Hen harrier
species of bird
The hen harrier (Circus cyaneus) is a bird of prey. It breeds in open areas such as marshes and grasslands in Eurasia and is migratory, moving further south outside of the breeding season. Birds in milder regions, such as France and Great Britain, may be resident year-round, but the higher altitudes are largely deserted in winter. The species is sexually dimorphic; males are smaller and mostly grey and white with black wingtips, whereas females average larger and are predominantly brown and have buff underparts with brown barring. Both sexes have a white rump patch, although it is more noticeable on females and juveniles.
The term "hen harrier" refers to its former habit of preying on free-ranging fowl. The northern harrier (Circus hudsonius) was formerly considered to be a subspecies of the hen harrier.
Taxonomy
In 1758 the English naturalist George Edwards included an illustration and a description of the hen harrier in the first volume of his Gleanings of Natural History. He used the English name "The blue hawk". Edwards based his hand-coloured etching on a bird that had been shot near London.
“Hen harrier” enters the record as species of bird. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what harrier, species and bird can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Hen harrier” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, harrier, species and bird provides the most credible route into that argument.
The date and method of observation matter as much as the stated conclusion, especially where classification or consensus has changed. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q25572. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1758.
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This entry incorporates text from “Hen harrier” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.