SkyLark
Jogging around the block
Woah! Your birds are so perfect! Not a feather out of place Do you feed your birds what they catch? I was wondering where to buy food lol.The last picture is so adorable! "My rabbit!"
I think that first picture post with the Harris's hawk was Frisbee's first and second kill. You can kind of tell in that picture without the dog where he's looking down kind of perplexed at how that just happened. He's got his foot on a rabbit head that is partially buried in the weeds and he's wondering what happens next. Baxter the dog is great. He's not especially predatory but he'll do anything I want. So if I point to a patch of cover and tell him to get it, he'll run in there and bust out any animal. But then he's just ready to do it again. He doesn't chase too much. I put him in a sit stay for the pic, but mostly he just wanted to run off and find more. He's reasonably respectful of hawks on kills. Once I get the bird back in the car, I toss the rabbit out for him to retrieve since he is a retriever and that is how he learns this is good.My goodness your bird is beautiful - perfect condition. Your dog doesn't seem to be too interested - LOL
They do eat what they catch. One rabbit will feed an average sized red tail or Harris's for about a week. I feed a lot of frozen mice and quail that I buy and have shipped to me. If you have a lot of game and time to get out a lot and are blessed with a good hawk, you might not have to buy a lot of food beyond what you need for start up. That last picture is I think the last rabbit kill my second red tail made before I released him. I'd had him for 3 years and he was getting hard to handle during the spring. Wanting to migrate and you could just tell it was time for him to go be a wild bird again. He was a great hunter and needed to contribute to the gene pool. The other red tail in juveline plumage with his mouth open was right after I trapped a new bird. He was starving, covered in parasites and filled with worms. He was not that great of a hunter and ended up getting west nile virus the next summer. I had to tube feed him and he got over it. I ended up releasing him about a month after he was sick. It was early enough in the fall that he had a decent chance of catching easy mice and young rabbits before bad weather hit. I always thought he was probably going to be one that natural selection would have weeded out of the gene pool though. I did spot him on a back country road about 5 miles from where I released him 2 weeks later. So that made me feel good. At least he lived long enough to regain wild level fitness and hunt on his own. At that point, the rest was up to him.Woah! Your birds are so perfect! Not a feather out of place Do you feed your birds what they catch? I was wondering where to buy food lol.The last picture is so adorable! "My rabbit!"
That wings spread over a kill is called mantling. Almost all hawks do it to some extent. If a bird is really comfortable with you, it will eventually fold its wings under and eat with relaxed body language. The reason they mantle is to hide it from anyone that might steal it. A wild hawk flying over won't see prey and think of stealing it. In the nest, when the parent drops food for the babies, the larger females will steal from the other babies, so they have to hide their food from each other. If the bird doesn't quite trust their human or the dog, then they will mantle more. My Harris is captive bred, so he shows some imprint type behaviors and mantles more than my wild red tails. Thankfully, Frisbee is not particularly aggressive despite his posturing. If you get into falconry, you'll find a lot of weird vocabulary in casual talk. Its because falconry is a very old sport and we try to keep to some of the verbal traditions of the past.The last picture is so adorable! "My rabbit!"
I can't answer too much on trapping questions. That falls under trade secret that we don't want the unlicensed general public knowing too much about and trying it illegally. You can probably find hawk trapping videos on youtube though. There are some absolute red necks out there that make the rest of us look bad. And a few apprentices that are a little too open and posting stuff that they don't know much about yet. So whenever you do general internet searches, make sure you look at how multiple people do things. There isn't really one single right way to do anything for falconry. Yet many people are convinced their way is the best and the rest of us are all just ignorant.I've been thinking, and I think a red tail hawk will be better for me than an American kestrel. Can I see some more pictures? How long did it take you to find a sponser? How did you trap your first bird? Sorry if I have a lot of questions, I'm trying to learn as much as I can