Haggard hawk

Life continues, here at North Devon Hawk Walks.

I'm looking after a young male Harris Hawk for a guy who has not been able to devote as much time to falconry as he would like.  I agreed to take on Hero for a month, to do a bit of remedial training and manning. He's been trained and hunted, a bit, but because he's had not much done with him, he's in danger of turning haggard.

Haggard means, basically, going back to the wild. So with Hero it's been a case of back to basics. Started off with sitting with him in the aviary, with him tethered.  Then feeding him on the fist, then walking around with him, then creance flying, then flying free.  Sounds easy! 

Actually, it wasn't too bad at all. Because of course, he was just being reminded of everything, not like Orlando ( see previous posts) who is learning it all from scratch.

Anyway, Hero is now flying free ( at about 1lb 5ounces), and following on nicely through the trees.

The only slight problem is that although he will follow nicely, he won't go far enough ahead. He needs to learn to do this if he is to be any good at hunting.  But I've still got a few weeks left to achieve that.


Orlando continues to frustrate and intimidate in almost equal measures.  She's got a tremendous bellow of rage that she uses whenever I have the temerity to try and pick her up from a perch.  But for several weeks now she's been free-lofted ( ie flying free in her aviary), as well as learning to follow on. She just needs lots and lots of manning. I probably need to get her hunting ASAP as that will help her psychologically.   Not enough hours in the day.!  ( Or rabbits in North Devon).

My wife Jane is off to learn about using Facebook for  business today. So hopefully I can pick her brains and the next stage for North Devon Hawk Walks will be to join the Facebook empire.

Look at the website www.NorthDevonHawkWalks.co.uk  for forthcoming events ( Fairs and shows etc).  Recently we were at the Devon Wildlife Trust event in Exeter, which is where the picture below was taken. Most kids are fascinated by hawks, and Artemis the sparrowhawk is quite happy to be stroked.

We shall be at the South Molton Seven Saturdays in Summer event, every Saturday morning, starting 14th  July.    Come along and meet the hawks.

Forthcoming events

Lady Macbeth, Cassius and the rest of the crew will be at Exeter Cathedral on Saturday 28th April as part of the Stay in Devon exhibition

As usual we shall all be attending the Mid Devon Show on 28th July. Look out for the North Devon Hawk Walks tent.


Also at the North Devon Show on Wednesday 1st August.

And I shall be doing a "masterclass" on falconry with the birds on Monday 3rd September as part of the West Buckland Festival.

I've added a photo of Lady Macbeth in which the telemetry she now wears can be seen. Over the past 4 months, she's twice  been out overnight as a result of my not being able to find her after she caught a pheasant. Obviously, she's more interested in eating that, than coming back to me.  Usually, the bell she wears is enough to help locate her but I decided I couldn't take the chance any more and invested in a tail mount for her, so that I could use the telemetry I already had for Artemis the sparrowhawk.  In the picture above, you can see the transmitter which is secured to her tail by a crimped-on metal grip. It's tiny, smaller than a UK five-penny piece, and carries a thin, six inch long aerial.

I did attach it to her anklet, but she ate the aerial, or at least, tore it apart. I suppose it was getting in her way a bit. She's quite happy with the present arrangement and I think she doesn't even know it's there.

We've just come back from a hawk walk. It's a cold windy day on Exmoor and the breeze helped Cassius and her Laydyship show off their flying skills nicely.

I also took out Artemis, not to fly, but to let people get close and examine her in a way they're unlikely to be able to do anywhere else. The above close-up doesn't give an idea of her size .She  weighs  222grammes when she is at flying weight, and she measures about six inches from her head to the base of her tail, which should be about four inches long.  See previous posts to learn why it isn't.

See www.NorthDevonHawkWalks.co.uk  for details of the hawk walks.

Link to hawk photos.

Here is a link to photos taken by myself and customers on hawk walks on Exmoor.

Some are also from falconry displays in the UK, while a few are from my visit some years ago to Biak, in New Guinea. 


http://photobucket.com/HawkWalks

Patience is a virtue

Definitely time that I posted something!

Orlando, the female Harris Hawk that I wrote about in the last post, continues to occupy a lot of my time. Because she wasn't touched at all for the the first 18 months of her life, she is a lot more difficult to train than birds that are bought at three months of age and then trained, which is the norm.

We've progressed to the stage where I can touch, stroke and generally fiddle about with her without losing a finger.  This is important, because anyone who owns a bird of prey that is to be used in falconry needs to be able to check the bird for injuries, fit equipment etc.

  It's always possible to  "cast" a bird, that is getting someone to cover the bird with a towel while she is on your fist and thus immobilise her, but as you can imagine, the birds don't like this very much at all.  Because the Harris Hawk is quite intelligent, for a bird of prey, they soon learn to be way of anyone sneaking up on them with a towel. If the casting always takes place in the same room, they can become unwilling to enter that room.

But as I say, I am now trusted enough to be able to handle her most of the time. Except for her feet. Her tolerance of being touched does not yet extend to her feet.  She will allow me touch them a couple of times every two or three minutes, but no more than that. I've learned to watch for the tell-tale shift of balance as she takes the weight off one foot preparatory to striking me with it. But as with most things connected with falconry, time and patience will carry me through.

The sparrowhawk, Artemis, is taking a break now after a mid winter career of starling scaring. The winter has been generally mild down here in Devon so there are less starlings around.  She did a good job of scaring them away from the farms where we were employed. When we were outside, I would point her at a tree full of starlings and she'd head straight for it at speed.  She'd fly quite low and then pull up at the last moment into a steep climb which carried her up into the branches.  Inside the cattle sheds, she flew low and fast, chasing the starlings around, through, over and under the various obstacles until either she needed a rest, or she caught one.

The tail feathers of a sparrowhawk are very brittle.  They don't bend anything like as much as those of the Harris and are very prone to breaking. Artemis now has only a stump of a tail, a shadow of its former glory.  It doesn't reduce her speed but it does make her less manouverable. The tail feathers will be renewed, along with all her other feathers, during the coming summer in the annual moult.

During the moult, the feathers drop out, in a regular pattern, over a period of months and new ones grow out to replace them.   Because the feathers come out in a regular pattern, the bird is never "lop-sided" by having say two wing feathers missing on one side and none on the other. Over the years, I've noticed, that the  Harris feathers  drop out at two day intervals.  So if there is a wing feather on the floor of the aviary this morning, then the corresponding feather from the other wing, will be on the floor in two days time.

Falconers tend to keep their birds moulted out feathers ( the big ones, that is), so that they can be used to repair any damaged or broken feathers on the bird.  This is called "imping"  and basically involves fitting an internal splint or brace made from bamboo or plastic within the hollow spine of the feather  that is on the bird and gluing a section from a moulted feather onto the splint.  If it's done well, you can't see the join  ( as Eric Morecombe would say).

Anyone interested in flying hawks is welcome to get in touch with wwwNorthDevonHawkWalks.co.uk     We fly around the North Molton/ Withypool area of Exmoor in Devon, all year round, any day of the week.  I enclose a couple of photos, both taken by customers recently.

Stroppy Harris and runaway Spar.

To be fair, my new Harris Hawk is not really stroppy, just intensely suspicious and quite aggressive. She has never been touched, flown or anything during her 18months, so it's not surprising that she is taking a long time to learn to trust me.

 I started training her as one would a new young bird. So for the first couple of weeks, I just spent increasing periods of time sitting in her aviary, reading or talking to her. When she was able to bear this without trying to fly through the wall, I progressed to taking her from her perch and holding her on my fist, still in her aviary.  Then it was a progression to taking her outside, on my fist and getting her to eat while there.   Surprisingly, this bit of the training was achieved quite quickly and she soon tore into her food while clinging to my fist. Now we watch television together ( indoors, her aviary isn't that luxurious), and go for slow cautious strolls around the garden and house.

 Over the past two or three weeks, I've started stroking her with a feather and as she gradually came to accept that, I now stroke or touch her with my finger.  This is still at the early stages, and she is only just coming to accept it. I've been pecked dozens of times and "footed"  ( grabbed by her claws) several times.  Fortunately for me, her claws are blunt as she has a concrete floor in her aviary.  Later on, I'll cover it with small gravel, and use a nail file to sharpen her claws, but that is several months away. The other day, due to my carelessness, she had three of my right hand fingers trapped in one foot while the other clung tight to the glove on my other hand, so tightly that I couldn't get my hand out.  So I was effectively handcuffed until she relaxed her grip, after twenty or twenty-five minutes.  The natural rachet mechanism within her foot means that once the grip goes on, it stays on until she makes a conscious decision to loosen it.  If her claws had not been blunt it would have been a trip to the local hospital for me, for stitches.

Once she is on the fist she is pretty calm, although she will bate  ( attempt to fly off) occasionally. However, she doesn't step up onto the fist like my other birds.  Instead, she attacks it, grabbing it with one foot with all her power as though she were trying to kill it. Then she steps up onto it.

She's quite big, and I think her flying weight will be somewhere around 2lbs 6 or 7 ounces. But that is some time off.  She's taking much longer to train than a young bird would, but as I'm in no hurry, that's not a problem.

The Spar ( Sparrowhawk) chose her time superbly and demonstrated just how the species gained a reputation for "sulking" and being difficult to train.

 A local TV journalist,  Janine Jensen  from BBC  Devon's  "Spotlight"  programme, came along to film Artemis scaring away starlings from a farm in West Devon, near Bradford. I explained what was going to happen.

 " Bird flies to tree where starlings are gathering, starlings fly off, sparrowhawk comes back to me for a morsel of food".

 Janine asked a few intelligent questions to act as an introduction to the piece of film, and then I released Artemis, who totally ignored the starlings, flew to another tree and sat there for ten minutes, totally ignoring me. 

Classic sparrowhawk behaviour, probably brought on by me flying her before she was ready to perform.  She then lead us all over the surrounding countryside for the next half-hour, with me using the telemetry to find her in various woods, hedges etc.  She eventually consented to me picking her up from a fence post about half a mile from where we had started.

Not a great film debut. Fortunately, Cassius was available to chivvy off the starlings and save the reputation of North Devon Hawk Walks.  

It does demonstrate that falconry is very much a partnership, and the bird is the senior partner.
























  .

Sparrowhawks and starlings.

It's been a long time since I posted here, sorry about that.  A new business venture, using the Sparrowhawk, Artemis, to chase off starlings from local dairy farms has been taking up a lot of my time.

It's proved very succesful, and we've operated on three farms so far with another three booked in for the future. Timing is everything, as I need to get there with the hawk as soon as the starling flocks turn up, so that they get the idea that there is a resident predator around the farm, and that they would be better off elsewhere. It's been mild this winter so far, so although there were a few early flocks of starlings, the huge flocks from Russian and Finland have not yet turned up.  When they do, I'll get the phone call from the farms and it will be another week of very early starts, getting to the farm at dawn so as to be ready to let loose Artemis as soon as the starlings turn up.  They tend to be quite regular and at one of the farms I've been visiting they would always turn up within five minutes of   08.10 . 

AS I think I mentioned in an earlier post, Artemis doesn't actually have to catch any starlings to have an effect. She just flies at the flock as it comes into roost in a tree and they immediately beat a retreat. If we can keep doing that, they push off completely.

 An article about our adventures so far appears in the most recent edition of Countrymans Weekly, a newspaper dealing with all sorts of country sports.

A local BBC reporter for BBC Spotllight is also interested in making a short film about the sparrowhawk versus the starlings , so Artemis may be appearing on the small screen. 

Sparrowhawks are famous for having very brittle tail feathers, which snap easily.  Artemis is no exception and her tail is a disgrace, only about half the length it should be.  It doesn't slow her down, but it does make her less manoueverable.  However, this isn't as bad as it could be, as I don't want her catching small birds, her natural prey.  ( They have enough problems in the UK as it is, given the large number of cats).

It is possible to repair a broken feather, by "imping" it.  That is, using an internal splint to fix a replacement feather to the shaft of the old, broken one.  Trouble is, you can't get sparrowhawk feathers for love nor money ( I've tried), so if I do it, I'll have to use feathers from the tail of a pigeon, which are the closest in size and shape.   That should confuse any amateur bird-watchers in the vicinity.

To add to my self-imposed workload, I've also got a new female Harris Hawk.  She was given to me and is proving a real handful as she is over a year old and has never been touched.  More anon.