A harrier in flight can look accidental, unsteady. They teeter on the wind like dwarfed vultures. Flying low, they look as if about to crash.
Occasionally, watching a harrier, I am reminded of a distant feeling: riding a saucer down an icy hill, thrilled to be moving—quickly, with what could seem like grace—somewhat in control, but barely.
A harrier’s wings are typically in a slight, upturned V. I more often see them cruising around than beating their wings. The appearance of one harrier can mean there’s another nearby, maybe two.
The bird is often—always—low to the ground, sometimes so low they can be hard to pick out. Set against open fields, prairies, meadows—or in my region: sandplain, marshland, tendrils of estuary in tall grass and phragmites—the harrier is easily lost in the landscape it inhabits.
They’re ground-dwellers; the birds betray themselves when they break the horizon.
“Harrier,” my old Peterson guide tells me, “comes from the Old English hergian, meaning ‘to harass by hostile attacks.’”
I, too, am harassed by harriers—mainly in that I can’t seem to get a half-decent picture of one. This is despite the fact that I can visit a nearby wildlife refuge and sometimes see half-a-dozen before noon.
Most of the photographs I’ve taken of northern harriers look the same. The bird is barely facing away from me. I can slightly see its downturned, owl-like face—which gives it better hearing than other hawks—and its signature white rump-patch. If only the bird would turn, just slightly. If only its wings would not cast a shadow on its face. If only my camera wouldn’t back-focus on the golden-yellow grassland, or the gnarled white oaks—which, however modest in height, extend higher into the sky than the harrier feels like flying.
Because of this, when I see a harrier, I typically point excitedly. I get overwhelmed, as if I’ve spotted some obscure raptor long-thought extinct, or some species that doesn’t typically winter in this region. This sensation does not lessen with frequency; I’ve found the opposite to be true. When I lock onto a harrier in my viewfinder, I frantically pan my camera as the bird flies, holding down the shutter button.
When the bird is gone, I review the pictures and generally express vulgarity-laced feelings of self-disgust.
Capturing a perfect—or even just passable—photo of a harrier has become an obsession. I see crows and cry “harrier!” pointing to the sky like a lunatic. Even when I know I’m wrong, I still double-check. Late at night, I scroll the #northernharrier page on Instagram, my eyes red with envy, exhaustion, and ire.
Driving around, looking for harriers—left hand on the wheel, right hand clutching my camera—I veer into the shoulder, ride the yellow line, slow down to sub-school-zone speeds. I jeopardize the safety of bicyclists and court the horns of other drivers. There is but one thing on my mind: the harrier. I feel like Ahab—if his white whale had been measured in ounces rather than tons, and was drastically easier to find.
The harrier is an easy antipode to my favorite raptor, the osprey.
Ospreys are vocal; harriers rarely make a sound. Ospreys nest high; harriers nest on the ground. Harriers cruise more than they fly; ospreys beat their wings with what looks like inefficiency—like poor swimmers trying to tread water. Osprey pairs mate for life; harriers are one of the only polygynous raptors.
Most importantly, I have plenty of nice pictures of ospreys. They are not shy about putting on a show. They dive for fish and tote them around like prizes; they dive-bomb me when I get too close; they carry big sticks or pieces of beach-trash to their nests. They are among the most photogenic of birds.
Even on a calendrical level, in my life, the osprey and the harrier are diametrically opposed:
As the leaves turn, I bid farewell to the ospreys. I saw my last one of the year on November 1st. Watching a kingfisher atop a cedar tree, I saw in the distance what looked like a gull. With each subsequent wingbeat, it came closer: the osprey revealed itself. I knew, as it flew overhead, it marked an ending.
On the same walk, returning to my truck, I saw three harriers. One perched low in the scrubby trees lining an open field. It flew away before I could get a decent vantage point. Two more descended from above, settling at a cruising altitude that seemed mere inches from the ground—like landlocked skimmers.
That’s that, I thought to myself.
When the ospreys leave, I focus on harriers.
The fact that these birds are so common for me to see, yet remain elusive, keeps me routinely disappointed. I think of a few lines from Geoff Dyer. He realizes,
... that my enormous capacity for disappointment was actually an achievement, a victory. The devastating scale of my disappointment (‘I am down, but not yet defeated,’ Gaugin snivel-boasted) was proof of how much I still expected and wanted from the world, of what high hopes I still had of it. When I am no longer capable of disappointment the romance will be gone: I may as well be dead.
Harriers, by this logic, are a wellspring of romance. As my routine sightings of them are expected, so is the disappointment that I will never get the glimpse that I want: I will not get the photograph that I hope for. However great an encounter is—and I’ve had thrilling encounters with harriers—I am left wanting something more, better, closer.
Unlike some other birds or animals I routinely see, the harriers keep a part of themselves from me. Chickadees—incessant visitors which I’ve enjoyed the pleasure of feeding by hand—give themselves away. I expect nothing more of them. There’s nothing left to expect; they often seem as interested in me as I am in them.
The harrier, contrarily, is like a hawk out of a Jeffers poem: profoundly disinterested. By depriving me, harriers give me something to hope for. Despite frequent sightings, the romance never wanes.
Thus I am condemned: I wake up early and snivel-boast like Gaugin. I drink my coffee before setting out for marshland or sandplain, confident in the knowledge that I will likely find what I want, but surely not in the way that I want it.
If asked to describe what my ideal photograph of a harrier would look like, I do not know what I’d say. At this point, I doubt I’d even know it if I took it. Perhaps it’s less about the photograph than it is about the romance, of searching for more from something so loath to give it.