Catching a Hawk For Falconry!

Today we are going to do a video about trapping hawks for falconry. Falconry is an ancient relationship between a bird of prey and a human, working together as hunting partners. In the United States, falconry is carefully regulated and you must have all the necessary licenses and permits before acquiring a bird of prey. In the U.S., you can trap a young bird of prey from the wild to be used in falconry. Since roughly 90% of all young birds die in their first year of life, trapping a young bird has basically no effect on the wild population, and is in fact likely saving the bird from an early death. Okay, so here's the trap set up. So we got these little bait birds in the middle, bouncing around in this cage. They are nice and safe, so if the hawk comes down, he can land on top of this, but he can't hurt the birds. They're just here to get his attention. Now, you see this big bow? That is a net that's set up so that when we pull this line, if you notice, we got the line set up here, and the line goes all the way back to where John's standing. We pull this string, the nail slides through the hole in the leather, and this net is released, and there are springs down here that spring that net forward and it closes. So when we give that string a pull, snap, it goes down, and the hawk should be right here in the middle, roughly somewhere in here, where it's nice and safe from the swinging objects, and that's how they get tangled. So we spotted one of the birds. We're waiting. Hopefully, she'll come in. Got the bait all set up. She's just sitting up there in the tree. We saw another one by her a moment ago, but it left. We don't know where it went. Fingers crossed they come over here and check it out. I don't know that she could even see it that tree. Yeah, looks like it's right in her plane of view. One eternity later. We were having a problem with the bait bird sitting still and not drawing enough attention from the hawk, so I attached a line to the bait cage so I could make the cage move, thus encouraging the bait birds to run around so the hawk is more likely to notice them. We finally got one guys. Pretty exciting. Check out this little guy here. This shows you just how bad I am at multitasking. Silly me, trying to hold a hawk while I'm filming. When I re-watched this video, I just had to cringe when I saw his tail feathers pushed up against my stomach. I'm risking a bent tail feather the way I'm holding this bird. Bending or breaking a tail feather doesn't really cause any pain or harm to the bird, but it's a big pet peeve among falconers, as damaged plumage is a sign of possible carelessness on the part of the falconer, and it can affect the bird's performance while hunting. We're gonna put a hood on him. What this little hood does is it covers his eyes so he can't see and allows him to calm down. Without being able to see, it helps them to relax. So I've got his feet secure here so he doesn't grab us with those little sharp claws. They're honestly not too bad if they grab you, but you'd rather not have holes poked in you. A small bird like this, though, it's not too bad. But yeah, pretty exciting, huh? Man, it's been a while since I've caught a hawk, guys. That's kind of fun. It's been a few years. He's just hanging out here. Now we're gonna restrain him in a little nylon sock, and that will allow us to just kind of leave him chilling. We got him set up in this sock, and this breathes so he doesn't get overheated at all. It keeps him from flapping and hurting the feather. It looks uncomfortable to us, but to him, this is the most comfortable way to lay right after being caught. Let's him relax as best as he could in such a stressful situation. Okay, so this is a male Cooper's hawk. What would they consider it? I would consider this to be a brancher. So this is a bird that is still under the care of its parents. We've been observing the parents bringing small birds in and dropping them for them. I don't believe that these have actually caught game on their own based upon the behavior that we've observed. So Josh Card likes to call these guys family birds. Ben used that term just today. I don't know that Josh came up with it or not, but that's what the term that Josh likes to use, family birds. So they're a little older than a brancher. Branchers are a little more helpless, and the family birds are just at the stage where they maybe caught stuff but probably didn't, but they're getting close. Anyway, you could break it into a hundred different categories I'm sure. Yeah, well one of the first things that we do when we catch one is we check the health of the bird. So things like looking at the health of its scales and the health of its feet, and we check the pads to see what condition that they're in, and we can see that this one has eaten recently. It's got some blood stains there. He's gonna get some more blood stains on his hand Yeah, you gotta be real careful. Keep poking those talons. Yeah, so you want to look at even the most inner part to make sure that they're all in good health. We check their tail to make sure that they don't have broken feathers, and this one looks like it's in perfect condition. One of the ways we can tell that this is a young bird other than the observations that we've had is the coloration. This is brown and gray, and the parents are actually a slate blue on the back and kind of an orangish striped on the front. Yeah, they're really pretty birds, and their eyes turn red as they mature. If you look at their toes, they've got some interesting toes. They got this one thick toe on the inside where it's short and stubby, and they got a big old claw on it, and I don't know the technical term for it. I always called it the kill claw. Yeah, the kill toe. This one is for penetration. If you think about it, so birds have, um, birds of prey, when they've got long old toes like this, it's kind of like a catcher's mitt. It gives them a bigger like net to catch stuff with. If you think of it like that, like a net, like a fisherman's net, a bigger net, you got more area to catch stuff with. If you think of a catcher's mitt, it gives you more area for the ball to hit. So that gives them, when they're hunting birds, a lot of the bird hawks tend to have these long old toes so that they could snatch stuff out of the air. However, those long old toes don't have the power, a short fat little claw. So a lot of birds that hunt mammals and stuff, they have all short stubby toes, and they need that power to just hang on to that mammal or crush it before it bites them. Once they catch it, they're not a falcon. The falcons have a little notch in their beak for biting down and breaking the neck of their prey. If you notice, this hawk does not have that. It's because he's a hawk, he's an accipiter, he's not a falcon. They don't have that little kill notch in their beak. So they can't just reach down and break the neck of the bird they catch. So what they do is they have this kill toe. So they've got the rest of their toes, they're long for catching that flying bird, and then they got this one toe that's just got all the power and that they can sink into the bird and kind of help to dispatch it. And the reality is these accipiters are not good at dispatching stuff, and if they catch anything very big, they literally just pluck it so that it won't fly away. If it does happen to get away, well it's alive, and then they slowly eat it to death. Now in falconry, you know, we have control of the situation. We want to prevent the poor animal from suffering any more than necessary. And so as soon as we catch it, or our hawk catches something, we'll make in as quietly and carefully as possible, but quickly as possible, so that we can dispatch the bird or whatever it is they happen to catch, maybe they caught a bunny. Whereas big cats and mink, members of the weasel family, they're very efficient killers, extremely efficient killers. Certain animals like canines and accipiters are not. They're very, very slow, inefficient killers. I'm planning on continuing this little thing. We're going to show some of the process of taming him, training him, and eventually hunting with him. That's the hope to keep this not just a one-time video, that you guys can see the process as he learns and grows to be a falconry bird. So we've got him all set up with his new equipment. And he's still got the hood on to help keep him calm. We've got some new little bracelets here. Those things are called anklets. You see you got this little part that attaches to his leg. Don't flip me buddy. Then you've got this other part right here called a jess, this little jess. This is what you hold. So if he was sitting on your glove, we'll show you in a minute, you can hold on to these straps. You can take them off and he can fly without the jess. Or you can fly with them. It just depends on where you're at with your bird, what you're doing, things like that. But it gives you the option. You can take them off if they get worn now or while you're hunting if you don't want those dangling. And this swivel keeps them from getting tangled up. And attached to the swivel is the leash. And you tie this leash down here to the bottom of the perch to this ring. Now you'll see this this funny green stuff up here called astroturf. And what it's for is for comfort of their feet. It's got a texture to it. It's not all just one uniform flat soft object. And it's not hard. So if it's hard, and it's uniform, it can create little calluses on their feet from standing in the same position all day long. And that can that can eventually grow into a sore and create what's called bumblefoot. And it's smooth around the edge here. So if the bird baits or tries to fly, this doesn't get tangled. So you don't want this to get caught over the perch and him to kind of hang upside down. So you want it to to be able to move smoothly if he tries to fly away, which in falconry terms is called baiting. He's going to try and get a step back up here on his glove. There he goes. Good job little man. So now the first thing you do after getting the equipment on is you want to weigh the bird. And we have with his equipment on 337 grams. Yep, that's with the hood and everything, the hood and all the equipment. So if you wanted his true weight, you could also subtract the hood or whatever equipment you're not going to always weigh him with. So you might wonder why we're weighing him. And that's the reason for the weight is so we know where he's at body condition wise. If he gets too heavy, if he has too much fat on him, he won't respond to training. He won't really want to hunt either. He'll just want to sit around and be lazy. If he is too low in body fat, then he's desperate and obviously not as physically fit as he could be. And so catching prey is going to be hard because he's weak and it's just not ideal. Obviously you want them to stay in the optimum condition, just enough fat that they're healthy and strong, but not so much fat that they're lazy and sleepy. The only way to, not the only way, but the most accurate way of determining their body fat is by weighing them on a regular basis and taking note of their reaction. If they're reacting very slowly, very casually eating, not very super interested at a certain weight, they're not super interested in food, excuse me, at a certain weight, then you drop that way a little bit and see how their reaction changes. If they become a little sharper, then you drop the way a little more until they're at the appropriate sharpness level. And then you can also notice when you've gone backwards, maybe you've lost, the birds lost a little bit too much weight and they're not as strong or they're a little too desperate for food. Or sometimes they'll get lazy because of the low body fat. Accipiters oftentimes get a little crazy when they're too low, but other birds of prey will often get lazier. So they'll have their optimum where they're going really hard after prey, and then they'll get lazier again. And so, you know, Hey, he's a lower weight. He's not lazy because he's fat. So if you didn't weigh him and you weren't watching the weight, you wouldn't know, Hey, he's not lazy. Cause he's fat. He's lazy. Cause he's weak. You've to know these things. And the best way to know that is you can actually use the numbers on the scale. You say, Hey, he's lower than he was when he was working perfectly. He's not too fat. He's probably a little too skinny. And then you can correct things. So it takes the guesswork out of it. In addition to thinking John Briggs for allowing me to tag along while he trapped his hawk. I would also like to thank Ben Woodruff for letting me use some of his falconry footage for this video. If you'd like to learn more details about falconry, there'll be a link in the description below for Ben's channel.