Winter seems to be here

I had wanted to fly both Jessie and the girls today, but Jessie is still coming down from all the duck fat that she ate. She weighed in at 933 grams. She will fly at that weight after she has been hunting for a while, but the wind was howling at 29 MPH with higher gusts. Didn't need that.  The Harris's could not handle that much wind, so Karen and I went out to feed them on the fist in the shop. While we were in there a snow squall blew up from the West and had the ground covered in a matter of minutes. So when we were done, I went back in the house, threw another log on the fire, got out my "blanky" and pulled out a book.

Tami called around 4 PM and asked if I was up to hunting with Jasper. The wind had finally died, and it wasn't snowing at the time, so I embraced a break in the boredom. By the time that she got here, we had another snow squall marching through. After a short wait, it quit snowing again.

Jasper after surveying his chances, took off for the free range pen, and flushed a Sparrow of his own and they were off. It evaded him in the rock fence, so the Starlings in the Chicken pen captured his attention. They were filtering out through the gaps in the wire in all directions. I went into the pen to force them to the back end, but he seemed to have forgotten his last flight and stayed on top of the pen. Finally we were down to one Starling, and he chased it towards the creek. It soon outdistanced him, so he went up to the power lines. He sat for just a few seconds and came off the wire and sat on a post by the Pigeon house trap door. Tami observed that there were a lot of Starlings inside the Pigeon pen. I said that I would go flush them out, and started in that direction.

Jasper was not in the mood to wait, and dived through the open trap, before I could do more than say, "Oh Shit" the sounds of a screaming Starling came wafting out of the house. I ran up to render assistance because there were about 50 Pigeons in there as well. It was at first hard to see him since there were so many Pigeons in there milling about. Then when I did see him, I had to take a picture, since I had thought to bring a camera this time. The white Pigeon to the left side of the picture was thinking about getting in on the action, so I couldn't waste much time.

 I have had large falcons refuse to fly into a flock of Ducks or even Pigeons because they were afraid  of being mobbed. Apparently this little warrior doesn't think that way at all. The front of the pen is wire, so there was no concealing the fact that there was a whole mob of Pigeons in there. The only ones surprised was the Starling and the Pigeons.

After he killed it we retired to the relative warmth of the unheated hanger to let him eat his meal.