Hood Making

I was recently given a new falcon to start to work on after loosing one of our very best display falcons.
Kris was the victim of an inexperienced lurer, a fence post and an total lack of respect for personal safety. All very sad after 9 year together but finally time to move on.

My new falcon is called “6”, and is a 3/4 Peregrine/ Gyr Hybrid.

He came to me very low in condition and it took me almost two weeks to start to put condition back onto him and over the last week or so he is now starting to fly for the hell of it once more with energy reserves to spare and a spring in is step!

Tuesday found him tearing after the local feral pigeon populations of the farm in an adrenalin fuel’d flight that lasted almost 5 minutes..

I have high hopes for this little chap and decided by Thursday that he needed a new hood (Leather cap used to blindfold) befitting of his hallowed place amongst the Phoenix Flying Falcons.

I have been making hoods since childhood ( I might add mostly badly!) but over the last 15 years or so they have started to improve. Stitching what equates to four separate pieces of leather together seamlessly is not as easy as you might think!
Then there is the shaping and boning (a process of polishing the hood on a hard block using a piece of smooth bone, resulting in a patent affect) attaching a Plume and braceing up, all of which takes time, patience and a bit of skill.

After 10 Hours hard graft, the result speak’s for itself, and now an amazing young falcon has a brand new fancy piece of headgear… Result.

Ensuring the school and birds are kept to the highest standards is a big part of the job, so today was mostly about cleaning and maintenance.

Despite there being a lot to get done, Tom and I managed to sneak out for an hour this afternoon with two of our hunting hawks (Caine and Cobalt) and a ferret. It seems like a lifetime since Cobalt and I were sharing so much time together as I took him through his training. He is now an integral part of the hunting team, doing a great job entertaining guests and chasing the local wildlife.

Cobalt has had a few pheasants so far this season, but had yet to bring down a rabbit. Despite a few opportunities, he has been a little hesitant. Well, you would be too - they’re twice the size of him and can fairly shift!

Well, today was to be the little man’s day. Having tried a few warrens, with no joy, we were starting to think the local rabbit population had moved on. Then the ferret bolted a rabbit right in front of the hawks. Both boys were off instantly - Cobalt bound; but was kicked off. You would have put money on the very experienced Caine taking the rabbit within seconds, but this one gave him the run-around, turning very quickly and making for cover. Unluckily for the bunny, Cobalt was back up and moments later bound to the rabbit with no hesitation.

Cobalt on his first rabbit

We were right there to share in the little man’s success. He has a bite to his foot for his trouble, which will be a lesson well learned - he won’t be making that mistake again. Of course, it’s all still a learning curve for young Cobalt, as it is for me.

To see the bird I trained taking his first rabbit was a fantastic moment - he’s growing up. I may have had a lump in my throat, but I don’t think Tom noticed! It’s amazing to think that this first season is coming to an end already - only a month to go for Cobalt. But there are many more rabbits out there and - based on today’s performance - a few more of them will be coming his way before then.

Ross

Well, it’s been a while since I’ve managed to sit down long enough to pull together my thoughts and record what’s been happening with the training of my first Harris Hawk. It’s not that I’ve not wanted to, just that all my free time is taken up training Cobalt (for that will be his name!).

Cobalt

It seems a lifetime ago since he took that first food from my hand - it’s actually been a mere three weeks. Since then, he has demonstrated exactly why Harris Hawks are such popular birds for Falconry. He is such an intelligent little man. As soon as he worked out that his food will always come from my hand, that was his sole focus.

Once I knew he would eat food from my hand comfortably, I began the process of getting him used to his surroundings - all the sights and stimuli he will encounter in his life as a Falconry bird. The rationale is that while he’s focused on feeding, he will not bother too much with what is going on around him, unless it gets close enough to spook him. It is up to me to judge how close to get to things, when to stop and let him settle - it sometimes felt like a battle of minds trying to pre-empt his feelings, but the amount of time spent at this stage has been enormously beneficial, as I aim towards having a bird that will not be startled by anything as he comes to realise that the glove is a place of safety.

Enjoying some time in the sun (and some pheasant)

For this part of his training, I started feeding him on things that take him much longer to fill up on - it’s not much good if it only takes him a couple of minutes to scoff down his daily rations! So the little man got introduced to rabbit legs with most of the meat stripped away, a pheasant’s neck etc. Whenever he is occupied feeding, it is easy to move around with him, moving him closer to people, dogs, cars, busy roads - all the things he hasn’t yet encountered in his short life.

Within a week, young Cobalt was habituated enough to jump towards me for food as he anticipated the day’s lesson - a sure-fire sign that he was ready for the next stage of training.

Ross

Well it has finally come to that point in my falconry career. Adrian has entrusted to me the care of one of this year’s juvenile Harris Hawks, for training.

While I’ve been handling and working with birds of prey most weekends since January, and consider myself to have a good understanding of the process involved in training a bird, this is a big step.

I feel quite a burden, because this is not just about how I feel, it’s the beginning of this little man’s life and how he will be introduced to that life and how he will interact with the world around him is all down to me. He will be trained to hunt game. That’s the end-game - getting there is the challenging bit.

Until Sunday, this baby (and I’ve yet to decide on a name for him) had spent his life in one of the purpose-built breeding chambers at Phoenix. All he has known is a 3 x 5 metre room where he spent the first weeks of his life with his siblings and parents.

Having made up anklets and jess for him, we snuck in there on Sunday evening. Ten minutes after being gathered up, he was equipped, hooded and struggling to stand on my fist. He never had any cause to balance while blindfolded, so naturally he wasn’t great at it initially! But after a while he worked it out and was ready for the drive to his temporary home in Glasgow.

It always sounds cruel to think of putting a hood on a bird, but think about it from his perspective. All of this is scary - it’s all unknown. If you can’t see any of it, what’s to be frightened of? So the hood stops the bird getting jumping around and damaging his feathers or worse.

The last two nights have been spent trying to settle the fellow down enough to convince him he can eat from the glove he is standing on. Suddenly all the knowledge I have acquired about body language and putting myself in the mind of the bird comes to the for, and we start the long process of get used to each other.

This evening (Wednesday - three days in) was a seminal moment in my falconry life. The wee man finally trusted me enough to bend down and take some of the food in my hand. Once he got the taste in his mouth, there was no stopping him.

This is the beginning of what I hope will be a long and happy partnership. The onus is all on me though. I have to put in the time to make him more and more comfortable as the days go on. Only through repetition and a lot of time spent together will this happen. This isn’t a “hobby” that that can be picked up and put down at will.

So, it is early days, and there is so much ahead of us. But, the feeling when he bowed his head just long enough to take a bite of food from my glove for that first time…amazing - a moment I will never forget.

Ross

Today brings us egg no 4 of our Inseminated hybrid eggs and a quick inspection of the natural pairs chambers reveals that we have a few Harris eggs and a couple of Hybrids too.
In the normal scheme of things a parent bird will not start to incubate her eggs until nearing the end of her clutch, so that ultimately there wont be a vast difference in the ages and appetites of her offspring. The female decides before she even starts to lay her eggs how big her clutch will be, a decision based on her environment and more importantly the availability of prey in the area on which she must eventually rear her family.
In avi-culture we are able to manipulate the amount of offspring we produce in a number of different ways, for a number of different reasons. The chosen species may be rare or endangered or simply in high demand on the commercial market.
Egg production is easy, fertility and incubation are not so…
The male bird is often in great danger during the breeding season as his sexual advances may be spurned and as the female is always larger; he might just end up as another meal!! (another reason we do a lot of A.I)
Natural incubation by a good pair of birds is always preferable to artificial as the hatch rate and successes are always higher, but for us this sin’t always an option, although we will endeavour to allow all of our birds to rear their own young after hatching in completed.
There is one method which we employ to increase our hatch rate which we call “weighing down”
The principle is fairly straight forwards, involving the weighing off eggs every 5 days or so.
Over the total incubation period, the average raptor egg must lose between 12 and 15% of its total weight in order that the foetus is of the correct size and strength to hatch successfully. This is achieved naturally by the parents through adding weight to the eggs by bathing more often or even increasing their body temperatures to promote weight loss, fascinating stuff!
We manipulate these figures by running three incubators, one with an average humidity, one with a very wet humidity and finally one filled with silica crystals (very dry).
We plot on a graph an ideal weight loss, and if the egg weight at any time deviates from this path, we manipulate the weigh loss/gain using the other incubators.
This is a more accurate technique than just putting them in a machine and crossing our fingers and we get on average above a 95% success rate.
If I sit here a think real hard I’m sure I can come up with yet more ideas to create yet even more work!