Lures and Baggies

Musket had an interesting week. I decided to work her on the lure again to reinforce the response since I have been teasing her with it in the field to encourage her to follow. Our routine has been to, weigh the hawk, free-fly her around the yard, getting her to come to the fist for tidbits and follow me through the trees, then give her the lure. It has been going well, for the most part.

Early in the week when I flew her and she was below weight, she was getting eager and took off just as we walked out the front door and I didn’t see where she went. When I came out, I blew the whistle and she came down to me from the trees for the first time! I can’t explain the feeling of wonder I had at that moment. I flew her around the yard and gave her the lure just as I had planned, it was perfect.

We did this little exercise several times throughout the week, and she was behaving well until she discovered the rabbits. I’d been covering the rabbits with a tarp on our little forays because I knew if she caught a glimpse of them, she’d try to kill them. She was following well and then stalled in a tree. I walked across the yard and whistled to try to get her to come to me, but she was distracted. I didn’t realize until too late that she had seen the rabbits! Sigh. I heard her bells and to me it sounded like she was after something, so I came rushing around the corner to find her under the rabbit cages trying to figure out how to get to them. Dismayed, I made for her, but she leapt and grabbed the cage from the bottom. She had the cage with so much force that I thought she had one of the rabbits. I pulled back the tarp expecting to see a mangled rabbit, instead I saw my breeder standing over the treacherous claws, sniffing them!!! Stupid stupid stupid!! I could not dislodge Musket from the cage, so I brought out my lure and tossed it to the ground. She hesitated, but eventually decided that she preferred the lure to the rabbit and went for it. Then, I traded for the lure and took her away from the rabbit cage.

I had hoped that this incident was the end of it. On Saturday, I waited all day for the squirrels to show up, but they stayed away so I decided to hunt her on a baggie. She was about ½ an ounce high but I wasn’t too worried about it. Lesson learned. At first she was attentive and flew to objects and back to my glove. I got her into a tree and she was following a little slow and far behind. Then she got into a tree above the rabbits and even though I had covered them very carefully so there was no way she could see them, she still knew they were there. Typical lazy red-tail, content to be patient waiting for the food to come to her, sigh, no amount of whistling could get her to budge. I had to pull out the lure to get her to come to me and away from those rabbits. She was sluggish so I decided, okay, let’s just go ahead and give her the baggie and end this. We used one of the babies, the cute grey one that had frostbite on two of its toes. She took a while to see him, but when she did, she shot down like a rocket and got him by the head. He never made a sound and she held on until he was dead, which did not take very long. She traded off easily for a chicken leg and I put her back in her mews.

Hazen said he was paying close attention to her when she went for that rabbit and she didn’t miss a step. It didn’t seem as though her eye impaired her whatsoever. Maybe she’ll just have to be a bunny hawk. But I haven’t given up on squirrels yet! She gets the next two weeks off while we vacation in California. My wonderful in-laws have agreed to brave feeding her for that time. Then I get to see where her weight is and start working her back down.

Merry Christmas!!