{"id":39237,"date":"2016-05-02T05:22:15","date_gmt":"2016-05-02T11:22:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=39237"},"modified":"2016-05-02T05:22:15","modified_gmt":"2016-05-02T11:22:15","slug":"an-unusual-encounter-with-a-northern-harrier-and-a-junco","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2016\/05\/02\/an-unusual-encounter-with-a-northern-harrier-and-a-junco\/","title":{"rendered":"An Unusual Encounter With A Northern Harrier And A Junco"},"content":{"rendered":"

Regular readers know that occasionally I recycle an older post that I published so long ago that most current readers haven’t seen it. This post,\u00a0first published in 2011 and modified from the original, is one of those.<\/em><\/p>\n

Both of these birds did something out of the ordinary as they interacted with each other and with me.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"northern-harrier-0985\"<\/p>\n

\u00a01\/3200, f\/8, ISO 400, Canon 7D, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS\u00a0USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

I was photographing this male Northern Harrier\u00a0out my pickup window while it was\u00a0perched on the clump of snow-bent vegetation you see below the bird when I heard a soft scratching sound coming from the front of my truck.\u00a0I quickly glanced to my right and noticed that a plucky\u00a0Dark-eyed Junco had landed\u00a0square in the middle of the hood of the truck. I thought that was unusual of course but\u00a0I was more interested in the harrier so I\u00a0quickly turned back to watching him through my viewfinder and it immediately became\u00a0obvious\u00a0that the harrier was now\u00a0fixated on that junco on my hood.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve spent hundreds of hours watching and photographing harriers and it\u2019s virtually unheard of for one to take off in my direction when I\u2019m this\u00a0close to the bird. Usually the direction of take off is away from me or if I\u2019m lucky it might\u00a0be either to my left or right. But this one had apparently decided that it wanted junco for lunch and when it launched it immediately turned slightly and headed straight toward the junco on my truck hood with mayhem on its mind.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"northern-harrier-0988\"<\/p>\n

\u00a01\/3200, f\/8, ISO 400, Canon 7D, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS\u00a0USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

If you look carefully at\u00a0his eyes in all four shots you\u2019ll notice that he isn\u2019t really focused on me \u2013 instead he\u2019s looking slightly to my right, directly at the junco on the hood of the pickup. That fact becomes even more apparent as the harrier gets closer to me and to\u00a0the junco.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"northern-harrier-0989\"<\/p>\n

\u00a01\/3200, f\/8, ISO 400, Canon 7D, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS\u00a0USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Here he is completing his slight turn to his left (notice the tail angle)\u00a0and heading directly toward the junco.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"northern-harrier-0990\"<\/p>\n

1\/3200, f\/8, ISO 400, Canon 7D, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS\u00a0USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

This was the last sharp shot I got because by now he was flying fast\u00a0and my shooting\u00a0angle was\u00a0restricted because of the limitations of the\u00a0truck window.\u00a0To be perfectly honest, with this busy background so close to the bird and with him heading almost straight for me I was pleasantly surprised\u00a0to get any sharp shots at all \u2013 especially with the teleconverter attached.<\/p>\n

Looking back, part of me wishes I\u2019d taken a moment to get a shot through the windshield of the junco on my hood with\u00a0another camera but\u00a0knowing my luck I\u2019d\u00a0 have missed the harrier\u2019s take off.<\/p>\n

And if you\u2019re at all curious about\u00a0what happened after my last shot, the harrier made it very close to my\u00a0pickup and to the junco before he apparently\u00a0decided that discretion was the better part of valor, changed his mind,\u00a0veered off to his right and flew past my\u00a0pickup within\u00a0a few feet of me –\u00a0too close for my lens to focus\u00a0and much\u00a0too fast for my reflexes.<\/p>\n

For a split second I thought he might join me inside the truck\u2026<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

PS –\u00a0\u00a0In my original post some international readers weren’t aware of what a “junco” was so I’m including the image below for clarification. Dark-eyed Juncos (there are\u00a0several sub-species)\u00a0are common\u00a0North American birds sometimes referred to as \u201csnowbirds\u201d for their habit of appearing at feeders during snow storms.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"dark-eyed-junco-7561\"Dark-eyed Junco (photo taken at my feeder)<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

Both of these birds did something out of the ordinary as they interacted with each other and with me.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2973,"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":[334,2782,341],"tags":[86,520,1008,146,746,2305,211,234,311],"class_list":["post-39237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-farmington-bay-waterfowl-management-area","category-northern-harriers","tag-circus-cyaneus","tag-dark-eyed-junco","tag-farmington-bay-waterfowl-management-area","tag-flight","tag-gray-ghost","tag-junco-hyemalis","tag-male","tag-northern-harrier","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/10\/northern-harrier-09851.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-acR","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39237","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=39237"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39237\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2973"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}