40-41 days

I had intended to make a video every three days, but he is changing so fast and I am getting so much differing video that the file would be too big or I would have to leave something out if I waited for three days.

I should mention that he is fully grown except for his feather growth. He will not get any bigger, just longer feathers. About 38 days is the heaviest that they will get. After that they trim down a bit, but not a lot. The feathers will be fully grown at 70 days, and by that time the blood will have been fully withdrawn, and he will be in his "new" suit that will have to last him for a year.

Now he is becoming more and more restless. He had not left his window ledge until today, his 41st day of life. He has been content, and sleeping a lot. Now he is getting ready for the flights that have to be coming soon. He went from being scared to be picked up, to feeling quite confident and actually jumping to me whether I want him or not. He apparently recognizes the glove as a place that I will let him jump to.

He is very confident that with us is very safe and where he wants to be. He is content enough that he falls asleep with no hesitation.

This period is a critical one for an eyass (baby) hawk or falcon. He does not want to be alone, and will come looking for one of us to be with. We can lock him outside, but he just paces back and forth in the window until we either go to him or let him in the house. They can be a pain in a lot of places, at this stage, as he wants to bite, not knowing that it might be a problem for us. He needs to be with us for his mental development, and it is very demanding, but all this will eventually pass, and the more time we can spend with him the better he will be for it.

It was very windy and quite cold outside, so I tried to bring him inside so that I could read and be comfortable. I set up a perch for him, and he was content for about 5 minutes.

Then he jumped to the arm of my chair, then to my arm, then up my shirt to try to give me some love bites. Then to the top of my chair, which gave me a crick in my neck as I fully expected to get my ear pierced at any minute.

Josie need some attention as well and they looked each other over from all angles.

A smell test was in order, but a cautious one. Josie is smart enough to know to not trust one of these critters.

Hearing a thump from outside, I went to look, and Lee was running around on the back porch. He eventually ended up on top of the smoker, sliding off, and then running over to me so that I could hold him.

The next week will be the critical time. He will soon be trying his wings. I am not sure what kind of possible danger he will face while he gets used to them. As long as he doesn't get too close to a mama hen with chicks, I think the Chickens will be OK. The young Redtails have not fledged yet, and he is very cautious of things that fly. If I can get him through the next two weeks, then things should work out fine.

https://vimeo.com/170335756    password-   owyheeflyer

37-39 days

Well the boy is growing his feather like crazy. Tail is about half its length. He is requiring more interaction each day. He is bored. We had to go to McDermitt, Nv today for a fire training, so he was left alone for about four hours. When we got back he was insisting that someone spend some time with him. I finally got all my stuff done and went out to sit with him and make a phone call concerning some fire radio for the rural fire district. He kept running around and I knew that he was going to jump to me whether I wanted him or not. I was able to finish the call before he came visiting.

Then I had to yell for help before he took a chunk out of my belly. I managed to foist him off on Karen while I finished my business.

 https://vimeo.com/170062874                Password-  owyheeflyer

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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32 Days old

At about 28 days old I decided that Lee needed some Aylmeria jesses installed at a time that would be least traumatic as possible. Karen and I managed to do so without having to hold him or otherwise manhandle him.

We have been taking him outside every day in his playpen. He spends an awful lot of that time sleeping. He is beginning to do a bit of flapping, but not a whole lot. He is a bit spooky when approached, so of course I need to keep him close as I can. Of course life has a way of furnishing a lot of things other than baby sitting.

He is close to begin exploring a bit more and I decided to use a neck mount with a rubber band to hold it on him as the least intrusive way to keep track of him.

At the moment there is no battery in it, but he will be chewing and tugging on it for a few days until he gets used to it.

Today was the first time that he was left outside his play pen, and he ran around a bit and then calmed down to eat a few bites. He is not eating very much at a time, but often.

When we decided to come inside, I brought him with me to help with the blog update.

Oops! correction

Unfortunately it appears that I  will have to face the facts and admit that my bird has come out of the closet. "SHE" has decided that she is a boy. I know, its tough to admit that I apparently have a transgender offspring. I will love him any way,   in spite of her confusion, it appears that this is a common occurrence these days. My only real problem will be the fact that I will have to change her name. Leeza will no longer do. I have considered changing it to LGBT, but I am not sure if I could pronounce it much less shout it in a moment of excitement on the side of a Duck pond. I guess I will have to be content with Leezard, Lee for short.

You may wonder at my Lizard compulsion, but his parents raised the last clutch of babies by feeding them Long Nosed Leopard Lizards among others. Besides I am running out of names.

Today is the 27th day of his life, and he has made some improvements. His ability to get around is improving daily of course. He was eating out of a dish by his third day, and prefers to make small additions to his crop, several times a day. So far he is consuming a bit less than one  Quail a day. That will change pretty soon.

It was time for him to spend a day outside. It was about 72 degrees and just right for him. He actually spent almost all of his day eating, sleeping and growing feathers.

Brick the Britt. still thinks that he is fascinating, and spends a lot of time just looking at him.

A F&W guy came down yesterday to verify that I indeed had managed to obtain a bird. He of course was not able to positively ID the bird in question as a Prairie Falcon, but he was doing his job and was willing to take my word for it. I took him around the place, showed him my mews and of course Jessie. She is my watch dog, and showed great desire to attack the poor guy. Most of the view of her that he got resembles what you see in the picture below. I thought that her behavior was a bit extreme, and I couldn't figure out why. When I put her up for the night the little shit ran around the perch and tried to foot me, drawing blood in the process. This morning I could understand why. I gave her the chance to become a Mommy, but she apparently loves only me. Sigh! Every year she has to lay a couple of eggs, and unfortunately all it does is delay her molt making her pretty ragged when I start her hunting.

If you see a Peregrine take this stance, she either loves you, or is going to kick your butt. It was the latter in this case.

This afternoon while Karen and I were in the house, I heard Jessie "Chupping". She does that when she sees another falcon. I "ran" out side, and to my surprise a tiercel adult Peregrine was making low level passes over the weathering area. He was quite light, so he should be an older bird. He made several passes and I even went in and got a lure, just in case, but he pretended ignorance and eventually circled up and departed East.

Leeza's third day

I put Leeza in a playpen that we used for falcon babies, and she is where she can see the TV and every body in the room.

Leeza cast up a pellet from what her parents have been feeding her. I was pleased to note that there did not appear to be any Lizard skins in there. I will take it apart when it dries enough to see what they are eating.

We had to go to town yesterday so we fed her all she would eat before we left. We had to feed her with forceps. Karen made the mistake of "chupping" to her in falcon mom language, and she began to quietly whine in return. Karen stopped that immediately.

When we returned I began trying to get her to eat off a plate with some success. As the evening progressed, I took her out of the pen and put her in my lap. Of course the dogs and cats are very interested in her, and both can be observed studying each other. Brick especially would like to be able to sniff her, and he will occasionally whine in frustration. While she was in my lap she took several bites of food on her own, and soon indicated her desire to sleep.

This morning it would appear as though her feathers have grown about a 1/4 or more of an inch. I put some food in front of her, and raised a bit of it up to her, and she bit at the food. I left it in front of her and it did not take very long before she was eating on her own. Today she has eaten on her own every two or three hours.

At the age that I took her it is not likely that she will imprint, but she can be made vocal if she gets used to eating from the hand. I don't remember a baby beginning to eat on their own this fast before. Even though my not remembering something is not unusual, it would appear that even so she is learning very very fast.

Each evening I will put her in my lap for as long as she seems content.

Leeza the Prairie comes to live with us.

Well I finely pulled a Prairie Falcon out of an aerie.  I have had a few eyass Prairie Falcons, but I have never had one that I was able to claim that it was any good. All of them previously were taken by someone else and I somehow ended up with them. I had one female that I trapped in a family group that was still the most impressive bird that I have ever seen. She was trapped from a family group when she was hard penned. ( feathers all fully grown) I only got to keep her for one year, but it was an impressive year. She died the following fall from a gall stone in the common duct of her liver.

Having done my share of breeding Peregrines and hybrids, I have been able to make some observations over the years of the type of bird that is better suited to falconry. Survival requires a bit different set of behavior traits that do not necessarily extend to the sport of falconry.  A bird that is suspicious, and very cautious, will survive, where a bold hunter that will kill at any cost can injure itself .

In almost any nest you will find several personality types, and the one that works the best for falconry is the one that is the calmest. The bird that first closes their beak and looks around will be the bird that will do the best in a falconry situation.

In this nest the bird that I took was the quiet, calm one. There was another that screamed from the time that we showed up until we left. Another that was so meek that it stuck its head under a rock and squatted trying to make itself as inconspicuous as possible.

This nest site was not active last year, but the year before the parents raised five young on just lizards. That is some feat, but the game situation was as tough as I have ever seen it. That is why I have named this bird Leeza, for the Lizards that she has probably eaten.

I have found that Prairies taken at about 22- 24 days of age do quite well. Their tail feathers are only about an 1/8 of an inch long, so stress marks are nonexistent. They are old enough that it is hard for them to imprint to you, and they actually become dual socialized. Prairie Falcons are one of the most difficult of all falcons to train in that if you ever lie, piss off, or in any way make one mad at you, they seem to never forgive you. However if you can actually get it trained, nothing hits game like a Prairie. I venture to say that for me, seeing a Prairie Falcon's totally devastating killing stoop ranks right up there with orgasms.

I am finely living in an area where I can "tame Hack" a falcon. I have always wanted to do so, and technology has progressed to the point that the odds are greatly improved. This blog will go through Leeza's growth and training, and we will see just how long I can go without screwing up.

I first found this nest through Dave's, (next door) observations while hunting lost cows about 5 years ago.  He described the area and I managed to find it with the help of my plane. I set the gps to the spot and went back on foot to confirm. Its about 15 miles or more back in the desert, and in an area that you would never suspect a falcon would live there. I think it takes a fairly special bird to make a living there. Prairies are a very versatile species and will hunt ground quarry as well as winged ones.

I am at the age where my grace and nimbleness has departed. While still young in the mind, I have enough sense to know my limitations- hopefully and most of the time. I have no one ( falconers) to call on to help me, so I must help my self. It is not feasible to be roping over a cliff face some where, so this nest was just the ticket as the nest was out in the open and only about 7 feet below the top. I reasoned that I would be able to take a fishing net, extend the reach a bit and scoop one out of the nest with ease. I first ( earlier blog post) visited the site to determine that they were actually using it. Found the babies just hatched on the 2nd of May. Determined that I would come back on the 22nd to claim my bird. This is what happened.
 

 https://vimeo.com/167826325  -   password - owyheeflyer