#harriers

John Cyril Harrison (1898-1985). Montagu's Harrier Flushing a Mallard and Coot. Watercolour.

Northern Harrier Circus hudsonius

A Harrying Feathursday

The Northern Harrier (Circus hudsonius), also known as the Marsh Hawk, is a raptor that breeds throughout Canada and the northernmost United States. It mainly hunts small mammals by flying low to the ground in open areas and surprising their prey. It is thought that harriers diversified with the expansion of grasslands during the Late Miocene and Pliocene. There are 16 species of harrier on every inhabitable continent, but the Northern Harrier is the only North American species.

This wood engraving of harriers is from an illustrations by German wildlife artist Gustav Mützel (1839-1893) and engraved by Karl Jahrmargt (b. 1842), as published in Animate Creation by the English natural history popularizer J. G. Wood (1827-1889), published in New York in three volumes by Selmar Hess in 1885. Our copy of Animate Creaton is a revised edition, adapted to American zoology by the American physician and zoologist Joseph B. Holder, of an earlier British publication by Wood first published in London by George Routledge as The Illustrated Natural History in 1853.

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