Tragic Weekend!

Well, I was going to make my next post about the cute bunnies that I purchased to breed for feeders. I thought it'd be okay to show you all pictures of the parents since they will be kept as pets (for the most part). Tragedy struck this weekend and I have a sad story to tell.

First of all...Thursday when I got home from work, I discovered that the beautiful falconry glove that I had wanted for so long and had lovingly covered in protective oils had been brutally eaten by my very much in the doghouse German Shepard. I think I flipped a switch when I saw it laying there; I felt like my child had been murdered. (silly, I know). You can see a picture of the in-tact glove on the previous post. I was so sad. That glove really made me feel like a falconer. I loved putting it on and staring at it, and it fit my hand so perfectly. All that was left on Thursday afternoon was a few fingers and the lovely trim that looked like a soaring hawk. Sigh.

As if that wasn't bad enough, the next day I get home from work and start bringing things in from my truck only to discover that my rabbits are gone! Everything around where they were housed was torn up or knocked over! I couldn't believe it! I had been planning on breeding my rabbits the very next morning and finding out a way to put them up off the ground, but I was too late... dogs had gotten to my rabbits.

My neighbor has a habit of walking through my yard to take her daily walks. I haven't really had a problem with this, but she has a tendancy to collect dogs on her walk that follow her home. I am very sure that they would not have seen the rabbits that day had she just gone up her own driveway!

With that background... I get home and find my rabbits gone, the yard torn to pieces. One of the cages had been drug off and I found my poor buck (boy rabbit) dead next to the cage. One of the dogs had torn the cage open and pulled him out of it. I was furious! I went to my neighbor and asked her if something happened at my house. She went into a story of dogs going wild and her trying to scare them off, but the most she could do was to get her dogs out of the mix. It never even occured to her to pick up the cage and rescue the rabbits. I was so angry that I just had to walk away. My rabbit was dead. She did all she thought she could, but still, my rabbit was dead.

I got back to the house and saw one of the girl bunnies. She was alive and happily munching on grass. I was so pleased to see her alive that my anger just melted away. I called Hazen and told him the news, and as I was on the phone with him, my other doe (girl rabbit) came out from under the deck. I figured they had both run off, I was so happy to see that they had found a safe haven. I kept them in the house that night and Hazen and I spent the weekend making a secure place for them to keep them away from dogs.

This weekend I had to replace my buck rabbit so we went to the flea market and found a vendor who was willing to sell them to us for 5 dollars each. Now I have four rabbits, two of them are cute lop-eared brown rabbits that are just so adorable. This is just an experiment to see if I have the ability to raise these rabbits for meat. If I don't have the heart for it, they get sold!

I'll post some pictures of the bunnies tomorrow.

Lure Training Revisited

I ran across another method of teaching lure flying to red-tailed hawks. Typically, lures for red-tails are only used to bring the bird down if she is reluctant to return on her own. As I've mentioned before, it's a safety net to be used only in emergency situations. The books I read said to give a full crop of food on the lure all the time and if you show the lure to a bird, you have to give it to them, no exceptions. Well, we already broke the rule of "you have to give them the lure when you show it to them" because of Rudy's methods, so that idea kind of went out the window.

When you hunt falcons like Peregrines or Merlins, falconers will use the lure to exercise their birds. You swing the lure and the bird comes in and tries to catch it, but you are also playing a game of keep away. It's a good way to condition the falcon. A big time falconer Gary Brewer has written a number of articles on red-tail hawking. He has a fascinating one on training the red-tail, who is typically a sit-and-wait predator, to work to get the lure. Eventually you can get them doing ariel strikes, and not just the "road kill" approach to coming into a lure. I think it will help sharpen her response a little as she has to work harder to get the lure. She likes it so much already that I figured a little more work could be rewarding for both of us.

I set about making her a new lure. I narrowed it and covered it with a rabbit hide. The first day I gave it to her, she literally jumped on top of me! As I walked into the mew with the lure hidden, she must have picked up on my excitement in giving it to her because she baited and landed on my shoulder! I quickly transferred her to the glove, but it was a little nerve-racking there for a second. Then I put her back on her perch, waited for her to settle down, and revealed the lure. She eagle-eyed it and dove for it, hitting it hard! Then, like she had actually killed it, she started to mantle over it and shake. It was very satisfying to me to see her so enthralled with this new lure. I gave her a knuckle-sized tidbit on each side of the lure. The idea is that she is eating on one side, then I have to come in and turn the lure over so she can get to the other side. I thought this sounded like a good idea so Musket would get used to me approaching her kill again. Before she'd easily give it up, but now that she has lost some of her natural fear of me, she'll fight me for it. I want her to realize that I am not going to steal her food, but trade her for it. I brought an extra glove with me and when I reached down to turn the lure over, she nailed me lightning fast with her foot. I was expecting it so I didn't react, but continued to approach her "kill" until she eventually gave it up. I turned it over and invited her back. I also gave her a few tidbits thinking that hopefully she will not see me as competition, but still the one who feeds her. We'll see how well that works. My goal is to do this with her meals for the next few weeks until she gets really used to me "making in" and trading off her kill for a tidbit.

I covered up the lure as Rudy had shown me and stood up. Musket took one look at me and jumped to my glove! Perfect! I rewarded her for her good behavior with the rest of the tidbits, then collected the lure securely wrapped in a rag and left her.

I did this again the next day with Hazen videoing the whole thing. I put it up on YouTube for those of you who want to watch. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0XX3eFM1Ls . She was very wary of Hazen being in the Mew with us, so she was much slower to respond than she was the day before. But we're moving along. You'll notice that she still has two brown tail feathers in there. Hopefully by next week she'll be all red!

*Edit- Because this training session was experimental and I didnt want to give YouTube viewers the wrong idea about falconry, I took this off the public forum. If you want to see it, let me know and I'll give you access.

Enjoy!

Last Hunt of the Season

The next weekend, Hazen and I headed out to the Quail Farm. We stopped by Rudy’s house, hoping to persuade him to join us, but his children and grandchildren were visiting so he elected to stay behind, giving me the needed boot out of the nest. Hazen and I tackled hunting with my bird for the first time by ourselves.

We set off for the Quail Farm and went to our “usual” hunting spot. I sent Musket up into a tree and we proceeded to crash through the bushes. She still was not following very well, but I think she was starting to pay attention to what we were doing which was better than last time. I managed to lure her to follow us a little and towards the end, I think she started to figure it out.

Hazen and I diligently kicked through bushes, leaving no stone unturned. We managed to flush a rabbit. I blew my whistle to Musket, but she was a little far out of range, she dived but missed the rabbit. I thought for a second that she had grabbed it because it did seem so close, but we did not hear the tell-tale scream. When we got to Musket, she was standing near a gopher tortoise burrow; we figured the rabbit had escaped down there.

I collected Musket and gave her a little break. After a moment I sent her up into a tree. She managed to get on top of a 10ft pine, not very high. So we continued to kick bushes and managed to flush another rabbit right under her! She was off after it in an instant and crashed after it into the brush (she has no fear once she’s on the rabbit!). Again I thought she had it, but still no scream. Musket was panting and pretty tired at this point. I collected her and held her over my head while I tried to kick the rabbit back up. It did flush one more time, and Musket tried, but she was just too exhausted to get it. She got a big reward on the glove for her effort and we decided to go ahead and put her up for the day.

Even though we didn’t come home with a rabbit, I still thought the trip was valuable. I now know how hard I have to work to condition my bird to get her in shape to have successful hunts. We got to witness a fair chase between hawk and prey, and this time the prey won. I really have a new appreciation of hunting after this experience. I can see now why hunters get so excited when they do manage to shoot something since there is so much work and preparation that goes into that culminating moment.

The next day, Musket got tangled in her jesses and broke the tip off of four outside primary feathers on one wing as she tried to regain her perch. She needed those feathers to hunt, without complete feathers it was going to make it even harder for her to catch something. Since it was getting close to what the books said was the moulting season, I made the decision to start giving her a lot of food and let her moult instead of fixing those feathers. She dropped her first flight feather 3 weeks later at the end of May. Now it is the end of September and she still has three brown feathers left, she’s pretty scruffy looking (The picture below was taken at the end of August). At this rate it will be the end of October before we are actually hunting again. I have been working with her for the past few weeks and things are progressing. I’ll be updating this blog on current events now that the history has been told. It may come a bit more slowly, but keep checking in for updates!

Attempt at Hunting

We went hunting again the next weekend. This time I met up with Rudy and Tom (Rudy’s other apprentice) and Rose- Tom’s red tail. Rose is much different looking than Musket. I don’t have a picture of her, but she seems bigger and she is much darker around the face. Tom keeps her on a perch in the back of his mini van and doesn’t use a hood for her. It was interesting to see how he interacted with his bird. I think he had been feeding her up for the moult because Musket seemed much tamer.

Since last time we hunted Musket, we decided to let Rose have her turn first. We drove out to the spot where we had seen the rabbits last time. It was windy, about 10:00 in the morning, but a beautiful clear day. We got suited up for crashing bushes, putting on snake chaps and bug-spray, and Tom got Rose ready to fly. She went up into a tree and we followed her, crashing bushes and searching for rabbits. I was interested to see how she did since Tom had captured her early in the season and had been working with her for several months longer than Musket and I. I was a bit disappointed, she wouldn’t follow us and seemed content to sit in a tree sunning herself. Rudy told Tom to tease her with the lure, he did, blowing a duck call to get her attention. She responded quickly and flew into a high pine tree in bad spot. Tom confided in me that he was nervous about teasing her with the lure since he’d never done that before. Apparently, we’d been reading the same books!

We were simply having no luck flushing rabbits. Rose was not interested in following or even paying attention, it was probably too windy and getting to be early afternoon. Eventually we flushed a big rabbit. Rose was way out of range and I couldn’t help but wish that I had Musket riding with me on the glove, she would have caught that bunny! Eventually we gave up.

Rose was still in the top of a tall pine tree; she was so far away that I had to find her with binoculars! Poor Tom, he just wanted to give it one more go before he put her up for the moult. We went back to the trucks to decide if we wanted to try Musket. Ultimately I decided it was too windy and getting too late in the day to try her. Tom was desperately blowing his lure whistle and swinging away to an unimpressed Rose. I was glad it wasn’t me, I’d be freaking if my bird decided to just ignore me. After about 15 minutes, Rose finally came back down to the lure and Tom was able to secure her… whew!

Ultimately, it was an unsuccessful trip, but still a good experience. Now I know it is better to hunt the birds in the early morning or the evening when animals are moving. Rudy tells me that the motivation to hunt at these times is stronger because it’s early or there is a limited time left before sunset, and the birds know it. The season was getting late, the moult should have already begun. Musket and I would have one more opportunity to go hunting before we were done for the season.

First Hunt!

Musket was doing very well flying free and coming back to me. The thrill never lessens. Now it was time to take it up a notch. Rudy had secured a place for us to hunt near his home in Lake City. The place was this old quail hunt preserve where he used to go all the time. It was apparently under new ownership, but they agreed that he could come out and bring us as long as we did not interfere with anything they were doing and let them know ahead of time. Its 200 acres of land that we can bash around on, truly incredible!

I met Rudy at his house to carpool out there. He had secured a small rabbit at the local flea market to use in case we did not scare up a wild rabbit. In falconry, they call the use of a live domestic animal to basically sacrifice to your hawk a “baggie”. It’s not very fair to the prey, but it helps to teach an inexperienced hawk that your activities out in the field will scare up game for it. It’s also a good technique to use if your hawk gets stubborn and won’t come down after an unsuccessful hunt. Rudy had this cute little white fuzzy baby bunny that he picked up. It was just adorable…sigh. We were determined to not have to use it if we didn’t have to, but the goal today was to put my fresh bird on some game no matter what.

We followed Rudy and his grand-daughter out to the preserve and met his other apprentice Tom who just wanted to come along. We found a nice place to start crashing for rabbits and Rudy told me to send the hawk up into a tree. Let me paint a picture for you. There are 4 people out in the brush stomping around and kicking bushes. There is a hawk in a little pine tree trying to figure out what the heck we are doing. She goes up into a tree, settles in, and immediately starts searching the ground for prey. We get pretty far from her to be of much use so Rudy asks me to call her to the glove. I held my glove out and blew the whistle, after a minute, she comes down to me from the tree (good bird), so I sent her back up into a tree closer to where we were working.

We start walking and crashing and again we get pretty far from her. She doesn’t quite yet understand that what we are doing is going to help her capture something so she’s settling in the tree looking around for prey. Rudy told me to call her again (the idea is to get her used to following us without my interference). This time she doesn’t come right away, so he tells me to throw out the lure, but not to give it to her. I don’t feel really good about this because before whenever she has seen the lure, she gets to eat a big meal, but I follow his advice and throw the lure out to her. She comes instantly! He tells me to put it away quickly, so I do. When she no longer sees the lure, she changes direction and lands herself in a really big pine tree with a great vantage of what we are doing below. This is what we wanted!

So we start crashing again, then it all happened so fast! Suddenly I start hearing shouts behind me, someone has flushed a rabbit and Musket has seen it. She launched herself from the tree and crashed to the ground. I come tearing over to see if she succeeded, inwardly grateful that if she did catch a rabbit that maybe we don’t have to sacrifice the cute white bunny that Rudy’s grand-daughter has been playing with. Before I get there, Musket is trying to launch herself from the ground. She had missed the rabbit, but saw where it went and was taking off after it! The poor bird was out of shape from spending almost two months getting trained, but they are not built to chase rabbits from the ground, so she had no chance. I was pleased that she tried anyway.

She managed to get herself into another small pine tree (she was pretty whipped by this point) so we started crashing around where she was, hoping to scare the rabbit again. It must have found a gopher hole because it was nowhere to be seen. By this late in the season, these rabbits are getting pretty good at escaping, unfortunately for us.

So it came down to it, we had to use the baggie. Rudy’s grand-daughter had been playing with it. Being a country girl and one of Rudy’s, she was used to animals dying, but it still made me nervous that we were taking her pet and sacrificing it. She had even named it Brandy… ugh! Musket was still looking around and starting to catch her breath. Since Brandy was a white bunny and we didn’t want to train Musket to catch white cats, we attempted to dye her brown. Yeah… that didn’t work out very well. I think we ended up more brown on us than the bunny, but it would have to do.

We took Brandy and (hidden from Musket’s view) put her in a bush. As you can see in the picture, she just laid there limp. We had to push her around a little to get her moving. Musket had no interest; it didn’t look like prey to her. Eventually we go her attention and she came over to see what we were carrying on about. She saw the rabbit and starred at it for what seemed a long long time. Eventually she decided that it must be prey and dove on it. A lot of things happened at once. Brandy started to scream, Rudy’s grand-daughter (though she had been making jokes about dead bunnies) started to cry, and we rushed over to Musket to help her in her capture. Brandy didn’t scream long, Musket knew what to do with her. She grabbed control of the head and held on. I think it’s an instinct to do that because Brandy immediately stopped screaming, this might help to not attract other predators. Musket sat there frozen, holding on to Brandy who was still trying to breathe. I was glad that she didn’t try to eat the poor bunny alive. Rudy coached me through what to do. I brought out a towel and covered up the rabbit. I got control of Musket’s jesses and offered her a chicken neck on the glove. Once she no longer saw the rabbit, her attention was on the meat in front of her. She let go and hopped onto the glove to eat her prize.

Hazen took the poor broken Brandy and put her out of her misery. I was hopeful for a moment that we could save her so Rudy’s grand-daughter could have her, but Musket had done too much damage. It was an interesting lesson. I was excited for my hawk and that she had killed and had let me take the prize (though she did get to eat every bit of it later). I had mixed feelings about the sacrificed rabbit, I wished it had not come to that and we had caught something wild, but I was not sad about it. It would have been much easier if Rudy had left his grand-daughter at home and that she had not formed an attachment to the bait, but he told me several weeks later that she did end up getting her own rabbit that would not be hawk food, this rabbit was fawn colored and would have been perfect bait, irony. In my mind, our first hunt was very successful. I walked out of the field with my bird.

No Strings Attached!

Rudy kind of laughed at my hesitation, but he was supportive. I went to work and thought all day about the task set before me. I called my father on my way home for some moral support and he asked me to explain exactly what the steps would be when I flew her free. I realized that I hadn’t actually gone over them in my head; I was just going to do it and hope for the best. I felt better about it after that conversation, that I was really ready.

When I got home, I mechanically took Musket out of her mew and went through the normal routine of hooding and weighing her. I’m sure she could tell that something was different, but she probably didn’t care. I had her tidbits all cut up and ready in my pouch and switched out her mews jesses for jesses without a slit in case she did as I feared and took off for the wild blue. Then I brought her outside.

I placed her on her lawn perch and backed up as I did routinely with our creance flying. She came immediately. No hesitation. I asked her to fly back to her perch and she went. We did this several times back and forth until I felt comfortable. Then I placed her in a short cherry tree and asked her to come to the fist. She came! She came back to me every time. This wild bird willingly came to me when she could have left at any moment. How wonderful!

I’m sure to her it was no big deal, not much different than creance flying. The training was there, she just kept doing what she always did, come to the glove when called.

I did these flights several times in the yard over the next few days. I could get her to follow my finger and land on an object I pointed at and then get her to return to my fist. I took her out into the acre of woods behind our house and asked her to come to me from logs and fence posts. She’d fly to the top of her mew and back down to me when asked. Now this was fun! All that hard work and fretting was finally coming to fruition.

Now that the line had been cut, it was time to hunt!

Creance and Lures: Houston we have a problem!

I had Musket’s weight down enough that she was eagerly jumping free to my gloved fist from a perch across a room. I decided that it was time to take her outside and try her on a creance. A creance is a line that can be any length (50 ft is pretty good) that is attached to a weighted object. It’s basically a leash. It allows you to fly the bird outside without fear of losing the bird. If she takes off for the sky, she can’t go further than the end of the line. She did a good job with this; it wasn’t much different than our flights indoors except that she could fly to me further. She was mostly okay, but still kind of skittish.

I had her coming well to my fist when called on the creance line outside when I realized that I had not spent the time to wed her to the lure. I am sure that you all have witnessed falconers swinging a lure around to call a bird in. This is not something that is essential to the type of falconry that I am doing, but it is a good tool if the bird goes into a tree and decides to sit there for hours until she feels like coming down. It’s extra incentive to bring her back in. Falconers “wed” their birds to the lure which basically means that the bird learns that when it comes to the lure it gets a huge reward. Most birds pick this up quickly and treat the lure like prey. Musket was no exception and learned that the lure was something to be desired fairly quickly. The only problem was that in order to wed her to the lure, I had to give her huge meals on the lure, and that also meant that my training slowed down as she had to sit for a few days to get rid of the weight. It was frustrating because in my mind it had already taken far too long to get her to the point we were at already.

When we finally arrived at the point where I felt that she was properly wedded and I was getting ready to free-fly her, we had a bad day on the creance. The following was a post I put on an apprentice falconry board, you can probably tell how frustrated I was at the time.

I've hit a snag with my Female RT "Musket". I trapped her in early January at 49.9oz. Let me say that I like to do things slowly, especially things that are very important to me. Well, we had some weight issues early and my sponsor advised me how to solve those, but after all this time, she still is not where I want her to fly her free. She has been doing some great flights on a creance from a post on the lawn to my glove with very little hesitation. I have her flying the length of my yard to me with no problems. She’ll come to me almost immediately as soon as I put my hand out there, and after we’ve done that for a little while, I blow a different whistle and throw out the lure with a full crop of food on it. Yesterday she almost jumped for the lure before I had it on the ground and then she hopped down beside it and leisurely ate the chicken I had put on there. She let me walk around her without problem, letting me put my hand right above her as she ate. She reluctantly went after a few little tidbits I tossed out trying to get her to trade off, but eventually we did that as well. All was going as planned until I took the lure away. When the lure was safely in my pocket, she walked around seeking out bits of meat that she had missed (she’s really good at this, I had no idea that there were bits of meat anywhere). The last two days of lure flying, she decided to fly back to her "creance post" after her lure meal instead of coming back to me. So, I stood between her and the perch, blocking her from flying to it and offering her a tidbit on the glove. After a while she gave me, what I can only describe as the “screw you” look, and took off! She made it to the end of her creance line and kept trying to fly off. I waited her out, patiently ignoring her escape attempts and would every now and then present a tidbit and blow a whistle to her. Well after about 10-15 minutes of this, I decided that she was not going to willingly come back, so I gathered up the slack in the creance line and walked toward her. Then she acted like a wild thing and flung herself on her tail and stuck her feet out at me. After a few attempts, I did finally get her to hop up on my glove by pushing my hand on her keel, but she was not happy about it. It was funny though because once she was on my fist, she was a different bird, totally calmed down. I actually probably could have flown her again on the creance, maybe I should have, but I put her away in her mew, and left her there for the night.It’s a bit frustrating to me because I really should be at the point where I am flying her free. It’s been a month and a half, she should be trained by now. Some part of me feels like a failure in this endeavor. But, my general way is to take things slowly. I am sure that part of this is my slow pacing and also inexperience, so I probably shouldn’t be too hard on myself (that’s what my husband says). But I can't shake the feeling that I'm doing something wrong. I have put a call in to my sponsor to try to help me troubleshoot a little bit. I think it’s just a matter of weight reduction. I know if she was not tied yesterday that I would have lost her. I know that free flying's a leap we are going to take hopefully soon, but I don't think we're quite there yet.

The board had some good suggestions. Ultimately the one that worked was to give her a full crop of food over a few days and let her feel fat, and then take her weight down again quickly so she felt hungry. I guess the birds can get used to getting little food and it gets their attention to have a full stomach and then go without again. After I tried this last suggestion, Musket was all over me! She would not let me get far away from her without coming to me and this, as I now understand it, is exactly what I needed to see before we flew.

We were now ready. I called my sponsor and told him I was going to do it, I was ready to fly her free.