Nov 3rd

The last time I hunted Hope, I decided that she needed some fur to clean out her crop. ( Raptors hold food in their crop, thus it can get a bit slimey and nasty if not regularly cleaned ) The castings are what accomplishes that. However this time I chose to give her a Rabbit head to do that. Rabbit heads contain a lot more food that one would think, and she generally gains weight when she eats one, as she eats every thing but the teeth.

So it wasn't much of a surprise when I picked her up yesterday, that she was a bit chunky. 990 grams, a full ounce more than her last flight. She still seemed ready to hunt, so off we went. The Jacks were not letting us within 100 yards so we has some pretty long flights, which of course are mostly going to be failures. 

Brick, who is quite happy to include every thing in his hunting routine, started rooting in a smaller Sage, scaring out a really small (perhaps a Shrew) critter, which Hope beat him to. That went down the hatch. It was really small so it didn't amount to much more than an appetizer. Then not too further along, Brick somehow managed to root out a Kangaroo Rat. Of course Hope caught it. That one took a bit more time and had a lot more mass to it. She was really liking this hunt. All those little sweet little morsels, just running around that didn't even kick her or drag her through tall bushes. The 70 degree weather was conspiring against me. Not only was I sweating, it was warm enough for the smaller critters to be out and busy as well.

The terrain turned into a lot larger and thicker Greasewood and Rye Grass. Hope slammed into an exceptionally dense mess down by the creek and didn't come back up. I went to look and had a hard time finding her. Eventually, I found her under a dense mess of limbs with a Bunny in her feet. She had it by the head, so it wasn't making any noise at all. I killed it and gave her a front leg to eat.

This area was once the site of one of the early ranches, or homesteads that were scattered through the area. Its appears to be a pretty "hardscrabble" type of an outfit.

From there we took the straightest line to the house. The hunt covered 4.94 miles. One bunny and two "Timber Tigers", or "incidentals" which ever you prefer. If I count each and every kill, we are racking up a score this year. :-/