More fires, and a really stubborn hawk!

Tis the season I guess. I feel as though we are playing Russian roulette. Every day that we get past without a big fire is a relief. Every evening it builds the storm clouds and the lightning starts popping. So far so good. When the days get short enough to cut back on the high temps, it will all end.

 The skies and sunsets are spectacular, but as you can see, come with a price.

I spend the evenings sitting outside watching the various strikes to see if they spark another fire.

This one did start another fire close by the first one.  They managed to put both these out. One started on the other side of the Owyhee River was still burning yesterday. I believe it is out by now.


As for Puddy Tat, we are still going through the throes of weight control. I keep starving her, ( at least it feels like it.) and she keeps on refusing to progress beyond the beginning stage. Perhaps my soft hearted "good guy" approach lead her to believe that I could be trained easier than her. I took her out yesterday to try to fly her with her weight at 820. That by the way even though she is a small hawk, is ridiculously low. When I first approached her on the perch, she flew the other direction. I turned around and walked away. She knows that I am going to pick her up. I pick up my bag and glove, she wants to fly away- not hungry I guess. I came back 30 minutes later, but this time she did not try to escape.

I put her on a rock and called her a few feet to the fist.

That worked out fine, but when I stepped back another couple of feet, she didn't feel comfortable and flared.

Then she wouldn't come back to the fist, and kept trying to fly away. OK, not hungry enough, back in the house on her perch.

This morning as I was waking up with a morning cup of coffee, I saw her jumping and footing the turf on the top of her perch. That is a first for her. She sits there with her head feathers showing all the signs of being starved to death, and she is jumping up and down on the perch? When I approached her with my hawking stuff on, she jumped onto my fist, hard. I weighed her and found that she was now down to a true weight of 810 grams. That is two ounces less than Peg, who I thought was small.

I put her on her rock and called her a couple of times and she was pouncing onto the fist when she flew. I walked her to the hay pile after she showed signs of being uncomfortable of flying the distance I was asking. I thought that flying towards the house might be causing her some concern. I walked out to the hay stack and sat her up on one of the bales. What she does that drives me nuts is that she will think about the flight to the fist rather than react to the fist. I need her to get past that stuff and just react when she sees the fist. She flew about 8 feet to the fist and then began to hang up again. I offered her a pigeon wing as a reward and a tiring. ( something to eat that will make her work at it for a while, but not put too much food in her crop) She flew, but chickened out and flared off. I let her go dragging the creance. She flew into the yard and landed on the fence around the garden. I walked to within 12 feet of her and called her. She dithered and false started several times. I finally started plucking the wing that was in my fist. That proved too much and she finally flew to me, with the high flight and mouse pounce used by Redtails trying to catch fleeing mice. The funny part was that her flight scared a half grown bunny hiding in the weeds, and it ran to within 6 feet of me and froze underneath some scrap wire. Pud and the rabbit exchanged looks for a while, but a pigeon wing on the fist is worth more than a bunny in the weeds, or something like that. I stood there laughing, and knowing that when it comes time to enter her on rabbits, I will never get another chance like that.

What I need to do with her now is to be able to give her rewards that doesn't put a lot of weight on her when she flies well. I really need to go somewhere and pop a few bunnies, but I am apparently too lazy and I flatly refuse to kill one of the ones running around the house. When they go to the great bunny trail in the sky it will be with a hawks help, not mine.