New Old Bird

     Petrie's back!
     I trapped him yesterday. It was amazing to watch. He's developed this serious stooping style of hunting. I watched him attack a magpie a couple of weeks ago and he repeatedly dive-bombed it with vertical stoops, then a sharp throw-up and a vertical climb, then he'd flip himself over and stoop again. He used this same tactic on the sparrow in the Bal-Chatri.
     He was on a powerline a ways up a loooong driveway. I dropped the BC about 15 feet up the driveway and he was probably another 45 feet from that. I (on my bike) pulled out of the driveway and around some bushes. He noticed the trap quickly, but waited for a couple of minutes to go for it. He swept in with a smooth glide from his spot on the line, then angled downward and made his first stoop. He stooped at it a few times, making U shapes in the air. Then he hovered about a foot over it, before bailing and going back to the line. He landed closer to the trap than he was at first, and after a couple of minutes he did the whole routine again. Stoop, climb, stoop, climb, stoop, climb, hover, bail. He landed just a few feet away on a fence post. There he waited for several minutes. He made one more try, only to land on another post after a short hover. Then quickly, he turned around and hit the trap. I watched until I saw his angry wings flapping around, then sped my bike over to collect him. It was fantastic.
     I got him to my house, where I weighed him and called my sponsor. He weighed 112.5 at trapping. The first time I trapped Petrie he weighed 100 on the dot. I have my doubts that this is Petrie, because anything could have happened since I released him last spring. But this bird looks about the right age, and I've never seen another kestrel in that field in all the time I've lived here. Still unsure, I refer to him as "Little King".
     I keep him hooded an socked until my sponsor gets to my house. We start to jess him up, but realize that she's forgotten her grommet setters at her house, and I don't have any. So we take Little King back to her house, where she's got her imprint male kestrel, Anakin. He churrups for food as soon as he sees us and Little King squirms in my hand.
     Anakin goes outside to weather and Monica and I get the anklets and jesses on this new bird. I unhood him there. He flaps and flails and bates, but tames down quickly and I soon realize that it is, in fact, Petrie. In the while that he's been a wild bird, he's learned to bite and not let go. He catches my finger and I have to pull his beak out, ripping my skin. Oh, well.
     Two hours later, he is standing fairly calmly on the fist and just starting to regain the glove after a bate. Monica has somewhere to be, so I hood him, which is no simple affair (like it used to be). He's convinced he's dead now, and won't stand upright, so he rides home laying on his back in my lap.
     We spend the rest of the day manning and hood training. He eats some sparrow from off the fist. I still refer to him as Little King, although I know that, yes, this is Petrie.
     I don't know if I'll let him go again.

Yes, I'm still here

     Hey, guys. Nothing's really been going on lately. My sponsor has been sick, so we haven't gone trapping again. I'm just living the birdless life. It sucks. I don't understand how normal people do this for years on end.
     I've been keeping an eye on Petrie. He's still in that field down the road from my house. Guess what that field will be this time next year. A subdivision. "Progress". I just don't have the words or motivation to explain my feelings towards this. Humankind is stupid in so many ways. I really want to trap Petrie, now.

Falconry: from study to ... umm, what were we doing here again?

Time for another sporadic update.
A few days after the last post I free flew CeCe for the first time and it went great, but after four total weeks of working with her she was chased of by a pair of wild kestrels during anti carrying training.
My next kestrel was named Petrie, and he was so fantastic that I couldn't believe it. He was super good with people and loved me. It was because he was trapped as a fairly young bird compared to CeCe and he may have imprinted on me a bit. We wrapped up the season with 9 kills, all of them rodents, which was more than my sponsor had between her first two kestrels so I'm pretty happy. And his first kill - a vole - he got on my birthday. But as the season came to an end I was having less and less time to fly Petrie, and he, in result, was becoming more and more dependent on me. I was planning on another month or two with him, but his freeloading spirit got to me and I cut him loose one sunny morning after a week of fattening him up. I'll probably go more in-depth about my journey with him later, assuming I don't let another six months pass between posts again. But for now, some pictures from his release:

Removing the anklets

Eating a final meal

Still connected...

Last goodbye

Away he flew