End of the month

Well another month is almost finished. September has gone very fast or is going very fast.

Last week started quietly with nothing really happening on Monday to Wednesday but from Thursday to Sunday things were very busy with events. Monday to Wednesday was spent cleaning the centre, doing a few odd jobs around the centre that always seemed to be needing done and flying the birds.

The birds are all doing ok. Gigha the peregrine seems to of come off the boil a bit as he has stared sitting which you don't want falcons doing when you fly them to the lure but he has done this before and comes through it and stops it. Bob is Bob. He is still very up and down but his fitness at long last seems to be improving and I can see that he is getting faster and stronger now which is great. Amber is doing ok. Pele is going great as well. All the other birds that are flying are all just getting on with it and doing things to the usual high standard.

While last week started off very quiet and became busy this week is going to very busy from the start. I am fully booked every day this week with things going on in the centre and things to do out on the road. We have a large corporate event on Wednesday through in Edinburgh. I always get a bit of a buzz at these events. I love doing them. Tuesday and Thursday I will be in the centre, Friday is a site inspection for a event I am doing the following week and the weekend I am all over the place doing 5 bookings with 2 in the centre and 3 out on the road at a different location. I am feeling confident about this week which is going to be a bit full on. One of the benefits of having a small team of birds is that I can spend a lot more time working with them individually so hopefully I can get them to a good level of fitness and ability with regular flying. It also means when I have a week like what is coming up I have a lot of confidence in the birds because of the time I put into them. In a weeks time I will telling the blog how I got on.

On a sad note I was called out to a wild barn owl this morning that had been hit by a car. Jo had a look at it but there was nothing that could be done as it had broken a wing badly and the bird was fading fast due to shock so there may of been other injuries that we couldn't see or find. Unfortunately it passed away before we could do anything. It is always difficult with wild birds that have been injured. The stress can be enough to kill them at times. If you can stabilize them I then feel you need to ask the question of how long will it take it to recover from the injury and to get it back into the wild. If you are talking weeks and months the best thing maybe to put it to sleep. It is not a simple case of nursing the bird back to health and releasing it back into the wild. For example a buzzard that injures a wing and needs to be rested so the wing can heal will loose fitness. If you release the bird back in to the wild and it is not fit as in it does not have the fitness to hunt and catch food is going to find  it very hard to survive and will probably die. To get it back to a reasonably good level of fitness you are going to have to fly it like a falconry bird build it's fitness back up and ultimately hack it back to the wild this is going to take a lot of effort and time. I feel that the longer a wild bird spends in captivity being  treated for an injury or illness the less likely it is to survive in the wild for any length of time when it is released. Saying that if (and I am) called out to help a wild bird of prey I will always go and see what I can do for it.