36 days old

Lee is now 36 days old and is beginning to develop a personality. So far so good. It is very difficult to improve on Mother Nature, and raptors raised as babies rarely turn out well mannered or achieve their full potential. There are many hard lessons that are learned on their own, that is very difficult to pass on when they know that you are the supplier of food. The hardest is that if they do not try, they do not eat. On their own there is no one to blame, so the raptor either learns to fly harder or dies in the process. There is a very small window or opportunity to learn that lesson.

In a natural setting there is a 30 day or so window that the parents will feed them. Until they are able to make kills on their own they will stay around the nest area, screaming for food. If there is a lot of them, the food is of course limited, so as they see things that the parents bring to them for food, they try on their own to catch them. As they fail, they begin to try harder, fly harder, and eventually they discover if they try hard enough they can indeed catch their own food. With a full tummy they begin to forage wider and wider afield, until the point that they forget why they would need to go back to the nest area.

Of course not all of them are able to make that transition, or they make a mistake and receive an injury. Over the course of the first year approximately 75 percent of young raptors die of either injuries, or mistakes. That seems to be a pretty large toll, but it is what keeps the species strong.

With the interference of man, in this case me, those lessons are almost impossible to teach. I will be very careful about depriving him of food for any length of time. Even though I do no more than drop off his saucer of ground meat, he still knows where it comes from, and if he doesn't get it he is not quiet about that failure, and with enough of a reminder, I will indeed supply that which he wants.It is a given that no matter how good a hunting hawk he becomes, he will only be a shade of what he could do in the wild with only nature to guide and shape him.

My goal at this point is to raise him so that he is quiet, with as good a set of manners as I can manage. So far things are good. The next hurdle will be when he is no longer content with lying around watching. That is why we have a telemetry transmitter hanging around his neck. That will help me find him when he starts exploring. It is my intention to leave him outside all day, and bring him in at night. Sounds easy, but there are many pitfalls just awaiting a young and dumb raptor named Lee.

There is a Red Tail nest down at the creek that the young are about the same age. Lee has already shown the tendency to scream a warning about the parents when they fly over. Hopefully it will all work out, but the danger is there. I eliminated our big Silver Wyandot Rooster already and I liked the stew much better than I ever did the Rooster. The only other Roosters we have are Old English Game hens, and they are smaller than Lee even currently, so I would expect them to give him the respect that he deserves, even as a baby.

https://vimeo.com/169576520

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