quiet week

It has been over a week since i last posted on the blog. The days go so quickly.

Things have been quite quiet with just bookings at the centre and not much out at different locations but July is always a bit like that.

The birds we are flying at the moment is changing. We have stopped flying Sanda the Lanner Falcon and Gigha the Peregrine Falcon so they can have a moult. Gigha need in badly as he is missing 3 tail feathers out of 12. We have also stopped flying Oran a Harris Hawk. He has been flying for about 10 - 11 months doing events and activity days. He has been great fun to fly over the months and always very reliable but is starting to look a bit scruffy and has been plucking which some Harris Hawks can be prone to unfortunately so i have decided to give him a break let him moult. I will start flying him again in about 6 months.

As we have stopped working with these birds it gives us time to fly others. We are always rotating the team. We will start to bring Pele's a Harris Hawks weight down to get him hungry enough to fly. Last year we tried try to bring Pele's weight down a lot slower than usual to stop him from shouting which he is prone to doing. It seemed to work for a bit but he started shouting after a while so we will try again this year. He is the oldest Harris Hawk in the centre and another great bird to work with. We use him for lots of different things - activity days, hawk walks, corporate events and hunting . I do enjoy flying him and always look forward to getting him going again.

I suspect the biggest challenge will be Bob the gyr x Saker. He is a bird i bought this summer. He is if you like second hand as someone else has done his training. I am always a bit reluctant to take on / buy birds that someone else has trained. Saying that i bought him so we shall see. I suspect he hasn't been flown for a while. He has been very nervous in the centre when sitting on his shelf perch or on a block out front but as time has gone by he has started to look more confident. Unfortunately not before he crashed about and damaged a lot of his feathers. All we have done so far is ask him to come to a hanging lure which he will do straight off. He has done this while on the creance - the long line. So no stress but now we are going to let him go free and see what happens. This should happen this week so it should be exciting. It should make for an exciting blog entry.

The other big news if you like is the arrival of 2 more ferrets. Jo took on 2 hobs (male ferrets). They are only 11 weeks old and they have been called Hudson and Hicks. We now have 6 ferrets but i suspect we will be back to 4 quite soon as Patch and Fatty the old girls are getting close to the end of the road shall we say. They are over 8 years old and this is seemingly very old for ferrets but hopefully they still have a bit to go. Here's a picture of the new ones