This morning he was raring to go, jumping to me as soon as I got close to the playpen. I took him outside and turned him loose. I then went on to do my chores. Jessie was being coy, and seemed to take forever to get on the fist. Perhaps she is realizing that she is no longer the only bird in my life. :-) Lee was all over the place, flying straight at me several times. He flew to the hawk pens and there was a young Pigeon sitting there. He tried to land on her, but she managed to escape him. He fumbled all over her several times, but did not have experience enough to secure her. She took off, slammed into the side of the motor home, falling to the ground. Lee was after her, but she managed to get under the Motor home. He was standing in the weeds looking underneath. She jumped up into the axle area, and he followed, flushing her out of there and onto the trailer next to it. He followed, fumble fingered as could be, she escaped and slammed into the Motor home again, down on the ground and out the other side. He lost her in the confusion. I'm standing there cussing myself for my shortsightedness. I have decided that I am going to have to leave the Chicken house open or go out earlier to give them a head start. He seems to be getting a bit more serious.
I decided to feed him a bit earlier today and cut a Starling in half for his breakfast. Apparently it was a bit much as he didn't show up until 7:30 this evening for food.
This morning I decided that it was time to introduce the drone. While I didn't expect him to take the lure off the drone, I did want him to get used to it. As is to be expected he didn't like it anywhere over him, and he flew off landing on the Duck pen. I landed the drone, and called him to the lure. Then as he was eating I brought it to a hover within about 25 yards of him. When he got close to finishing, I clicked the switch to have it land where it took off from. I offered him my glove and he ran over to feak his beak, (This ancient term describes him cleaning his beak) he then tried to nip me on the leg. I left him there and started putting stuff away. When I got back he had run up to the door. I told him to go on in, but he decided that the refrigerator under the back porch was a better place to snooze after eating.
I had a bunch of stuff to do and lost track of him. He sometime later went to the Hack tower and stayed there for most of the day. Sometime around 3 PM I turned on the receiver to see where he was, and got no signal. I assumed that he had gone to the ranch. The wind was a bit brisk for comfortable flying, so I kept waiting. We had a really nasty dust devil go through, tossing one of our pool chairs out into the garden and in the process bending the center of one of the hangar doors. Its a piece of 1 1/2 X 1 inch rectangular tubing, so it should have been fairly exciting. In retreiving the chair out of the garden, I discovered that a rather large Deer had jumped the fence and pruned all my plants and pulled all of the Cantalope plants out. Any body out there hungry?
Finally about 7:30, I decided that it was calm enough to risk my life in the air, so I secured one of my telemetry receivers to the firestar's cage and rolled it outside. The very first thing, the wind blew my one piece windscreen totally over the other side of the plane. Luckily it didn't break. I got it pointed into the wind, and waited for a bit for the wind to calm. It finally did, and I got in and started up, plugging the ear buds to the receiver in my ears. To my surprise I can now hear him coming back over the ridge from the ranch. In truth I was relieved and regretful at the same time.
It would appear that he had some excitement today as his sere is scraped. There is nothing for him to hit here at the house, so apparently he is trying to catch stuff. He crashed into something today. You can see the little scrape at the top of his beak. (For those of you who do not know what a sere is- it is the soft tissue that goes over the top of his beak and includes his nostrils. The little post in the center of his nostril allows him to breathe while in a dive. It modifies his air intake so that the speed of his dives do not affect his ability to breathe.) He could have gotten it on a fence or a branch. Fence is the most likely culprit.
One of the most common ( in my opinion) mistakes that falconers make is to keep their young falcons away from wires and fences. It is my opinion that if they know what they are when they are just bumbling around, they will know what to avoid when they are really flying hard. I want them exposed to those dangers while they are just pooping around.
He was really hungry this evening, enough so that what ever bad manners lurk in his little mind was to the fore front. It took him a while to settle down enough to eat. Today I decided that it was Karen's turn to feed him. :-)
https://vimeo.com/174699997 passwork owyheeflyer
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