Well, the rare times I’ve come across this, it seems to be a feeling that keeping a healthy bird of prey for any reason is ethically wrong. I don’t really know though, it’s not something we’ve really discussed… just a feeling a few of them give off. Disapproval.
Arion is beautiful and looks more than a little bad ass in those photos!
I went for a “hawk walk” several years ago when I was visiting England. I think we flew a Harris hawk. We walked along a creek while the bird would fly from tree to tree periodically popping by when we had a snack for him (tiny piece of meat). It was interesting to see how the bird could maneuver through the trees. He wore bells but had learned to tuck them up, so he was pretty quiet. I was amazed at how they can drop straight down onto the glove (the bird just dropped out of the sky and landed light as can be–or so it looked). Amazing animals.
How much does your bird eat? The bird I took on the walk didn’t catch anything, so he got a dead baby chick (chicken) at the end of the walk. Then he went to a quiet place to digest it. Didn’t seem like a lot for a day’s work, but he wasn’t a large bird.
I’m very interested by falconry, but for various reasons (time, mostly) unable to own one. I have a friend who’s a serious falconer; I go out hunting with him perhaps a half-dozen times a year. I’ve been doing this off and on for more than 20 years - it’s a great way to learn about and enjoy the sport without the necessarily ferocious time commitment.
Falconers tend to be supportive of those interested in their hobby, so if you find a local one it shouldn’t be hard to get invited to go along.
BTW, NajaNivea’s information in this thread is absolutely spot-on. It’s interesting to note that falconers are mostly male - I doubt women make up even 10% of the participants. (I’m told that among bird rehabbers, the percentages are the other way around.)
He definitely looks like a western bird. Eastern redtails nearly always have a mostly light breast with a “belly band” of dark across it.
Wow, NajaNivea, thanks for such a detailed and incredible post! Sorry I didn’t rely to it sooner. I love the idea of volunteering at a rehab place, and it turns out there are a couple within a few hours drive. It’ll be a while before I can get to one, but I’m looking forward to it. I doubt I’ll ever have the dedication to be as involved as you have to be, but I’d like to get as involved as I can.
I’ve always been fascinated by birds and wanted a pet bird as a kid (but my mom was opposed to keeping birds as pets). A few years ago I saw the incredible movie Kiran Over Mongolia about a teenager in Mongolia learning the traditional Kazak practice of hunting with golden eagles. And then recently the North American Falconers Association held there national convention in my town. Unfortunately they did it over Thanksgiving, and so I missed it, but would have loved to have gone. Seeing this thread made me think . . . .
Thanks, he is gorgeous, it’s true!* He’s also very suspicious of that camera.
I love Harris Hawks. A former falconry Harris’ named Rosa that I knew at the California Raptor Center is one of the major reasons I went on to become a falconer. She was surly as all hell, but we were pals. After I left I ended up getting a huge Harris tattooed on the back of my right shoulder as part of an elaborate backpiece. They’re amazing birds. They’re called the wolves of the sky, because they hunt in packs. There was a nice national geo. special a while back on them, if you ever get a chance to catch it.
That behavior, following along from tree to tree, is called “waiting on”, where the bird is following the falconer, in position to take the slip if you should kick up some prey.
He seems to maintain weight with around a half a quail a day, or around 1.6-1.8 ounces of cottontail or nutria, but feeding is a whole art unto itself. The amount depends on a lot of factors including the type of food, the weather, how hard you’re flying them, the species of bird and the individual. It dropped below freezing the other night and he lost two full ounces in twelve hours. For a 28 oz bird, that’s a significant drop. This feeding thing is completely nerve wracking.
*I may be biased on this subject.
Cheers 
It’s a neat experience, for sure. At the CRC I handled everything from teentsy little burrowing owls to bald and golden eagles, and everything in between. With falconry you’re limited to a pretty narrow range of traditional species, but there I was able to handle harriers, kites, one of only a small handful of spotted owls in captivity in the world along with a bunch of other owl species, and turkey vultures, which are the greatest, along with the traditional falconry birds. I highly recommend the experience.
I’d not heard of that movie, thanks so much for the heads-up! I’d also love to make it to the NAFA meet some time–maybe next year I’ll even be able to bring a bird.
In a perverse way I’m glad you didn’t come. I’d be kicking myself for missing it even more if I found out I could have met an awesome fellow Doper! 
It’s that fighter-jet metabolism they have - whoever said “eats like a bird” to mean “eats very little” clearly was never responsible for feeding a bird. Of any sort.
The fact you know these weights so precisely tells me you much weight your bird and his food regularly.
No kidding.
Right now I’m weighing him obsessively several times a day while I’m gathering information on how he burns fuel and learning the fine art of feeding a falconry hawk. For an amateur, the line between “combat weight” and “dead” can be perilously thin, so I weigh him first thing in the morning, immediately before we fly, immediately after we fly, and sometimes right before bed if his weight is low. I weigh his food as I measure it out, then weigh whatever is left if he doesn’t finish it all. I also keep a log of all these numbers, plus notes on the workouts and the weather in my hawking journal to help me track weight patterns and trends.
After some experience I won’t need to be so hyper-vigilant,* but for now it’s… completely nerve-wracking.
*and then I’ll start working with a different bird and have to learn it all over again. Hooray!
I have it somewhat easier, in that my birds are indoor animals protected from the extremes that would make them burn fuel even faster, and because of the very different relationship we leave food available to them almost all the time, but we still have to watch their weight, check to make sure they’re eating, track what they’re eating… parrots being flock animals, they’ll completely hide evidence of illness or distress until they are near death to keep the rest of the flock from harassing them, or predators from picking them out for a meal. Even if they could talk to you about it they never would. Weight loss or failure to eat adequately may be the only warning we get they’re ill.
The other problem is traveling - when we travel we take them with us, and the stress can put them off their appetite for a day, may expose them to colder than usual temperatures, make them skip their mid-day nap… we try to condition our birds early in life to travel and maintain a “travel routine” so it’s not completely foreign to them (thank goodness they’re so trainable), but as you point out, birds can drop weight amazingly fast. They might live on goodies for a couple days just so we can get them to eat adequate calories even if it’s not ideal nutrition. For a few days, getting food of any sort into them might be more important than perfect food. They have a good diet, having less than perfect food for a few days won’t hurt them as much as starving will.
Actually, some of our birds have LOVED to travel. Some don’t. But they all do so whether they like it or not.
Then we have issues like with Sydney the past few days - he’s being anti-social and squabbling with the other birds, but he’s eating well. We suspect he’s starting a molt (he’s about due for one) but we’re still checking him several times a day just to be sure. Of course, a molting bird doesn’t want to be bothered much, but tough - he has the privilege of living safe from predators and not having to search for his food and being warm in the winter, this is the downside. The humans will insist on keeping him healthy no matter how grumpy he is about it.
I’m guessing that a bird being flown to hunt encounters quite a bit of stress. The bird can handle it, of course, they do so in the wild after all (usually), but someone observant can see the signs of it. I’ve always suspected, though, that one of the reasons hawks return to the falconers is that they do get secure shelter and, when the hunt is bad, something to eat.
The other thing I’ve learned from keeping birds is that they are all very much distinct personalities. I see no reason why hawks (and other raptors) would be different.
But - another question. How do you weigh your bird? We use a postal scale for most of ours (when we can get them to stand still) but yours looks a bit big for that. What sort of set up do you use?
Are hunting ferrets like the kind people keep as pets/companions, or is there a distinction between hunter and house weasels? A friend of mine used to have a half dozen of them – they were very cute but also nippy and squirrely and used to swipe all sorts of stuff – socks, scarves, hacky sacks, lighters, and two $20 bills --and stash it behind furniture.
Actually, a postal scale with an astroturf surface. Some folks use lab scales, but a postal scale is a tenth the cost and just as accurate for my needs. They just need to be set up in such a way that they can stand on it without their tail resting on the table. I’ve got mine set up on blocks for this because I use the same scale to weigh packages, but some people build perches on the scale itself for the bird to stand on.
They’re trained to step off the glove, onto the scale and stand still for weighing. Mine knows food or flying always immediately follow being weighed, so sometimes I have to stop him from hopping off the glove and to the scale before I’m ready to weigh him.
I imagine they’re one and the same, though folks using them for hunting keep and breed them specifically for hunting, so they are almost certainly raised or kept differently. I honestly don’t know much about it other than the very basics, but would be happy to ask around for you and see what other information I might come up with. I’m looking into importing one of the Mediterranean sighthound breeds as a falconry dog and will ask more about ferret use; those folks have been running ferrets and dogs after rabbits for centuries.
Yup! That looks like the guy I saw.
How often do you have to exercise your bird? Do they need to fly everyday? Do they get stir crazy if they don’t get adequate out time (like horses and dogs)? If they’re not out flying, do they need mental stimulation (toys, etc.) or are they content to hang out and sleep?
Also, how far away from you does your bird go when you take him out? Do you lose sight of him? If so, how do you call him back?
I try to fly him every single day, rain or shine, unless it’s a torrential downpour or 30mph winds or something. Four times a week is absolute minimum outside the moulting season. They don’t really get stir-crazy; in the wild they more or less simply sit in one spot all day, waiting for their next meal to come along. If there’s a plentiful supply of food there and no one bigger chases them out, they’ll sit in the same area and often the exact same spot for their whole life, only leaving at dusk to roost and coming back at dawn. If you live in an area where red tailed hawks are plentiful, keep an eye out on the tops of telephone poles–you’ll see the same birds returning to the same spots, day after day.
Toys hold no interest for them, though they like to bathe. They really are just like little, feathered hunting machines.
Mostly he just sits on one of the window perches you see in the photos and watches the world or sleeps. He might mix it up by moving to another perch once in a while, if he’s feeling like a real party animal.
Red tails hunt low and close, so I’ll find a likely area, such as a hedgerow of blackberry brambles with a row of telephone poles nearby, take off his leash and swivel, and cast him up to the nearest pole. I’ll walk along, beating the brush with a walking stick and generally making a bunch of noise, hoping to scare up a bunny. He’ll follow me by flying from pole to pole as I walk along, staying just in front of me. Some people will do what’s called “soar hawking” where they put their RTH up into a soar and hunt them similar to longwings, but this is risky and less efficient, though it does look neat and sometimes is necessary depending on the terrain you’re hunting.
The longwings, falcons, on the other hand, are put up into a soar and will climb to a thousand or fifteen hundred feet. You wait until they’re way up before flushing the ducks or whatever you’re hunting, and they stoop to the prey.
It’s common to lose sight of a falcon, though not as much with the buteos simply because of the style of hunting. Either way, you call them back with a whistle or sometimes, visually, with a lure if he’s being stubborn.
I seriously can’t understand how one can love something that doesn’t return that love.
Oh, I’ve loved a couple cars I’ve owned, and I love my house, my country (not neccessarily the govt.), and animals in general. But not in the same way I’ve loved cats and dogs who shared my life. I even love my grand-puppies :). That love is very close to how I feel about people I love.
So, I love that beautiful Harris Hawk in a general way, but I wouldn’t feel happy (or unhappy) to find him there when I come home from work. No more so than that “I’m home” feeling when I walk through the front door.
I sure hope I don’t seem mean, or cold, or uncaring, because I’m not. I simply don’t understand.
Peace,
mangeorge
I seriously can’t understand how one can love something that doesn’t return that love.
Oh, I’ve loved a couple cars I’ve owned, and I love my house, my country (not neccessarily the govt.), and animals in general. But not in the same way I’ve loved cats and dogs who shared my life. I even love my grand-puppies :). That love is very close to how I feel about people I love.
So, I love that beautiful Harris Hawk in a general way, but I wouldn’t feel happy (or unhappy) to find him there when I come home from work. No more so than that “I’m home” feeling when I walk through the front door.
I sure hope I don’t seem mean, or cold, or uncaring, because I’m not. I simply don’t understand.
Peace,
mangeorge
Much the same way I feel about anime fans!