2021 starting small

Sunrise in the Desert

Steen's

 New years day happened to be a normal day to fly Hope, and what could be a better way to start the new year than to go Hawking.

Hope is getting used to her new digs, and has learned that if she doesn't come to me, I don't come back until the next day. That is good, but it also comes with a down side. That is if she is even the slightest bit hungry, she will now come to me. Yes that is a good thing, but as I mentioned earlier there is a certain point that centrifugal force overcomes her ability to make the turns inside of the Jacks. The extra freight can sometimes make sharp corners impossible. In any case she came to me at 1064 grams. This is not to say that she slacked off, she flew her heart out, but was only able to pull hair a couple of times.

Personally I don't mind, heavens knows that I need the exercise, however Tami's sister, Tara and her husband George came down and I invited them to go hawking. Both are falconers, but due to very young children are not able to practice. 

Not having any idea what Hope would weigh, I invited them to go Hawking and they rearranged their schedules to go. Since time was a factor we went just on the other side of the Ranch. There are Jacks in there, just not that many. So here we go, 5 adults and three kids, one in a back pack. We put in about 3.5 miles, with Hope pulling hair twice, perhaps three times, but no pot of Rabbit at the end of the rainbow.

I eventually felt sorry for the girls and we let them go back home to start their dinner chores while George, Connie and I stayed to continue hunting. We jumped a Jack that snookered Hope and ran across the road into a really small patch of Sage. It was the perfect set up. If, that is, he had flushed the way that he should have, but of course he didn't. I walked right by him with Hope on the Tee perch, he waited till we were about 20 yards away and cut back the way he had came. Hope had him in the butt, but he scraped her off in a Greasewood tunnel.  January Jacks have been pared down to the strongest and best, they don't give up easily.

We started back to the car thinking that we would load up and go over the hill to a different patch of Sage and continue our hunt.

With three young kids that were really curious about Hope, I confess that I had called her several more times than I would ever do by myself, so she had had a few tidbits here and there. It did not  affect her desire, but with some hawks it would have, it merely added to her difficulty in turning. As we were walking back to the car, Brick was pointing a pretty big mess of Sage. I told him to "get it" and he began rooting around in the bush, but couldn't get any thing to come out. Hope was watching from the perch on my shoulder, and when I kicked the bush, she slammed into the ground on Bricks side and came up with a mouse, which she promptly swallowed. Brick was still at it, and pretty soon a hawk's foot snaked out and came up with another mouse.

These are cell phone photo's so they are not all that detailed, but if you look close you can see a mouse tail sticking out of her beak.

We had hunted pretty hard, with heavy odds against us, eight people in the field, one kicking my heels, the other asking nonstop questions and one whining that she wanted to play in the dirt. Not to mention an obese Hawk. So two timber Tigers (Mice) in one hawking trip is not to be scoffed at. 

I am hoping for bigger and better things to come this year, for all of us. Especially for fun times like these.