Falconry Displays

Have not posted for a while – Christmas and the New Year and so on – but I would like to wish everyone all the best for the year ahead.

I have continued to fly the birds everyday and we are in the shadow of bird flu which seems practically everywhere. It is now endemic and an all year round problem. We are able to – with sensible precautions – to exercise our birds for one hour per day. The two lanners that I am flying do not range away, are not hunting birds and do wear telemetry just in case. But hunting birds like Harris hawks it is more difficult for obvious reasons. Thankfully I do not have that problem but with the lack of rabbits – due to yet another virus – accentuates the problem still further of staying away from game birds or water fowl.

Hopefully conditions will ease into the new year. Sprite our peregrine is having a rest to finish off his moult. I have described in earlier blogs that after our Autumn holiday with additional food and the comfort of the loft Sprite made up for lost time and starting moulting very heavily. So I left him lofted.

I noticed we had a leak in his loft roof so I put Sprite on a block for a few days while I repaired it and also took the opportunity to do some general maintenance. With cold weather returning I put sprite back in his loft yesterday as shown in the picture below.

He is a grand bird. It is unbelievable that he is still in moult in January – although with only one primary to go that is almost fully down he is almost done. Hopefully he will be flying again in a couple of weeks.

We had a trip out to the Malvern Hills yesterday for a walk. We saw a lovely Kestrel hovering on Worcester Beacon. It was a real treat – I love Kestrels – and it did not seem to mind a fair number of walkers milling around. It just got on with the job of quartering the grassy bracken slope below looking for rodents.

Anyway here is a picture of the hovering kestrel and a further picture showing the ridge or spine of the Malvern Hills. It was a lovely afternoon.

Just before I sign off my book ‘Falconry – aspects of care of the trained falcon and hawk’ is still very much on sale almost everywhere including  Amazon but also Coch-Y-Bonddu Books who stock it for those people looking for a ‘How to’ book on falconry. It is based on 50 years of bird of prey daily care.

Happy New Year.