Golden eagle and peregrine fitness training

We know Roy enjoys playing with big boys toys, but with his latest bit of kit he really is taking the mick. We're going to fly a kite. No, not a red one, but a yellow and blue one. And the reason is we're training his young peregrine, the Dude, to increase his pitch and his strength. Training falcons with kites started in the USA. With their vast open plains, some of the birds are now achieving heights of 2,000 feet. Roy is looking for about 1,000 feet from the Dude eventually and today it will be more like 500. Many years ago I used to do a lot of kite training and I found myself going back to playing with balls of string and big toys and basically what we do is we put the kite up on a line and we dangle the lure from the line which is on a detachable mechanism so when the bird goes up to it the lure detaches and it follows back down or the lure comes back down the string with the falcon attached. And basically what we're trying to do is one build fitness with the falcon because it's quite hard work for him to go up to it and two we're trying to encourage him that height is a good thing above us. So then what we do once he realises that he can go up and he's got the strength to make a good height above us then we start going out and we start trying to find game for him to fly on. So we'll get him up and then we start looking for coveys of partridges to flush underneath him. Pete takes the kite to the top of the hill. We're a bit nervous because the wind is much stronger up there. We could risk losing the kite. Before the kite is released Roy attaches the lure. What we've got here is a clip that fits onto the main line so that should run back down towards us. It runs quite freely and we've got a little rig here that attaches on with a pressure release clip so it just attaches onto the main ring underneath the kite and what we're hoping will happen is as the falcon takes the lure it pulls down on here and just pulls the clip off allowing the lure and the falcon to come down the line back towards us. Three, two, one, go. With the kite airborne the dude is brought out for his exercise. So what we're going to do now is just go back a little bit just so as you can see the kite up there and you'll notice hopefully if he's going to do what he should do as I take the hood off he'll just look around a little bit, look up to the kite, realise the lure is there and hopefully he'll be off and starting to mount on his way up there. So as long as no pigeons flush as he's on his way we should be all right. The dude makes good progress and reaches the kite in less than a minute. He attacks the lure once, twice and then gets a good grip and descends with his prize. So how does Roy rate his performance? Yes that was ok, he did well on that, he mounted quite nicely so we'll just ask him to step off of there and he gets the rest of his grub and a nice successful training session for the afternoon. So that tied you out a little bit. Not too bad though, I thought he was going to be panting a lot more after working himself like that, but he did well. So hopefully another week and he'll be up around about 1,000 feet and then we can start introducing him to game. So that's when it really gets fun. With the dude's training over it's time for a few quick training flights with Pete's golden eagle Merlin. The fox lure is dragged behind the 4x4 and Merlin pumps after his quarry. After a couple of successful runs the peregrine, the golden eagle and the kite are all packed away for another day's fun.