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Falconry

SkyLark

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Woah! Your birds are so perfect! Not a feather out of place :xflove: Do you feed your birds what they catch? I was wondering where to buy food lol.The last picture is so adorable! "My rabbit!"
 

melissasparrots

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My goodness your bird is beautiful - perfect condition. Your dog doesn't seem to be too interested - LOL
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.
 

melissasparrots

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Woah! Your birds are so perfect! Not a feather out of place :xflove: Do you feed your birds what they catch? I was wondering where to buy food lol.The last picture is so adorable! "My rabbit!"
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.
 
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melissasparrots

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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.
 

SkyLark

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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 :laugh:
 

melissasparrots

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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 :laugh:
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.

It didn't take me long to find a sponsor. I lucked into someone that was willing. I did have to do some old fashioned research though. Sponsors don't just jump at the opportunity to help someone. I found some falconry boards and searched the archives for any words involving my state and looked at who responded and private messaged them. But, like I said, my sponsor ended up going through some personal stuff that delayed me being able to get my first bird, and other falconers in the area didn't like him, and would judge me based on my sponsor and it ended up being not my favorite part. I was real happy when I got my general class license and I could finally go learn more without having to worry about how my inquiries would reflect on my sponsor and then having other falconers take it upon themselves to back channel message my sponsor about the lousy job he was doing and then I have to worry about if he'll drop me because I asked someone else a question. Gads, my blood pressure is rising just remembering it. It was nice of the guy to agree to sponsor me so I could get started. However, since getting my general license, I've changed nearly everything from what he had me doing. The sponsor thing can get complicated fast. I've known people that have taken a few years to find a sponsor. If you have a choice among sponsors, the first person to volunteer may not be the best choice. However, if they are your only choice, you might just have to smile and be grateful for what you've got.

Almost all falconers agree that the red tail is the best first bird. They will toughen you up and get you out doing real falconry. If you can handle a red tail, and handle getting footed by a red tail, you can probably handle most species. Also, red tails being a larger bird aren't nearly as sensitive when it comes to weight control. With a kestrel, being lazy with food and weight management and being off by a gram of weight can make the difference between a bird that comes back to you and one that dies from being too weak. With a red tail, you might have a weight window of 40 grams or more. If you expect your bird to put forth his best effort at catching something, you might have to have his weight dialed into within 10 grams. But you can often get the bird to come back within a much larger weight window. Plus, red tails don't need to be inside the house with you all the time. Some people like to have their hawk inside. I had a kestrel once and he was cute, but you need to keep temperature the same all the time to have good weight control and smelling mouse intestines in my bedroom when I'm fresh out of the shower just isn't my favorite thing. I really like my falconry birds to live in the mews outside.

I'll try to look farther back in my pictures for earlier red tail photos. My first female was a b***. Tried footing me every chance she got and ended up going for my face on our second free flight. Most of that was probably from me following my sponsors advice and over training her and overly associating myself with food. Which directs the bird's food related aggression toward the falconer. Not a good position to be in and I have a scar on my eyelid to show what happens as a consequence. My second red tail I almost completely ignored my sponsor's advice and he worked out to be a great bird. Totally different personality than my first bird and because my sponsor had so much personal drama taking up his time, I was able to get away with doing what I wanted. My official advice is to just do what your sponsor says. Suffer your first two years if you have to and then you can do what you want. Hopefully, you'll be lucky and find a good sponsor. My first red tail didn't catch much game. And in general, you can go though dry spells of weeks of hacking around in heavy brush and not catching anything. Some hawks are better hunters than others.
 

melissasparrots

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Roadside kestrel trapping. I flew this bird for a year and released him. Was grateful I kept him alive with all the cooper's hawks materializing out of nowhere and trying to eat him.
 

melissasparrots

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A wild adult red tail I trapped and released on the spot. Notice the missing toe. He was a fat and happy bird, but the wild isn't always nice to them. Amazing what they can survive and learn to live with. Actually, it won't let me paste the full pic of this bird, so I'll post another one that I released on the spot. Both were gorgeous adult males. We can only keep juveniles so adults are released right away. Sometimes you drop the trap for a juvie, but an adult swoops and hits it instead.
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melissasparrots

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An owl I helped rescue. Owls are not great falconry birds. Someone just notified me of a downed bird they found so I went to investigate and made sure he ended up in the right hands. Broken wing, but he was later released after rehab. BTW, horned owls will happily kill a red tail and vice versa. I've been known to arrive at a patch of woods intending to hunt my hawk and then leave after a few minutes because I had owl vibes about that spot.
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SkyLark

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Red-tails are so gorgeous! Horned owls killed red-tails? I never knew that! Will make sure to stay away from owls in the future. I've been learning some falconry vocab, will try to use some in this tread. I've been researching for hours each day and I didn't even start my test yet lol. Hopefully will get a good hawk and sponser, and will it too much to ask for some more photos? :p Sorry, I love raptor photos even more than chick photos
 

melissasparrots

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Here is Ace during his second year. He was my second red tail. My sponsor thought I should release him since he was so wild. But I powered through and used some parrot training methods to gain his trust. Great bird. He nearly drowned catching this rabbit though. He caught it as the rabbit was half way over a stream trying to escape. They both ended up in the water and floated down stream before getting hung up on an ice shelf. I thought for sure my bird was drowned and kept sticking my hand in the water hoping to feel either fur or feathers at the last place I'd seen them. Finally my eyes adjusted to the near dark and spotted him a few feet away with only his head above water. BTW, sometimes we tether the bird with their leash right after they catch something so they can't drag the kill under a bush that I'll eventually have to drag them back out of. They have a powerful need to hide their kill.
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SkyLark

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And he came out of the hunt with barely a feather out of place. Amazing. Ace is beautiful!
 

melissasparrots

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I'm totally procrastinating about working on my new mews tonight. You can just see a rabbit ear under Ace in this picture. I think this was a New Year's Eve catch. Some guy came over and asked if he could run his dogs since I didn't appear to be hunting. I asked if he could give me a few minutes to clean up since we were done. You could see his focus suddenly shift from me to the hawk and a very bloody rabbit. The guy started backing up, fell over a tree, kept scuttling backwards until he regained his feet and disappeared fast. I really thought I'd have the police meeting me back at my car. The general public does not know about falconry and that guy probably thought I was into some really weird stuff.
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SkyLark

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Ace really likes showing off his tail, doesn't he? :roflmao: That being said, he does have a gorgeous tail!
 

melissasparrots

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Ace fresh out of the molt his second year. He hadn't been handled all summer but was finally willing to come to the glove and eat on the fist for a chunk of bunny. Also one of him looking scruffy and not quite done with his first molt.
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