{"id":20780,"date":"2013-12-19T07:15:56","date_gmt":"2013-12-19T14:15:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=20780"},"modified":"2013-12-19T07:19:52","modified_gmt":"2013-12-19T14:19:52","slug":"northern-harrier-on-a-mission","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2013\/12\/19\/northern-harrier-on-a-mission\/","title":{"rendered":"Northern Harrier On A Mission"},"content":{"rendered":"

Typically Northern Harriers in flight studiously avoid my vehicle but occasionally (very<\/em> occasionally) one will continue to circle and come in quite close.\u00a0 On the rare occasion when this happens I always\u00a0wonder why.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

\u00a01\/3200, f\/5.6,\u00a0 ISO 500, 500 f\/4, 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

A week ago today, as I was leaving Farmington to go home,\u00a0this juvenile female (I believe) flushed from alongside the road just in front of me.\u00a0 Usually all I’d see after this is a good look at her butt but she circled back and came in again.\u00a0 Very close.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

\u00a01\/1600, f\/6.3,\u00a0 ISO 500, 500 f\/4, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0Then she did it again.\u00a0 She was so close that I kept clipping body parts so I removed my tc.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

\u00a0\u00a01\/1250, f\/6.3,\u00a0 ISO 500, 500 f\/4, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

I began to suspect that she had prey in the area and that turned out to be the case.\u00a0 Adjacent to the road was a deep, icy ravine and eventually I could see that she was after a dead duck at the bottom (I could barely see it through all the vegetation, even\u00a0at that steep angle).<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

\u00a01<\/strong>\/2000, f\/6.3,\u00a0 ISO 500, 500 f\/4, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Then I noticed that each time she passed she was looking down at the duck and immediately after she passed over it she would look back and give me a furtive glance (I like this peekaboo look).<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

\u00a01<\/strong>\/2000, f\/6.3,\u00a0 ISO 500, 500 f\/4, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

The ravine was so close to the road that I began to\u00a0suspect that it was the passing traffic (and possibly\u00a0my own presence) that\u00a0might be keeping her off her meal.\u00a0 This feeling was reinforced when more traffic came by and she stopped circling and landed on this nearby post for a short time.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

\u00a01<\/strong>\/2000, f\/6.3,\u00a0 ISO 500, 100-400 @ 400mm, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/em><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

I wanted one last look at the duck but just as I began to scope it through my lens I noticed that she was already on the bird and I got two poor images as she took off with it.\u00a0 She dropped it in the ravine again so I decided it was\u00a0high\u00a0time to leave her to her meal.\u00a0 As you can see from all the plucked feathers she had apparently been feeding on this duck for some time earlier in the day.\u00a0 Harriers often come back to a\u00a0kill like this several times in a day and I suspect that despite all the traffic\u00a0this very\u00a0determined bird got her fill from the duck more than once.<\/p>\n

Mission accomplished.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Typically Northern Harriers in flight studiously avoid my vehicle but occasionally (very occasionally) one will continue to circle and come in quite close. On the rare occasion when this happens I always wonder why.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":20783,"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":[334,341],"tags":[86,113,397,137,190,234,256],"class_list":["post-20780","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-northern-harriers","tag-circus-cyaneus","tag-duck","tag-farmington-bay","tag-female","tag-juvenile","tag-northern-harrier","tag-prey"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/northern-harrier-7728-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-5pa","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20780","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=20780"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20780\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20783"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20780"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20780"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20780"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}