Species File: Exploring India’s biodiversity, one species at a time. Flying thousands of kilometres circumventing the mighty Himalayas, harriers arrive in India’s grasslands around July every year, when winter sets in across their breeding grounds in Central Asia and Russia. Mated pairs perform a suave mid-air food pass, with the male dropping prey for the female to catch during flight. They hunt by the day, circling low and in zigzag patterns to find small mammals, birds, reptiles, and insects. In addition to controlling their prey populations, a recent study found that two harrier species — the pallid and Montagu’s harriers — are surprisingly also grassland gardeners; they consume seeds carried inside their prey’s gut and later expel them unharmed. Of the 16 harrier species found worldwide, six visit India — Montagu’s, pallid, hen, pied, and the Eurasian (western) and eastern marsh harriers. Unusually for raptors, they nest on the ground, and roost communally in large numbers with other harrier species — the world’s largest such roost documented so far was at Velavadar National Park, Gujarat. Most harrier species are listed as least concern by the IUCN, except the pallid harrier, which is near threatened due to a global population decline. In India, harriers receive the highest legal protection under Schedule I of the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972. Long-term monitoring by Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment’s Harrier Watch programme found that the number of harriers roosting together had declined between 1985 and 2015, driven largely by the…This article was originally published on Mongabay
