Falconry Displays

Sadly no news of my missing falcon Jarvis. It is now 2 weeks since she was lost and I am still waiting for the phone call saying ‘please come and get your falcon’. Of course as the days go by I increasingly doubt whether we will see her again. Having said that one year I lost a Sparrowhawk just before Christmas and I picked it up at Cheltenham Race Course at Easter and amazingly it still came into the lure – but would not let me pick her up. Instead I grabbed her off a branch in the dead of night while she was roosting. The whole story is recorded in an earlier blog. So with Jarvis one lives in hope rather than expectation.

Of course the whole way round I was remembering my own words from my book ‘Falconry – aspects of care of the trained falcon and hawk’ and wondering whether I would need to update it from my latest experience – but I think not. It states both the challenges of getting a lost bird back – trying not to lose it in the first place – what to do if you get the bird back ( learning from it) and of course the anguish and heart ache involved and not to lose confidence. Jarvis is the first bird I have lost since 2019 when we lost Brian a really top quality lanneret at a Show in Windsor – the pain does not get any less.

Anyway today I have started flying Frank my lanneret again which I really found uplifting. Of course not only did we lose Jarvis but the transmitter she was wearing – this will need to be replaced when we start flying ‘Sprite’ our peregrine again in a couple of weeks. I saw a beautiful wild female peregrine above our house on Saturday – she was magnificent.

I used a smaller 2 stage Merlin transmitter on Frank. I tested out how long it would run on new batteries and it was  about 3/4 days. I was disappointed with the performance of the transmitter on Jarvis as it seems to run down very quickly on barely used batteries – maybe in its defence it got wet – the falcon may have spent part of the night on the ground in a flooded corn field – or it just got wet anyway because it rained all night. This is not an excuse because I found Jarvis 5 or 6 times with the system – before she ranged away – I just could not call her down. One of the problems of flying a bird in very high condition when something goes wrong – as it clearly did in this case.

We are minding a old sports car at the moment and driving it a couple of times a week – in the dry – just to keep it running while its owner is away. We took it up to Tewkesbury and as we left the M5 at junction 11 we saw a buzzard hunting from a motorway overhead light. We managed to get a photo of it from a funny angle – it underlines how successful they have become catching anything from earthworms to seagulls as the mood takes them. We have even had them hunting in our back gardens and they well deserve their original name because of their ubiquitous nature of Common Buzzard. Anyway here is the photo.