Field of Dreams: The Harrier and the Owl
To badly misquote the famous line from the movie Field of Dreams, “Leave it alone and they will come”.
There is a large field in metro Denver resembling a prairie that has somehow escaped the conversion to its surrounding landscape – suburban sprawl of endless new uniform housing construction that has displaced any living creature in its path. Possibly pushed out of its original habitat, Cinnamon the female Northern Harrier and Sunny the male Great Horned Owl have made that untouched field their home this winter. Sharing the same territory is usually a recipe for disaster for different species of birds – or aggression at least – but these two birds can coexist because the Harrier is a diurnal hunter while the Great Horned Owl is a nocturnal predator.
It all started in December when I sighted a Northern Harrier flying near the field. Northern Harriers look like what you get if you crossed a hawk with an owl. In fact, they previously were referred to as Marsh Hawks.
Below, left to right - Great Horned Owl, Red-Tailed Hawk, Northern Harrier
Northern Harriers are considered raptors (aka “birds of prey”) because they use their somewhat terrifying-looking talons to seize and capture their prey.
They are not easy to photograph as they are skittish around people and are constantly on the move, flying low to the ground both looking and listening for a rodent meal. They have exceptional hearing and, in fact, can use that hearing to pluck their prey from under a blanket of snow.
Cinnamon is so named because of her cinnamon-colored breast area, a typical coloring of female Northern Harriers (males are a gray color). Attempts to photograph Cinnamon became a game for me, one which she just kept easily beating me at 90% of the time. Here are some of the 10% that I (barely) won. It wasn’t until I met Sunny much later that I got the photos of a Northern Harrier that I had been striving for. In the image on the far right Cinnamon is flying with what I believe to be a juvenile Harrier, possibly her offspring from last year.
Frequent shooting partner Shelley, aka “The Owl Queen”, brought me back to the field not for the Harrier but to see Sunny, a Great Horned Owl she had found who wasn’t afraid to be seen sunning himself during the day (thus his moniker), assuming you could find him. I would have never noticed him if Shelley hadn’t pointed him out to me as you can see below how camouflaged he is.
We noticed a few unique things about Sunny. He seemed to have no mate or even a potential one nearby. He was relatively smaller and thus the assumption that he is male as male raptors are smaller than their female counterparts. And that eye! Look at the difference in his left eye compared to the more normal right one.
Sunny frequently sits in trees overlooking the field, likely the equivalent of a Golden Corral buffet line of rodents for this nocturnal hunter. One evening in the bitter cold we were rewarded with our patience, as well as his cooperation, when he began hopping on to small trees in what seemed like a pre-flight meal prep regiment. It was “Blue Hour” with some colorful, wispy clouds to the south and dramatic billowy and equally colorful clouds to the north that alternated gold and pink hues as the three images below show.
On Super Bowl Sunday I visited the field and observed Sunny sleeping soundly but Cinnamon actively pursuing prey. This time I patiently watched her patterns and could then guess when and where it might fly directly at me, the shot I had been trying to get all winter. And just like a broken clock that is right twice a day, I, too, guessed right and got my shot!
I still wanted to get Sunny in flight, an owl photo I’ve never gotten before. So we headed out on an almost full moon night, reasoning that the additional moonlight might be enough to enable our cameras to catch more than just a dark, flying blob. Plus, we hypothesized, we might even get a bonus shot of and owl and the moon together. Well, as you can see below, dreams come true (teamwork makes dreamwork come true as Shelley accurately declared) in the Field of Dreams!
Good night, Moon!