Jasper's second bag, and Puddy finally gets hungry enough to come to the fist.

Today has been a fairly interesting day. I decided to check a couple of ponds to see if they had water. I told Karen that I would be gone for a couple of hours and told her that I was going to check Palomino Flats. I found that both ponds there had water and ducks. As I started back, the Dodge died. Water in the fuel again. I tried to drain the water, but it would not restart. I managed to make the mile and half walk to the highway in time to  catch a ride with one of the Hwy dept trucks. Traffic is not that heavy on Hwy 78, so I felt quite lucky. I met Karen at the mail box at Burns Junction, and waited for an hour and a half for the mail lady to finally get there. We then went to the house to get tools to change the filter. We drove all the way out there, and found that I had left the wrench in the shop. We drove back again, got the wrench, and I spent the next hour cussing and bleeding from multiple sharp edges placed to inflict maximum damage on any idiot dumb enough to work on a dodge truck. It still wouldn't start, so we went home and I called AAA to get someone out there to tow it home.

While I was waiting for the tow truck to get to the house, I was puttering around in the shop. I could hear occasional high pitched squeaking. I have had one of the free range chickens that insisted on setting eggs. I let her sit. Of course the other chickens laid eggs right on top of her, so they were not set at the same time. Finally two of the eggs hatched, and since this hen is not one of my best mothers, she took the two that she had and left the eggs. She managed to kill one of the chicks, but I had two more hatch, so I gave them to her. She lost another one, so that made two. I gave the remaining two eggs three days to hatch, them gave up on them and put them in an egg carton in the garbage can in the hanger about three days ago. I finally checked the garbage can and opened the carton. The two eggs had hatched with no incubation other than the ambient temperature . ( How hot was it? ) I couldn't believe it. Since Mom was out in the yard with her older chicks, it was obvious that these new hatched wasn't going to be able to keep up. I fixed a box for them, gave them food and water. One of them promptly drowned itself in the water.  It was a standard chick water bottle. Sigh!

The tow truck finally arrived and we took off to get the truck. Batting a 1000, I left the keys at the house. Karen brought the keys to us a bit further up the road.  We finally got the truck home for me to worry about later.

Tami brought Jasper over to fly. He had eaten all the Black Bird that he could hold yesterday and still lost a couple of grams of weight. Great, that meant that we fly him again today. She let him loose in the parking area, and called him to the fist a couple of times. He took a perch on top of the old chicken house, and from there he made his first wild kill, a Grasshopper. He regained his perch and flew to Tami, as she was walking away. He again regained his perch and the next time he flew, it was to my head. He stayed there for a while until Tami called him. I flipped out a black bird that I had not handicapped enough, and he gave chase. When he saw that it could fly, he veered off to the top of the hanger. If he had kept after it, he could have caught it. His reaction was nothing out of the ordinary, and he will soon learn that he can catch those kind. I got another Black bird and handicapped it a bit more. He wasted no time grabbing this one. Tami made in to him and helped him kill it. We put him in the shop to finish eating while we picked up Puddy.

She finally got on the fist, and was weighed at 810 grams. About a three ounce reduction in weight. One of the little bunnies was eating on the lawn, and over Karen's objections I decided to see if Pud would go after it. The cute little thing is so tame that we walked to within 6 feet of the bunny. Pud saw it, looked at it, watched it hop away, with no effort to pursue.

I took her out to the hay bales hoping that she would remember that she had flown to me from them. I sat her on the bales and after quite a bit of contemplation, she flew to the perch. I called her again, and again the long wait, and she flew to the perch again. This time she managed to knock the meat off the perch, but would not go down to the ground to get it. I attempted to get her to fly back to the bales. She took a detour and ended up on the fence in the yard. I decided to reinforce the lure and call it a day, in the hopes that I could feed her less, and she would lose more weight. She actually came to the lure quite quickly.

In the 47 years that I have been doing this I have never spent so much time with a bird and gotten so little in return. I sent off for a capture permit for a wild bird today.