Day 69 -70

I have been having trouble holding the video camera steady enough to inflict the resulting video on anyone, so I made a stock to hold the camera. Yes its a bit crude, but it does the job reasonably well. The camera actually takes fine video, but nothing about it is ergonomic, or fits. On its own it is almost impossible to hold it steady or to see where the darn thing is pointing if there is any daylight at all. To reach the telephoto button takes another hand. I got so frustrated that I looked on line for a camera that had a view finder. Yep they had them, starting at about 1200 bucks. Sorry, not happening.

The screw hanging down gives me a place to wrap my finger around it to hold it snug to my shoulder. I may have to make a little round thingy to dress it up a bit.

So with my new camera addition, I took it with me to do my morning chores.  That seems to be the time that Lee is the most frisky, and today was no different. The biggest problem is that some of the Chickens that I have running around in the yard are smaller than what I intend for him to hunt. Once they make it across the open parking lot he doesn't bother them. I am not sure what all that adrenaline does to the chickens egg laying process, but I have too many eggs now any way.

At 9:30 AM, Lee got hungry, and stopped his harassment of the critters both tame and wild and landed on the fifth wheel looking for me. I tossed him the lure with a Starling on it. He finished it and came to sit on my fist for a while, before leaving to finish harassing things.

There was a storm coming in and as the day went on it progressively got worse. By 5:30 when he got really hungry the storm was just on the verge of breaking. He went to the lure and then to the fist to finish his meal, as the storm really picked up. He sat with us in the protection of the porch and watched it blow. I am a bit surprised at how well all this is going. I expected more trouble.

One of the emails that I received concerned his eating of feathers. Raptors take in much more food than they can put in their stomach. They have a crop that holds the food until their stomach can process it. Meat and bones and other byproducts are messy and the feathers as well as the bones that they cannot digest serve to clean their crop, so that they do not develop a toxic mess that would eventually make them sick. It is regurgitated the next morning as a pellet.

Keeping things neat and tidy. One of the problems that can be fatal to them is a condition called sour crop. It is merely food that for what ever reason is not able to be processed and begins to rot in the crop. For instance if a hawk gets too low in condition, the bacteria within the stomach stop working, the food rots, the bird dies of peritonitis.

https://vimeo.com/174114347  password   owyheeflyer