Day 7

     We did indoor ten foot flight to the fist today. He was really paying attention and nearly immediate with his responses. I started hiding the tidbit in the glove, then handing it to him when he landed. This should cement the reward system with the glove and teach him to look forward to my approaching hand. It's already working. His response time didn't slow at all the first time I asked him to come without showing him a tidbit.
     He sits all puffed out all the time now, rouses, and preens. He'll sit with a foot tucked sometimes too, even on the fist. In fact, on the fist was the first time that he stood like that. He sleeps headless, too. He keeps at biting his jesses and bating, though. It's just because Petrie's a really high energy bird. I assume he will calm down once we really start flying. If not, walks in the morning and flights in the afternoon should keep him calm at home.
     He lets me touch his feet and tarsi now, and doesn't mind too much when I touch his sides. He looks for tidbits when he sees my bare hand coming.
     He doesn't take the hood really well yet, but I can get it on him. I may use his meal tomorrow to tidbit him during hood training. If not we will move outside. It depends on the weather tomorrow, because it's been rainy a bit lately.
     On a slightly unrelated note, I started drivers ed and will finally get my license in June next year. This will make falconry so much easier and up my chances of getting a cooper's hawk next July.
     Wish me luck, and happy hunting!

Day 3

     Petrie is falling back into the swing of being a falconry bird. He hopped to the fist today! He jumped about 5 times from 6-18 inches inside at 100g.
     This is about the part where I start beating up on myself for letting this blog lapse the whole time I had Petrie last year. We had some of the greatest days last year, and I don't have them in this record.
     Our best hunting day last year, we'd just gotten permission to hunt on this local dairy farm. We were over there in a spot where they used to store hay bales, but they'd used them all at this point. There were still little clumps of hay lying around everywhere and a tarp crumpled and lying off to the side. And there were mice everywhere. These particular mice had gotten very good at hiding from predators in the little hay clumps and very bad at running, so when I flushed them, Petrie was on them in seconds. He caught 6 or 7 mice. I lost track; it was that good. Unfortunately, Petrie was good at carrying these small prey items, so he'd pick them up and head off with them. Fortunately, he was so lazy that he wouldn't want to bother breaking into them, so he'd just drop them and come back to me for easier food. After he'd caught several, I was chasing one down with him on my fist (more like following it because it was so fat and slow) and I tried to step right in front of it and make it double-back toward Petrie. But instead I accidentally stepped on its head. So, I just stuck it in the hawking bag.
     Anyway, here's the video of Petrie's first hop to the fist!

First Free Flight

     I free flew Bellatrix for the first time today. It was super nerve-wracking. We started on the creance doing 40+ foot flights to the fist. She was coming immediately at 108g, which is a little higher than normal but she was acting hungry enough to fly. I set her up on the shed for a couple of flights so she had to come down to the fist. She was hesitant, but she did it twice. The third time she went onto the peak of the shed and didn't pay me any attention, so I used the creance to slide her off. She landed on the ground then came to the fist from there. We did a few more 40ft flights from the training perch and she was doing really really well, so I started thinking about free flights. \ I've been super nervous to free fly her because sometimes she just tries to fly off, but this time she was returning consistently to the training perch, so I held my breath and unclipped her jesses. I set her on the training perch, then slowly stood up and slipped about 20 feet away. Tidbit, glove up, whistle. She came immediately. I only had three more tidbits left, but they were smaller so I piled them all up on the glove and called her again. She was immediate and ate calmly while I clipped her back onto the glove.
     Now shes sitting on the screen perch all fluffed up and one-footed with one eye closed, so I'd say it went really well.