Northern Harrier Practicing?

I was walking along the edge of a plowed field along the Clarksberg Branchline Trail in West Sacramento a couple of days ago when I saw a hatch year Northern Harrier quartering back and forth, low over the ploughed earth. The raptor was not very far from the edge where I stood, so I was able to get a really great view as I watched it coursing along and staring at the ground intently as it hunted for its breakfast. Suddenly, it made a sharp turn, almost flipping over itself, and dove for the ground. It landed on something and after a moment standing on the ground, it took off. As it did so, I saw a small, brown object in its talons. I assumed at first that it was a small mammal, and that the Harrier had made a successful hunt, but when the bird was about 20 feet off the ground, it dropped the brown object. As the thing dropped back to the earth, I was able to see that it was not an animal at all, but was actually a clod of dirt.

What had happened here? Did the Harrier make a mistake and attack a mouse-shaped bit of dirt thinking that it was, in fact, the makings of a meal? Given how amazingly keen the eyesight that raptors possess this seems unlikely. And it seems especially unlikely given that the bird was only about 20 or 30 feet off the ground when it started the dive. Making that big a mistake at that close a range is hard to believe. So what was the hawk doing? Was it practicing? This was a young Harrier. Perhaps, not seeing any actual voles or mice at that moment, it decided to do a little target practice. I don’t think of raptors needing practice, but of course that is probably kind of silly. Young songbirds need to practice their song, and often sound amusingly bad at first. However, of the course of a few weeks, they practice and hone their vocal abilities and end up producing songs that sound like the other adults of the species. So, raptors practicing their hunting skills seems pretty understandable. The amount of skill required to be a predator is rather impressive, and even when you consider that many of these skills are hard-wired instinct, that still leaves a lot of room for learning and improvement: practice. Here was a raptor that, perhaps, just picked a particular earth clod on the ground and wanted to see if it could hit it at high speed, just to see if it could. It did, so that practice run was successful! Practice does make perfect!