Dec 6th

 The temps have been steadily dropping and I am a bit concerned as to how much cold weather she can handle. Of course she is much heavier than a normal flying weight and that helps, fat converts to heat, but I still worry about her. I have been putting her in the shop at night, and she appears to my ever active imagination to suffer from a bit of a shock to her system when she goes outside in the morning. The Shop almost always stays very close to 32 degrees no matter how cold it gets. Wind and wind chill is the real problem with a Harris Hawk, and the "weathering area" gets a bit of it, but not a direct wind. I decided that I needed to change things a bit.

I intend to hunt much later in the season this year so I decided to use my Hawk mews as her winter house. She really hates to come to the fist to be put inside the shop, so it's better to keep her where she can be protected without all the extra handling.

 I blocked the West facing window, from whence the winds almost always come from. I got a long heating cord and wrapped half of her perch with it, leaving half with no heat, in case it was too hot for her. That way she can get as much or as little heat as she needs. So far I have never seen her on the heated half, but it is there if she needs it.

Her suite is the one in the middle.

After our last hunt on the 3rd, I put her in the shop for the night. The nights were getting down to 7 or 8 degrees. I weighed her when I transferred her to the mews and she weighed 1071. So I deducted that by putting her in the shop where she didn't need to burn that many calories to keep warm was going to change our weight regime. When I was leaving her outside at night, she was holding pretty steady at 1021 grams, no matter what I fed her.

Saturday was supposed to be her regular flying day, but when I went to pick her up, she wouldn't stay on the fist long enough for me to get one of her jesses. She was obviously too fat to hunt. I tried her several times during the day, but she refused to hang around long enough for me to take her outside. The change in her housing had her a bit confused, but the fact remained that she just wasn't hungry enough to hang around long enough to go hunting. I checked on her a couple of times during the day to make sure she was OK, and on one of my trips out there, I couldn't see her, so I started in to see where she was. She flew up to the perch from the ground by the door. Then I remembered that there was a Mouse or a Rat hole gnawed in the corner that went into the other mews. I think the mouse population is in trouble. It was obvious from some debris on one of the perches that she had been scrounging around on the floor. Perhaps that was the source of her recent weight problem.

We had a warm front coming in and the temperature last night was only 22 degrees. I got everything ready around noon to go hunting. She was much more willing to stay with me this time. Three days without food does much for her ability to focus. Her weight today was back to 1021.

Today I went to an area that I had only hunted once this year. Its not very big at all and it varies from Sage to Greasewood, then to pasture. We had one pretty intense flight in the Sage, where she took four shots at him barely missing by inches before she quit trying. I really wasn't seeing that many Jacks in the Sage, so I went to the area that the greasewood was the prevailing cover, not finding much there either.  I then decided to hunt the edge of the pasture. To all appearances there was nothing there for a Jack to hide, but quite often they choose such spots when the heavy cover is hunted too often. The advantage of that type of cover is that they tend to wait until they have no choice but to flush because of your proximity to them. I had guessed right this time and one flushed about 15 yards to our right and she burned him down in 20 feet. Its actually pretty rare to be able to see the entire flight, it mostly takes place far enough away that the only indication is the Jacks death scream when she finally grabs them.  

I won't be hunting tuesday as I normally would and it is time for her to have a casting, so I gave her the head to eat when I put her back in the mews. That should hold her over for a few days.

"Castings" consists of hair, bones, and other nondigestible stuff that cleans the crop, and is regurgitated the next day. Raptors store the meat from their prey in their crop until the stomach is empty, they will then force it into their stomach to digest. The things that are not digestible serve to clean their crop when it is "cast " up the next day. In the normal course of events in the wild, they will cast every morning before they hunt for another meal. In captivity their food consists of raw meat with little to no wastage. Therefore it is necessary to make sure that they have enough "castings" on a regular basis to maintain their health. Since she does not feed on the actual kill, the food that she gets rarely has hair in it. Therefore I have to give her something that does have casting material in it. I prefer to "gorge" her once a week and the casting can be incorporated in that meal. I have found that the Jack's head is quite nutritious and serves that purpose. All the bones also serve to keep her beak from growing too long as well.