Page 2 of Chuck's Falconry Home Page
Click On These Other Links Within This Website:
|
For me this says it pretty well: Lifted from The California Hawking Club Apprenticeship Manual And this: "There are a hundred things that can happen in falconry, and only two of them are good."
|
|
On the last day of 2004, my passage Kestrel (Alex) got driven off by a sharp-shinned hawk, so I decided to build this web site.
A little background. After being away from falconry for over 35 years I decided to return to it. As a kid I trained a couple of Red-tailed Hawks, and fooled around some with American Kestrels. Through an old friend and falconer, Mark Reindel, who lives up on the east coast, I met Jim Ince, a master falconer living in Bellaire, Texas, who agreed to be my sponsor. Required because of state and federal regulations, a sponsor can be invaluable as a mentor, especially for a novice . I accompanied Jim a few times while he hunted with his tiercel peregrine. At some point he mentioned that folks were having real success hunting birds with American Kestrels, and that a friend of his had written a treatise on the subject*. That was probably the catalyst. At that point I started back into it. I learned about the regulations, passed the written test, and acquired the necessary equipment. I had the hawk house ("mews") built, and then had it inspected by game wardens from Texas Parks and Wildlife, another requirement. After paying the fees, I obtained the state and federal government falconry permits. With some input from my sponsor, I built a bal-chatri hawk trap, basically a small cage with a bait animal inside and fishing line slip nooses on the top. This activity took a fair amount of time and energy starting in the spring of 2004.
I trapped the juvenile Kestrel, "Alex," late in the day on October 10, 2004. I previously caught and released two adult female Kestrels, but was trying to catch a juvenile bird. She was trapped southwest of Rosenberg, TX, where she was flying around with three or four other Kestrels, possibly family members. They put on quite an aerial display for about an hour before this juvenile female hit the trap, just before I was about to leave and regroup for the following weekend. Jim Ince was a little surprised when I showed up at his house with an unhooded bird in the box. "What? You didn't hood her?" If I had four hands I could have hooded her, but as it was, I barely got her off the trap. First, my car was on the wrong side of the road. Because of the way I held her, she had a great opportunity to bite my thumb off. I was holding the trap in one hand, bird in the other and I couldn't locate my cutters to snip the unrelaxed nooses holding her leg. Then some guy drove by and yelled at me, telling me I was breaking the law. So I just stuffed the bird into the shoe box, figuring that Jim would figure out a way of getting her out of there, which he did. He got her out of the box using a dark room and a flash light. He hooded her, put jesses on her and then unhooded her. She turned out to be an agreeable bird, eating on Jim's fist within minutes.
Named after a male eyas Kestrel that I had as a kid, within a day she was flying to my fist, and was liked by everybody. She was flying free in a few weeks, but encountered Accipiters (Sharp-shinned and Cooper's Hawks) regularly. On two occasions she was attacked by Cooper's Hawks in the air but did not seem overly upset. In fact she chased the first one after I drove it off. On another occasion, at a nearby park, a small sharp-shinned hawk attacked her and she turned on it. The two birds met in mid-air, I yelled, and the sharpie headed off. During her short falconry career she killed a couple of house sparrows, and was on the verge of really hunting. On the morning of 12/31, just two days after the picture above was taken, she was sitting in a tree on our street in north Houston. She started her shrill alarm call "kek-kek-kek," then she flew from the branch. I knew there must be a hawk nearby. A female Sharp-shinned Hawk appeared from across the street, high in the air, speeding like a bullet toward her. Alex headed north with the sharpie right on her tail, and that was it. For a few days, I spent a lot of time looking, but saw no sign of her. I didn't completely give up looking for a couple of weeks. If she survived the attack, she was apparently driven a long way off. After training another Kestrel, who caught his first game, and took off the same evening, I decided to fly Red-tailed Hawks. I lost the first one, called Bravo, in a bizarre incident right after he was trained.
*American Kestrels in Modern Falconry, by Matthew Mullenix Notes added 7/26/2008 Here are a few more comments about Alex. I was thinking about her today, nearly four years later. On the day that I lost her, I was flying her in Oak Forest, a wooded, very large neighborhood just north of downtown Houston. She pursued some sparrows up to a martin house, and tried aggressively footing inside the entrance holes. The sparrows stayed well back, as she failed to catch any. On another outing, about a week earlier she flew from a tree, crossing the street and flying into a bush where a sparrow was hiding. She looked like a tiny Redtail, gliding down with a fixed wing triangular shape, and disappeared into the bush. A great flight. It was momentarily quiet, she wasn't screaming, and I was excited thinking that she had scored. But a few seconds later, she began to scream, and I knew she had missed. Her best flight, a week or two earlier than that, was on a bagged sparrow that she pursued from a tall light pole in the park. The sparrow took off in a flash, heading for trees, and it looked as if the Kestrel had no chance. But she rolled over as it flew under her; she then flew it down and pounded it into the ground. As she settled in, a dog scared her, and she carried it. I lost her for a very long hour or so, but she came back, and I took her home. She had only gained fives grams in weight, so apparently she lost the sparrow. Probably she was robbed by a crow, or just dropped it, which I have seen Kestrels do on ocassion. When I got home, I called Jim Ince and talked excitedly about the chase. I need to mention that Alex was the worst screaming bird that I have ever encountered. Matt Mullenix attributed it to isolation, and I now concur. She and Apollo, her successor, were both tethered in the mew in the back yard, and though I spent a good part of each evening with the birds, they were left completely alone during the day; both screamed. Alex was worse. Her screaming was nearly constant, except when she was hunting. On the fist, or if anyone was around, it was constant. The minute I left her alone she would be quiet, but when she would hear someone approaching, it would start in again.
Chuck Redding
|