{"id":19759,"date":"2013-11-05T05:31:24","date_gmt":"2013-11-05T12:31:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=19759"},"modified":"2013-11-05T05:31:24","modified_gmt":"2013-11-05T12:31:24","slug":"northern-harrier-playing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2013\/11\/05\/northern-harrier-playing\/","title":{"rendered":"Northern Harrier “Playing”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Northern Harriers are\u00a0occasionally\u00a0known to play but it’s something I’ve seldom seen.\u00a0 Harriers are normally all business as they pursue simple survival in a harsh and unforgiving world\u00a0but a week ago today I watched and photographed as one of these hawks had some apparent “fun”.<\/p>\n

The bird was very far away and in\u00a0marginal light so these images are of documentary quality at best,<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"northern<\/a><\/p>\n

At first I thought the harrier was chasing a vole on the ground but it soon became obvious that something else was going on.\u00a0 The bird repeatedly flew up from the ground a couple of feet…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"northern<\/a><\/p>\n

and then pounced at something (several things)\u00a0on the ground.\u00a0\u00a0From the timing of the pounces and the behavior of the bird it didn’t appear to be after moving prey.\u00a0 Each time it pounced it landed in\u00a0a different spot, separated from the previous one by several feet.\u00a0 This went on for some time.\u00a0\u00a0At first I was watching it with the naked eye because I had to turn my pickup around to get my lens on the action and by the time that was accomplished this behavior was still occurring.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"northern<\/a><\/p>\n

The harrier picked something up and dropped it and I believe that “something” was cow manure.\u00a0 Cattle spent much of the summer in this area of the refuge in an attempt (I\u00a0believe)\u00a0by managers to control Phragmites (more on that in my previous post).<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"northern<\/a><\/p>\n

The hawk played with the meadow muffin and other apparent objects on the ground that I couldn’t see through the vegetation for almost a minute before it flew off empty taloned.<\/p>\n

Both fledgling and adult Northern Harriers are known to play with inanimate objects such as corncobs and other farming residue and play is more likely to be initiated when there’s another harrier nearby.\u00a0 In this instance there was another harrier\u00a0very close to this one though the second bird never did join in the fun.<\/p>\n

I’m fairly convinced that what I observed was play and though the image quality is poor I thought it worthy of a documentary\u00a0blog post.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Northern Harriers are occasionally known to play but it’s something I’ve seldom seen. Harriers are normally all business as they pursue simple survival in a harsh and unforgiving world but a week ago today I watched and photographed as one of these hawks had some apparent “fun”.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":19761,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[334,395,341],"tags":[86,234,999],"class_list":["post-19759","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-miscellaneous","category-northern-harriers","tag-circus-cyaneus","tag-northern-harrier","tag-play"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/northern-harrier-2237-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-58H","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19759","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19759"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19759\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19761"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19759"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19759"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19759"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}