There has really been little to share with anyone lately. The hunting has been crappy, and that is generous in the extreme. I have almost given up on finding enough Rabbits to hunt. Bud is stuck in a rut, that has been really tough to get him out of, so I have just been slogging along, hoping for something positive to happen.
Connie and I finally finished her "Catio". I, of course call it the Cat house, as at best, it is a bit too common a structure to call it such a fanciful name. No matter the name, it is the best idea for town Cats that I have ever seen. "Atta boy,Girl".
I had bet that they would not like it at all, but they thankfully have proved me wrong. The tunnel has a "cat door" in the garage, and another cat door in the garage allows them into the house.
I am seriously thinking of stopping hunting for Rabbits with Hope. There are so few Rabbits around, I almost hate it when she does catch one. So far we have brought three Jack Rabbits to bag. A day that turns up three Jacks is currently a good day. The average Hawk makes a catch in ten tries, and we are averaging three tries after covering three to four miles, a losing proposition at best.
Sue, the Lady that found Jessie, my last falcon, came over today to go hunting with myself and the birds. We first took Hope down to the end of the runway to start our search for Jacks. We walked for two miles, and as we approached the car from the opposite direction, a young Jack broke cover much too close to us to have a chance. Hope caught him in about 20 yards, he broke free and she again caught him before he covered another 20 yards.
The poor girl has been so frustrated, that she had begun to fly in front of the dogs and myself, hoping to see something. Then of course if we do stumble across a Jack, it generally busts out in the opposite direction behind us and she can't make up the distance.
Bud
Bud's personality has now fully formed, and it is quite interesting, and actually quite nice. He is fearless, and calmer than one would believe.
His first flight while on "hack" was to the ground by Hope's weathering area. For a reason that I cannot comprehend, I felt compelled to pick him up and bring him back to the window ledge. He did not want to be picked up but I insisted by holding his jesses and putting him on the fist.
Since then he does not want me to pick him up. He will "bate" the other direction every time. Once he is on the fist, the rebellion is over and I can do what ever I want, other than put a hood on his head. Once however he is hooded, the fight is over, and even when I take his hood off, he shows no other resistance, or sign that he has just "thrown a shit fit". After eating the food on the lure, he flies to the fist with no problem or hesitation. In fact he is very good on the lure, or even a duck that he has killed, he does not hesitate to leave the Duck for a Quail on the fist.
I have been trying to get him to come to the fist in the weathering area by offering him food when I try to pick him up. If I starve him enough he will come to the fist, reluctantly. However it seems that the behavior is ingrained permanently. Sigh! I have always said that "you need to be smarter than the crap you are working with", and it appears that I "ain't", at least some of the time.
Training a falcon to hunt requires that I teach him to fly high above me, "Waiting On" at an altitude high enough to command the area around us. The higher he is the more area that he can cover.
There are several ways to do this. You can just take them out during the middle of the day and let them play around and hopefully they will get some altitude, at which point you serve them with something that they can catch. The problem with this is that they tend to wander around, rather than stay overhead.
Another and the current method most in use, is a drone. They are taught that their lure is on the drone, and they have to grab the lure off the drone. It starts close to the ground then higher until the altitude that you want is reached. The advantage of this is that the falcon is actively engaged as soon as he is released. There is much better control, and the bird gains condition much faster than by any other method.
The theory is that when the falcon has hit the altitude that you want, prey is released and the falcon then learns that game is forthcoming when they reach a high altitude over you. While that sounds simple enough, nothing ever gets simple, at least for me.
There are several "truism's" concerning falcons, one is that "a falcon that is too fat or too lean will not fly". The only way that I could get Bud to step up to the fist was to cut his weight back. He would still fly 600 feet up to the lure. Primarily because he needed to eat. However without the drone in the sky he would fly around then land on the ground wondering what the hell I was up to. Generally speaking falcons do not hunt because they are hungry, mostly it is because they want to. Yes it is nice to feed on fresh hot warm bloody Ducks, but it seems to be a secondary benefit. Bud would clearly prefer cold Quail.
One of the problems that drives a falconer crazy is releasing game birds that will not fly with a falcon in the air above them. I have some Chukars that were intended for "kill birds" for the falcon. If the falcon is not around, the Chukars fly like crazy, but if Bud is in the air they will not fly at all, preferring to be mauled by the dogs rather than tempt the falcon. That unfortunately for the Chukar, does not stop Bud from plowing through the Dogs to grab it.
In the past some falconers had found that if you put blinders on Pigeons they would fly because they didn't know where the falcon was, but they could still see in front of them. With their eyes completely covered the Pigeon would just hover in the air.
Being a great "thinker", or at least believing I am a great thinker, (I get confused about that sometimes) I decided that making a little hood that would stay on a Chukar's head was almost impossible. However I had some little paper drinking cups. I could just cut the bottom into little slices and shove it over the Chukar's head, then he would fly like hell to get as far from me as possible.
Well I finally got Bud up a couple of hundred feet with the drone. I tossed the Chukar and he popped the parachute out and landed about 15 feet away, where Bud mugged him in the road by my car. CRAP!
So after three days of Bud landing back on the ground to wait for me to put the drone in the air, we finally reached his true flying weight of 800 grams. I released him in a rather brisk breeze and the started circling up. A wild Prairie tiercel came along and after a couple of circles with Bud, changed his mind about hassling him. Bud kept circling getting higher all the time.
I had made a special trip to a game farm in Idaho to buy some "flying" Mallards just for this occasion. At $14.00 each, a bargain to be sure. All the other Ducks had flown before. This one landed about 15 feet from me in the road and again was mugged by Bud. Sometimes words are just not enough!
After I called Bud to the fist for his Quail, I asked Sue if she liked Duck. She said "yes, I do". So I said " Good then you can have it. She then tried to back peddle,saying that she hated plucking Ducks, as she had been forced to pluck Ducks for the hunters as a kid, and didn't want to ever pluck another one. So I plucked it in the middle of the drive way and shamed her into taking it.
On another note, I finally got a load of wood, so I won't have to burn the furniture this winter. I have about a third of it split and stacked.
As I was preparing the pictures for this blog, I noticed that the earlier lenticular clouds had coalesced into a spectacular sunset.
Our weather has begun to normalize a bit. We still haven't gotten more than 1/3 of an inch of rain, but it is better. The Ducks still have not materialized as yet, but they will.
