{"id":53587,"date":"2017-11-17T06:11:35","date_gmt":"2017-11-17T13:11:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=53587"},"modified":"2017-11-17T09:04:34","modified_gmt":"2017-11-17T16:04:34","slug":"fighting-northern-harriers-plus-a-rant-about-baiting-raptors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2017\/11\/17\/fighting-northern-harriers-plus-a-rant-about-baiting-raptors\/","title":{"rendered":"Fighting Northern Harriers (plus a rant about baiting raptors)"},"content":{"rendered":"

There’s more negative fallout caused by baiting raptors than many are aware of and some of it affects our fellow photographers who don’t bait and never have. I’ve been stewing about this for a while now so I finally had to get it off my chest. Today’s post is a long read and I accept the fact that it may be a bit too much for some of my blog followers.<\/p>\n

First\u00a0some background. Back in the winter of 2008 when these photos were taken\u00a0I was a novice bird photographer still learning the ropes – hell, I couldn’t even find<\/em> most of those ropes. I was completely na\u00efve and didn’t even know that some\u00a0photographers baited raptors but when I first saw it happening (those doing it were\u00a0sneaky about it) I instinctively knew it wasn’t\u00a0for me. At the time baiting just didn’t feel appropriate for\u00a0“nature” photography and it wasn’t until much later that I learned about the potential negative effects on birds some types of baiting could have.<\/p>\n

On February 28 of that year I found a well known bird photographer who I knew personally (I’ll call him Donald for this narrative though that isn’t his real name)\u00a0photographing Northern Harriers\u00a0as they fought\u00a0over a Mallard carcass on the ice at Farmington Bay WMA. So I joined in and I did so enthusiastically because without exception this was the most exciting action from birds I’d ever witnessed, much less photographed.<\/p>\n

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1\/640, f\/13, ISO 500, Canon 40D, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS\u00a0USM + EF 1.4 III Extender<\/em><\/p>\n

The fighting was fast and furious involving multiple birds flying in and out\u00a0of lighting that was constantly changing – conditions that overwhelmed my extremely limited skills and lack of photographic knowledge (as\u00a0evidenced by some of my settings in at least two of these photos). But I took many hundreds of shots and with the combination of luck, perseverance and sheer grit (stupidly I was standing on the ice in tennis shoes and couldn’t even feel my toes or some of my fingers) I got quite a few photos that I still like a lot to this day.<\/p>\n

Those harriers\u00a0meant business! It had been a terribly\u00a0harsh winter and\u00a0many of them were starving so food was at a premium and they fought\u00a0“tooth”, nail and claw over that Mallard.<\/p>\n

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1\/640, f\/13, ISO 500, Canon 40D, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS\u00a0USM + EF 1.4 III Extender<\/em><\/p>\n

As you can imagine with my poor choice of camera settings (partly in a misguided effort to have enough depth of field to get multiple birds sharp) many of my\u00a0photos were soft for lack of shutter speed\u00a0but occasionally I got lucky. When another friend and fellow photographer saw a shot very similar to this one\u00a0he called it “Kung Fu Harriers” and that name\u00a0stuck.<\/p>\n

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1\/1600, f\/10, ISO 500, Canon 40D, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS\u00a0USM + EF 1.4 III Extender<\/em><\/p>\n

The incredible\u00a0quickness of these hawks simply blew me away, especially way\u00a0back then. I didn’t even know that the bird on the right had imbedded its talons in the chest of its rival until I looked at my photos on my screen at home.<\/p>\n

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Somewhere in this same time frame of the winter of 2008 I learned that the aforementioned “Donald” was a habitual\u00a0baiter. I was with him once when he baited harriers with dead carp and when I\u00a0declined to photograph those particular birds it was obvious\u00a0he wasn’t pleased. Later when photographing Bald Eagles feeding on dead carp he would often arrive on scene very early to arrange the carp in more photogenic locations before other photographers showed up. There are worse forms of baiting but I just knew it wasn’t for me\u00a0so whenever I was aware of the baiting (or suspected it) I went shooting elsewhere and I had to do that for several winters. At first I didn’t have any real\u00a0animosity about it, I just figured we had different shooting styles,\u00a0but it did bother me that he always baited the best locations for eagles so I was excluded from those areas.<\/p>\n

On one occasion I encountered him and two other photographers as they came out of a pond after moving dead\u00a0fish around and rearranging an old photogenic stump in the water\u00a0(it was late in the\u00a0morning so most of the other photographers had already\u00a0left) and I could tell he was unhappy with me for not openly approving of their efforts.\u00a0In front of at least one other photographer he sarcastically said to me\u00a0“Oh, so it’s\u00a0OK for you to photograph baited eagles as long as it’s not you doing the actual\u00a0baiting?” and then he walked away. That single sentence accomplished two things: It told me he’d likely\u00a0been baiting at times I wasn’t aware of\u00a0and I had been photographing baited birds out of ignorance. And it instantly and\u00a0permanently\u00a0ended our friendship.<\/p>\n

The problem was I didn’t know which of my birds (mostly harriers and eagles) had been baited and which ones hadn’t. For years I thought these harriers fighting over the Mallard\u00a0hadn’t been baited but now I suspect they may have been because I’ve fairly recently learned from a reliable source that they probably were (the dead Mallard had been picked up and placed in an open place on the ice in good light and at an appropriate distance from an accessible shooting spot). Donald was\u00a0photographing these same harriers and he was there before I was.<\/p>\n

So here’s the rub. Several harrier photos\u00a0I took\u00a0that day have won awards<\/a> and\u00a0I’ve posted many of them on my blog over the years\u00a0but in none of those cases did I disclose baiting because I didn’t know it had been done. For me honesty in my photography is paramount and I feel awful about that.<\/p>\n

My purpose here isn’t to bash Donald. He was old school and set in his ways so baiting just wasn’t an issue for him. Donald was\u00a0actually quite\u00a0generous\u00a0about\u00a0giving me and several\u00a0other photographers tips about techniques\u00a0in the field and for that I’m grateful. But he either wasn’t cognizant or didn’t care\u00a0(most likely the latter)\u00a0that his baiting affected other bird photographers who were dead set against the practice (I’m far from the only one who resented his baiting activities).<\/p>\n

So here’s my point. Thankfully the ethics issues involved when raptors are baited are becoming more widely understood and accepted\u00a0so fewer photographers are doing it (at least openly). But when photographers choose to bait their decision often affects their fellow photographers causing very hard feelings in the community (not to mention the negative effects certain types of baiting\u00a0can have on the birds themselves).<\/p>\n

So I hope that bird photographers think long and hard in the future before choosing to bait.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

Notes: <\/em><\/p>\n