Jessie appears to me to be ready to hunt again, after 2 years of inactivity. She of course is out of shape, but her mental state seems to be where it should be, so I am at least going to be exercising her even if she won't hunt. The way of course to do that is flying her to the kite or a suitable alternative.
In the past I used the Kite or a balloon about 6 feet in diameter. That covered each weather condition- Kite in windy times and a balloon when the wind is calm. Unfortunately this conditioning would occur during the one time of the year that the wind doesn't blow in this area. The balloon covered that, but in recent years Helium has become scarce, and no one wanted to sell any to me. I finally made a contact at Norco, but the cost for enough to fill my balloon was$166.00. I chickened out.
A good and generous friend gave me two basic ( at least by today's standards) quad copters. If you remember when I had Lee-Zard, I intended to use them to train him. After he left I had little reason to fool with them. So a couple of calls to my friend and a bit of OJT and I was back in business.
The day before yesterday was my first free flight for Jessie and I was able to use the kite. Today there was no wind, so it was time to grit my teeth and give it a shot. She has so far not shown the reluctance that Lee had towards the buzzing menace. I still have a long line between the drone and the lure.
The plan was to get Jessie out of the weathering area, hooded, and setup with a transmitter, ready to go. Then put the drone at the altitude that I wanted the lure to be. Once that was accomplished, I would then bring Jessie out, unhood and release her to climb up to the lure. The lure line has a parachute on the other end so that she could not take off with the food.
I am using a pvc pipe secured to the legs of the drone, with the parachute stuffed up into the pipe. I stuffed the parachute to what I hoped would be the proper friction point that would still allow her to jerk it out without dragging the drone along with it. Of course that didn't work, and the weight of the lure and food pulled the chute out of the pipe before I went for Jessie. I landed it and really stuffed it back in this time. I put it back up in the air. Unfortunately I still had too much power applied and by the time I got back out it was much too high for a fat hawk to climb to, so I brought it back down to a normal height, and turned her loose.
Jessie appeared to have no other thought in her mind but to grab the lure and within three circles did without hesitation grab the lure and fly it back to the ground. I flipped the return home switch and set the transmitter down and walked to where she landed.
Karen stayed and kept filming the drones return to where I began the flight. I don't understand what happened, every thing went off without a hitch. What a concept!
https://vimeo.com/237006215 password owyheeflyer
Pretty good shot of the back of your head.....I know hard to follow the bird and at that height hard to see anyway. Nice to see ya have the bird out flying.
ReplyDelete