More hawk pictures.

It's been a very busy time at North Devon Hawk Walks.  This last August has been the busiest since I started up business three years ago. The hawks and I have been out every day, often twice a day.  There seems to be an increasing demand by people to get close to birds of prey.  I suppose every county show now has a falconry display of some sort, which excites people's interest, and makes them want to learn a bit more about falconry. 

I've been pleasantly surprised at the amount of repeat business, that is people who've been on one hawk-walk coming back for another. Also surprising is the number of local residents who have become customers.  I had assumed that most of the customers would be visiting tourists, but I suppose about seventy percent are locals, or people visiting relatives who are locals.

We were out the other day at the Mid Devon Natural History Society and I attach a couple of photos that one of the members took. Looking at the picture of the Sparrowhawk, you can see why they are among the birds referred to as " broadwings" in falconry. Their deep wings help make them very manouverable.  Somebody said that they reminded them of the wings of the Spitfire fighter plane, which was also very nimble.  This, coupled with their long tails which act as very efficient rudders, mean that the hawks can slalom their way through a forest in pursuit of their prey.

  In addition to the hawks, I took along a selection of creepy-crawlies, courtesy of Joe De Witt Vine who runs Reptobug.   He specialises in kids parties and educational visits where his giant Madagascar hissing cockroaches,  stick insects, snakes etc  always go down a storm. Kides love them. ( The adults, of course, are horrified).  I often take along a selection of his bugs as an interesting aside to the hawks.  I've got used to people assuming that the cockroaches are there as examples of what the hawks eat!

Sparrowhawk pictures

Here are some photos of Artemis ( she's got a name now!) having just enjoyed  a gruesome dinner.
She's now 2 months old and looks almost fully grown-up.  An amazing change from only a few weeks ago.  She's come out with me on all the hawk-walks for the past few weeks, and although she doesn't fly, she  gets lots of experience meeting new people and seeing new sights.  When I leave her in the car, she perches on the steering wheel, much to the amusement of passers-by. Tomorrow, we're off to visit a care home in Taunton to show the residents the birds, then off to the Mid Devon Natural History Society meeting near Tiverton.

Out and about with the hawks.

This is a busy time of year at North Devon Hawk Walks. Since I last posted, we've been to the North Devon show as well as the Mid Devon show. My friend Tom, his wife Sam and baby Daniel ( also known as The Youngest Falconer in Britain) helped me run the stall and display the birds. 

This year, as well as having Lady Macbeth and Cassius the Harris Hawks on hand, we also had the Sparrowhawk and Tom's latest addition, an African Eagle Owl. ( Pictures to follow). The birds were, as always, extremely popular and we spent the entire day on our feet showing them to the crowd around the stall, answering questions and posing them for photographs.  There is something about being close to a bird of prey that appeals to an awful lot of people!

The Sparrowhawk is growing at an alarming rate and has gone from being a ball of fluff to a proper bird in about three weeks. People at the show were amazed that the cute lump of fluff in the photo was the same as the bird standing on my fist.   She doesn't have a name yet, so we invited people to think of a name for her, with a prize of a free hawk walk voucher to the best name. I haven't yet had time to look through the seven pages of suggestions.


The Harris Hawks have been busy over the past weeks introducing people to falconry on Exmoor. It's school holiday time now so lots of children have been getting up close to Cassius, who most agree is a friendly little fellow, and Lady Macbeth who most agree is a lot more aloof, and aware of her own power  and dignity.  That's the trouble with giving animals historic or literary names, they tend to live up to them.

The whole gang can be seen at the tearooms in Withypool on Exmoor, most weekend mornings or lunch times as we wait there to meet customers. I have the Sparrowhawk in her portable nest sitting on one of the outside tables, where she spends her time absorbing new sights and sounds, and giving the local blackbirds and sparrows the evil eye.    It's important for a young falconry bird to be exposed to as much as  possible, in a controlled and safe way, as soon as possible.  That's so that in a couple of months time when we're out hunting she's not going to be scared witless just because she sees a man on a horse, or someone wearing sunglasses or whatever.  It's part of the manning process, and as I said in one of the earlier posts, it never stops.

Sparrowhawk pictures

Life and death.

Rather a pretentious title, but it seems appropriate.

I'm afraid the  buzzard didn't recover, his injuries were just too severe.  In spite of the glucose, anti-biotics and TLC, as well as the help and advice of my vet, he died.  It's sad, but I did the best I could.

 In the wild, something like 40% of all birds of prey die within their first year.  This can be from injury, disease or starvation and the factors can be cumulative. For instance a young bird  loses a few feathers making a bad landing in a tree. This means that it can't quite catch a prey item, which means that it gets a bit weak from lack of food. It picks up an internal parasite from somewhere ( maybe eating carrion), and gets weaker. Because it can't fly fast enough to catch food for itself, it starves or is taken by another predator. A predator has a very precarious existence, in the wild. 

By contrast, a non-predator sometimes seems to have it made. Someone once pointed out to me that   " If you're a herbivore, living somewhere like Exmoor,  the ground is a never-ending platter of food, laid out in front of you".     True enough, I suppose, but not when the ground is three feet deep in snow like it has been for the last couple of winters. 

At the moment, there's no snow, just rain.  I knew Devon was meant to be a bit damp when we moved here three years ago, but I didn't realise just how damn damp.  My car has developed a green mould on the black rubber surround of the windscreen. It's no consolation to know that the summers have been  " unseasonably wet" for the past three years, when you're developing webbed feet.


A week ago today, I picked up our latest recruit.  This is a female sparrowhawk ( in falconry terms,a "spar" , as opposed to a male sparrowhawk, which is a "musket").  She was born on 16th June, and is developing at an astonishing rate.  When I got her, she wasn't able to stand. She learned to do that over just three days and is now happily trotting around. Over the past two days, she's learned to stand on one leg, as hawks do when they are relaxed. She's also learned to scratch her head with one foot, without falling over.  
But the biggest change has been in her appearance. A week ago, she was a ball of white fluff, with a few brown feathers sticking out of one end. Now, her breast feathers have come through while her back and wing feathers seems to grow as you look at them.
This fast development is part of Nature's way of giving the birds as good a start as possible. While they're in the nest, unable to fly, they're extremely vulnerable. She seems to know this at some level and spends most of her waking time plucking at the white down to get rid of it and encourage proper feather growth.

I took her outside today for the first time, to meet some customers on a hawk-walk. The rain held off long enough for us to see some nice flying from Lady Macbeth and Cassius. Additionally, the customers were able to admire the sparrowhawk as she sat in mobile nest on the passenger seat of my car.   One of the customers, Claire, is conservation officer for the British Dragonfly Association.  What a great job!  She's also a keen photographer so hopefully, I'll be posting some of her pictures either on www.NorthDevonHawkWalks.co.uk , or on here.   In the meantime, I attach a few I've taken recently.
Next Saturday, we'll all be at the mid-Devon show, together with my friend Tom and his son Daniel ( also known as the youngest falconer in the UK).  With Daniel in his pram, and the sparrowhawk in her nest, it'll look more like a creche than a falconry stall!

Injured buzzard.

We have a new arrival at North Devon Hawk Walks. (www.NorthDevonHawkWalks.co.uk)  A friend found an injured buzzard by the roadside and brought him to us on Saturday.  He's obviously had a hard life so far.  His left eye is destroyed and he was very weak and wobbly. His feathers are very dishevelled ( always a sign of a bird that is in trouble) and his flight muscles  seem undeveloped.  His one good eye was not big and round as one would expect in a healthy bird, but more slit-like.  That's anothe obvious sign of a bird that is ill or very weak.

He is obviously quite young as he still has the speckled plumage of a juvenile.  That is, one that has not yet been through the moult and grown his adult plumage.  I would guess that he's been injured somehow, and because his eyesight is so impaired, he's had difficulty getting enough to eat.

My friend said that the bird had actually been hit by a motorcycle, but there's no evidence of external injury. His wings and legs appear to be working OK, but he was very, very weak and barely able to stand.

After checking him over, I left him alone in one of the carrying boxes I use for my hawks.  This is a large, light-proof  box.  An injured or sick bird should always be kept warm, dry and undisturbed.  The darker the better, so that the bird feels safe and doesn't get stressed or scared which would only add to it's problems.

So, after consultation with my vet, I began feeding him a glucose solution via a crop-tube.  This is just a syringe of liquid attached to a thin, flexible tube which is passed down the throat and into the bird's crop.  This is not difficult to do, but it needs great care as  it is possible to get liquid into the bird's lungs which is obviously extremely dangerous.

I took him to the vet yesterday ( Monday) who checked him over and gave me some antibiotics to administer in the same way. The eye injury would almost certainly mean that he has got some sort of infection.  His mutes ( that is, his droppings) had quite a lot of green in them, which is a sign of intestinal infection.

He is now much stronger and taking an interest in his surroundings.  He is still refusing to eat solid, or even mashed, food, so we are keeping up the crop-tubing.  He seems very tame, but this is actually a bad sign.  A wild bird should be afraid of humans and if it allows itself to be picked up or handled without protest, it means that the bird is ill and/or weak.  

I hope that after the course of antibiotics, he will be able to tackle solid food. Once he can do that, we'll have to decide whether he is fit enough to be released back into the wild. Buzzards are very common around here, and I suppose, realistically, that one more or less would be no great loss. But if you keep birds of prey, there is something very poignant and touching about comparing your fit, healthy, well-fed birds with something as battered and sorry-looking as an injured wild bird.  There is a great desire to bring the wild creature up to the best condition you can.  We'll certainly do the best we can.

I'll post some pictures soon.

Other news from North Devon Hawk Walks.

Last week, I had a couple of people on one of our Bird of Prey Ownership Courses. ( details on www.NorthDevonHawkWalks.co.uk)  This was Greg and his son Laurence.  They'd been thinking about getting a bird of prey for some time and had done a lot of research and preparation.  They met me in Barnstaple, where the Devon Wildlife group had invited me to take part in their annual show,  and  after meeting Lady Macbeth and Cassius decided to invest in a course.

They did very well during the five days of the course and got a load of hands-on experience which will make them more confident and better able to deal with the practicalities of handling, feeding and training a bird of prey.  When there is only a couple of people to deal with, you can cover a lot of ground, and they were able to pack a lot of learning into the five days. Apart from the handling and manning, they tackled imping, coping,casting, using the creance and recovering the bird from a kill.

The only downside was that they were both considerably better than me at pool and thrashed me in our local pub where we went to celebrate the end of the week.   I hadn't played for twenty years, and I was rubbish then too.

Time to feed the buzzard again.

Mantling.

I thought I'd describe a little of my experience of how the two hawks differ in this regard.  Mantling is when the hawk hides the food or prey by spreading her wings and tail over it.  The idea, of course, is to hide it from other predators. 

When I take people out on Exmoor with North Devon Hawk Walks, I usually end the walk by firing a few heads of quail up into the air for Macbeth to chase, and, usually,  catch.  It's quite spectacular and always gets a cheer from the customers when she catches it in mid-air.  There's a lot going on when she chases it.  She has to work out when it is going to stop going up and start coming down, she has to allow for the wind strength and direction blowing it, and her, around.  She flies upwards, with her head well back, looking upwards. When she has got close enough to it, she flips up and back, so that she is almost standing on her tail in the air, and grabs at it with her claw.  If she misses it, she turns into a corkscrew dive to try and catch it up.  Quite spectacular as I say.

Anyway, once she's eaten the head ( which is about the size of the top joint of my thumb), her behaviour changes remarkably.  Up  until that point she has been coming to the customer's fist for a small piece of meat ( rabbit or quail), eating it on the fist and then usually hopping or flying off.  While crunching up a quail head, she will mantle as though her life depended upon it. When she's finished eating it, she is quite aggressive to any move being made towards her upon the glove, but only for about thirty seconds.  After that she calms down and she's back to her normal self.

I think the blood, brains and bone in the quail head cause adrenaline to be released in Macbeth's blood stream and this  triggers the mantling and possessiveness. ( Sorry to be so gory).

Just lately she has not been catching the heads and seems to be not quite so hell-for-leather chasing them.  I think she's worked out that what goes up, must come down, and all she has to do is mark where it lands.  The mantling and possessiveness is still there, but the flight is not nearly so exciting. I think I'll have to find a way of making it impossible for her to get the head without catching it in mid-air.  Not sure how.   In fact, I've no idea how !

Cassius, being a lot younger, is not nearly so successful at catching the heads but he is still very excited about the whole game and gives it his best shot. But,  no mantling. He's just his normal, placid self. People are sometimes surprised by how different the personalities of the two hawks are, they expect one bird to be pretty much the same as the other,  as I've described, they're not  !