{"id":29072,"date":"2015-01-21T06:17:33","date_gmt":"2015-01-21T13:17:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=29072"},"modified":"2015-01-21T07:10:57","modified_gmt":"2015-01-21T14:10:57","slug":"northern-harrier-with-an-interesting-tail-feather","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2015\/01\/21\/northern-harrier-with-an-interesting-tail-feather\/","title":{"rendered":"Northern Harrier With An Interesting Tail Feather"},"content":{"rendered":"

I had some fun with a\u00a0rather unique Northern Harrier yesterday morning.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"northern1\/2000, f\/8, ISO 500, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon 100-400 @ 400mm, 1.4 tc, canvas added for composition, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

The bird was intent on its hunting and mostly ignored my pickup as it did so. I got a fair number of flight\u00a0shots I like but it wasn’t easy because this was another instance of having to shoot out my window as I drove about 25 mph, steering with my knee and firing in short bursts. It’s times like this that\u00a0I’m rewarded for shooting\u00a0very early in the morning on deserted back roads or dirt tracks where I don’t have to worry about traffic. Once again I thought my old 100-400mm lens\u00a0with attached teleconverter performed reasonably well. If I’d been using my 500mm the bird would have been crisper but\u00a0I’d likely have clipped or cut off some body parts. For those interested, my 500 is still in the shop but I’m hoping to get a verdict on what is (or isn’t) wrong with it today.<\/p>\n

I must admit that in the interim I’m beginning to think that I’ve underused my 100-400 in the past and I’m actually considering purchasing the new version of that lens that just came out.<\/p>\n

I love the flight posture of the harrier in this image (though it would have been nice to\u00a0get\u00a0more light in the eye) but as soon as I looked at\u00a0it\u00a0on the screen I was struck by that single dark central tail feather so last night I asked my friend Jerry Liguori about it. Jerry is a noted authority on raptor ID (he has written several\u00a0highly respected books on the subject and really knows his stuff!).\u00a0It’s normal for harriers to have two<\/em> central tail feathers that are darker or less marked than the others but a single one is unusual. Jerry said that this single dark feather\u00a0is not the result of a normal molt cycle, but instead its predecessor had either been pulled out or damaged and then replaced independent of the\u00a0cycle.<\/p>\n

Jerry writes a blog for HawkWatch\u00a0International and he provided me a link on the\u00a0subject. Some may be interested in his\u00a0explanation and photos here<\/a>, especially\u00a0the\u00a0second image down\u00a0of a juvenile\u00a0Northern Harrier.<\/p>\n

Thank you Jerry and HWI.<\/p>\n

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

I had some fun with a rather unique Northern Harrier yesterday morning.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"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":[5,6,334,341],"tags":[1828,1103,2378,146,1432,2376,2377,234],"class_list":["post-29072","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bird-oddities","category-bird-photography-methods","category-birds","category-northern-harriers","tag-1-4-teleconverter","tag-canon-100-400-mm-lens","tag-dark-central-tail-feather","tag-flight","tag-hawkwatch-international","tag-jerry-liguori","tag-molt-cycle","tag-northern-harrier"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-7yU","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29072","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=29072"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29072\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29072"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29072"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29072"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}