Day 15-24: More Creance Training

First thing on Day 15 I set up the creance the way my sponsor originally suggested; after the fiasco on the first night of creance training, I wasn’t taking any more chances. I brought the pitchback to one end of my yard, ran paracord from the pitchback to a tree on the other side of the yard, and slipped a metal ring over the paracord. I attached some more cord to this ring so that Atlas would be able to stand on the ground while attached to the creance. Training went really well. Originally, I was trying to randomize whether or not I would give him food if he came to my glove, because I had read about conditioning animals and I thought that this would be a more effective method, but my sponsor warned me against this. I wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice, so I listened to him. By day 21 or 22, Atlas was flying the entire length of the creance to my fist and had learned to figure out when I was taking quail meat out of my bag and putting it on my fist, and before I could even turn around to show it to him, he was halfway to me. It’s time to move him to a larger field, I think. Hopefully I’ll get a giant hood soon and I’ll be able to bring him over to Ross.

Day 14 – First Day of Creance Training

Today was an exciting day on many levels. I woke up and looked outside my kitchen window to find that I had accidentally left Atlas in the weathering station the whole night. I beat myself up over it a little bit, but I realized that this wasn’t so much different from him spending a night in the wild and I trusted the safety of my weathering station, so I knew that nothing bad would happen to him in all likelihood. I spent the morning setting up what is known as the creance so that I would be able to train him in the afternoon. A creance is simply an extra-long leash that gets attached to the bird on one end and to some sort of heavy weight on the other; this allows the falconer to train the bird to return the fist over a long distance without the bird actually being completely free.

The traditional setup for the creance is to take the bird into an open space with a perch, attach the creance to the bird and to a weight, and start calling the bird from increasingly far distances. However, my backyard is fairly narrow surrounded by many trees, and since I lacked the capabilities to move the bird to a field, my sponsor recommended that I run some paracord through a welded ring and tie it between two trees, almost like a clothesline, and tie more paracord onto the ring and put a clip on the end, so that the bird could be attached to this and would still have enough slack to stand on the ground, just in case he refused to land on my fist. His concern was that if I let out enough slack in the creance, the bird would be able to get up into one of the trees in my backyard and get tangled, possibly hanging upside down, and become stuck or seriously injured.

I didn’t have enough material to complete this at the time, so I decided that I would set up the creance the standard way and I would make sure not to let out too much slack. I had come up with a new perch design for use during creance training, which involved taking an old pitch-back I had lying around, wrapping some astroturf around the top, and securing it with duct tape. I ended up tying one end of the creance to this perch and securing the other to Atlas’ leg.

The training went incredibly well. I would cut a small piece of quail meat and put it on my fist, turn to him, and call him both verbally and with a whistle. Just like Pavlov’s dogs, calling him at this point in the training means nothing to him, but eventually he would learn to associate my calls with food, and then later on I would be able to call him verbally. The only reason he was coming to me now was because he could see the food on my glove. This was reason enough for him, though, and after 20 minutes or so he was flying about 50 feet across my yard to my fist.

I didn’t have enough quail meat to continue training, so I ran up on my deck to grab some more. 30 seconds after I got up onto my deck, I heard his bells and I turned around to find that he had flown up into a tree. I grabbed the quail and ran down into the yard, calling him and waving the quail in the air. My sponsor had warned me that if a bird gets a little bit high up and they start to feel the wind and the sun, they get euphoric and refuse to come down, especially when they are not trained. He kept climbing higher in the tree, wrapping the creance around as he went. I was starting to get nervous and I was trying to call him back down the way he had come. At one point he tried to move higher and ran out of slack, causing him to dangle upside down over a branch. I went into a complete panic and started screaming and trying to scramble up the tree, which conveniently had no branches low enough for me to grab onto. Atlas was able to get back up and stay standing, which was incredibly lucky; if he hadn’t he would have been dead in a few minutes.

My family started calling everyone they knew to see if anyone had a ladder tall enough to get the bird out of the tree. One friend had a 40 foot ladder, so my dad sped over to their house to get it. I had already called my sponsor and he was on the way from Southampton, but we were losing light by the minute. It was already about 12 minutes away from dark. My sponsor arrived and we got the ladder set up, but it didn’t quite reach the bird. My sponsor went right up the ladder and climbed the extra 15 or 20 feet up the tree, I cut the creance from the ground, he grabbed the bird and wrapped his feet up with the extra creance, put the bird into his jacket, and climbed back down. He got down with the bird all in one piece and we put Atlas away in the mews.

Needless to say, I was beyond ashamed and embarrassed about the whole mess. My sponsor had specifically warned me about the potential dangers I faced and gave me a perfect solution to the problem, but I had chosen to ignore him out of laziness and eagerness to start training. The most important lesson I learned from this whole experience is ALWAYS listen to your sponsor. ALWAYS. Falconry is one of those subtle arts where there are 100 ways do do the same thing, and no matter what you’ve read of heard from someone else, or if you think you’ve come up with a foolproof way to do something, your sponsor knows just as well, if not better, and he will be able to explain things to you better than a book. Especially if your sponsor is like mine and has been a falconer for over 20 years. I would never make the mistake of not taking his advice and ever again.

A Few Words on Training

Before I start posting about the actual steps I took to train the bird, I figured I should take the time to actually explain the theory behind the training. The training is essentially a variant on Pavlov’s famous experiment with his dogs, in which he rung a bell every time he fed his dogs until eventually, he could ring the bell and the dogs would salivate without being shown any food. The bird is offered food, both from the fist and from a lure, and is called audibly while the food is offered to it until eventually, when it is called to the fist or to the lure, regardless of the presence of food, the bird will return to the falconer.

The main difference between Pavlov’s experiment and the conditioning of a raptor for falconry is that the bird is asked to respond to certain signals over an increasingly large distance. Almost every falconer has his or her own slightly tailored way of conditioning a raptor. The main difference in training styles is between scheduled and random reward systems. In a scheduled system, the bird is rewarded on some type of fixed ratio, whether it is after every successful trial, after every 3 successful trials, or some other number. The main criticism of this is that the bird will learn the schedule and then will only perform the desired behavior when it wants the reward.

The random approach deals with this by rewarding the bird in random intervals; the bird will never be able to learn a schedule and therefore will perform the task every time it is asked to because there is a chance it will be rewarded. My sponsor told me that I should reward the bird after every successful flight, so that was the approach I used. Because a falconer must manage his or her bird’s weight regardless of the preferred training approach, I have found that I haven’t been effected severely by using the scheduled approach. Plus, while I was training Atlas, I did try randomizing his rewards a few times, and I found that on the flights where there was no reward, he could see that there was no food before landing on my glove and chose instead to land further up my arm or on my shoulder. I’m not sure if this was the cause of his strange behavior, but it’s my best guess.

It is important that after a bird has been acquired, its first feeding must be from the falconer’s fist. If the bird is allowed to eat not on the fist, the falconer is simply reinforcing undesired behavior and is working against the ultimate goal. One should also note that raptors do not respond to punishment during conditioning in the way that another animal would. They do not learn to avoid certain behaviors if they are punished for it; they only learn to maintain certain behaviors when they are rewarded. Punishing a raptor only leads to aggression, anger, and added difficulty in the training.

 

Days 10-13

Looks like all my worrying was for nothing. On day 10, the morning after he ate for the first time, he ate from me! I think I knew that would happen, in truth, and that I was worrying for no reason. I think now that he’s getting food he’s a little more active, which is good to see. He’s manning well, still bating occasionally but otherwise appears to be pretty comfortable. He still hasn’t taken a bath, which Dennis assures me is normal. h the afternoon I fed him again since he seemed hungry and the temperature was going to drop that night. I tried to get him to jump to my glove, but after staring at my glove for several minutes and shuffling around on the perch, it was no good. Maybe tomorrow.

The morning of day 11 I got Atlas to jump to my fist! By far the coolest part so far. He kept trying to reach with his mouth from the perch and almost fell over. I realized he wasn’t quite getting it, so I brought my hand close enough for him to a bite and then brought my hand out of reach again. He shuffled around on the perch for a little while and then hopped to the glove. I weighed him in the afternoon and he was getting up around 30 ounces, so I figured it would be better not to feed him.

During days 12 and 13 I got him to jump a little bit farther to my fist. I started working him up, in the mews only, until he was jumping about 4 feet to my fist. He’s acting calm still and I occasionally bring him in the house to warm up when it’s cold out. He’s getting pretty good on the fist and I think it’s time to set up the creance.

Day 9

HE FINALLY ATE! I was getting really really worried about him, I’m so relieved that he’s finally eating. At the same time, I’m pretty angry with myself and disappointed because my sponsor was the one who got him to eat. He came over at around 5:30, about a half-hour after dark, and we went into the mews to find that Atlas had already gone to bed. We woke him up and Dennis put him on his glove and brought him outside. He grabbed the half of a quail he had left over from flying his Goshawk on his way to my house and we went and sat under a porch light on my back deck. We both tried to look away, since staring at the bird can After a few minutes with no success, he elevated his hand on an air conditioning unit and kept the bird farther away from his body and was able to raise the meat closer to the birds face. We both looked away and after about a minute she took a bite! After that she pretty much ate the entire half a quail in less than 10 minutes.

Finally! Atta boy.

Despite my relief at the fact the bird was eating, I couldn’t help but feel like I was useless and dumb and a bad falconer and that I would never be able to train this bird if I couldn’t even get him to dig into a nice bloody quail. I saw how subtle the differences were between what Dennis and I had done; if falconry was all about those subtle differences, how was I ever going to be successful? If I were to offer any helpful advice to potential falconers, at this point I would say that if anything like this happens to you, the absolute LAST thing you should do is beat yourself up or get discouraged. The whole reason a sponsor is a legal requirement before getting a license is because of things like this. Being a falconer is such a fine skill, an art even, that it would be impossible to learn all the nuances and important subtleties that make it what it is. These are valuable learning experiences and you should be happy you’re getting the help you need, not upset that you didn’t magically know everything you needed to know about falconry from that one book you read. Don’t lose faith and keep working at it.

Days 7-8

I’m starting to get pretty worried about the bird. It’s been a week now and he still hasn’t eaten anything. I’ve been talking to Brian, the falconer I went trapping with, and he says that it’s been a pretty long time for him to have not eaten yet and he gave me some new ideas, including taking a whole quail, cutting it wide open down the breast, and putting the whole thing on my glove in a dark place and shining a flashlight on it. I tried this and a few variations on it a few times and I still was having trouble getting the bird’s attention for more than a minute or so. Dennis keeps telling me not to worry about it and he’s sure the bird will eat. He told me that it’s not uncommon for a bird to go more than a week in the winter without eating, in a snowstorm or something for example, so that was comforting. Hopefully he eats soon though, because once it gets around 10 days, it’s been too long.

The Rest of Week 1

Days 3-7 were pretty similar. The general trend was an improvement in the bird’s behavior and mood, but still no success with getting him to eat. I began to settle into a schedule, mainly because of school, of manning and trying to feed him for about half an hour in the morning, putting him in the weathering station, going to school, manning and trying to feed him for another half hour or so, and putting him in the mews. I noticed every day that he was getting calmer and spending more time on sitting on the perch or on the bathpan instead of on the ground and he would bate less and less while on the fist. By day 4 he had totally figured out how to get back on the glove after trying to fly away. The only problem is he still wouldn’t eat! My strategy was to take either a large chunk of breast meat, a leg, or a wing, and hold it in my fist and wiggle my fingers to get him to look down at the meat. I tried to feed him both in the mews and outside, but neither seemed to be much better than the other. Starting around day 5 or 6, I noticed him sort of licking his chops, which my sponsor told me usually meant they were about to go for the food. I guess  whatever I was doing wasn’t quite working. I kept giving him water from a squirt bottle because I was unsure of whether or not he was getting water or not. Hopefully things will improve over the next few days.

First Hunting Trip with Dennis

Today was my first ever falconry hunt. My sponsor, Dennis, came over to check on me and my Red-tail to make sure everything was going well and he decided to bring his female Goshawk, who is in her 18th season with him. Finding places to hunt can be difficult to do out here with all the development going on, so when I told him I had seen rabbits and squirrels in my backyard frequently, he figured it was worth a shot. He rigged her up with telemetry and got his hunting gear and Dennis, my father, my senior project mentor, Greg Drossel, and I went for a walk in the woods behind my house to try and flush a squirrel.

Dennis and his Goshawk

We  managed to find one squirrel on the way back home, but it was pretty clever and went way up in a tall pine and wouldn’t move; if it had, the Gos would have been all over it in a second. Unfortunately, Dennis’ bird was a little unresponsive because she was about an ounce above flying weight; when he tried to call her down with the lure, she was hesitant the first few tries, which is a dangerous thing to see as a falconer. Despite the lack of success hunting, I had a great time getting out and seeing what a hunt is really like and seeing Dennis’ beautiful Gos in action.

She’s not too happy about our failure

Days 1-2

The fun finally begins! Or so I thought. I went into his housing, or the mews, on the first day, Sunday the 4th, to find him bating, or trying to fly, like crazy and looking around wildly, trying to get used to his new environment. I put him on my glove and foolishly manned him outside for about a half an hour twice during the day. For the first few days, don’t man your bird outside; there are too many distractions and it reminds them too much of where they had been just 24 hours ago. He was bating like crazy and would not return to the glove after attempting to fly; instead, i would have to untangle his jesses and pick him back up with my ungloved hand and place him back on my fist. The time he spent off my glove was spent in the weathering station. All he did was bate and stand on the ground. I tried to feed him, of course, but he wouldn’t even acknowledge the food because of all the distractions.

Sitting on the ground in the weathering station with his mouth open, a sign of stress. Crazy bird.

Hanging upside down after bating. He hasn’t quite figured out how the whole sit-on-the-glove thing works yet.

Day two was pretty a little better than day one. I gave him some water from a squirt bottle because I was worried he hadn’t been drinking and I didn’t want him to get dehydrated. I manned him for a half hour tried to feed him in the morning before school with no luck. My parents kept an eye on him while I was away and told me that he spent some time sitting on the side of the bathpan, which was good news. I manned him and tried feeding him again when I got home, but he won’t even look at the food even though he’s practically holding it in his talons. Oh well.

Trapping the Bird

Finally, the trapping video is done! I’ve been crazy busy with this whole new schedule thing (having a bird changes your life pretty drastically), so it was hard for me to put the final touches on this thing, but here it is. A huge thanks to Brian Bunce for helping me trap my first bird.

And here’s a video (http://screencast.com/t/9W8ozcBvthC) I made that explains the whole trapping setup with pictures.

A few things about the trapping process that weren’t included in the video. The trapping does not hurt the birds in any way; I wanted to make that clear to anyone who might possibly think otherwise. That would be entirely counterproductive. Over the 3-4 hours we were up on the ridge, we caught two birds, mainly so that I could have the opportunity to choose a bird and so that Brian (the man in the video) could give any other falconers in the area a Red-tail if they so desired (we would have caught more if we had the time and the good fortune).

Trapping the birds can be very tricky. It is a very delicate art and requires the absolute attention and caution of everyone involved. Lots of unexpected things can happen. Both the birds that we got in the net were not actually the ones we thought we were getting; we all had our eyes on one Red-tail when another came up and over from the other side of the ridge and we glanced down just in time to see them come in and take the bait. Make sure you’re looking everywhere and keeping your eyes open, but don’t lose sight of your target, either!

I came a little unprepared to trap, forgetting to bring a hood or a transport box, otherwise known as a giant hood. Since a bird’s sense of sight is where it gets most of its sensory input from the outside world, darkening its eyes cause it to be incredibly calm and transportation becomes much easier. Because of this, I had to bring him all the way home (an approximately 2.5 hour car ride) in the stocking, which is clearly not the most comfortable situation for the bird.

The bird was really thirsty after we finally got him on the glove, so my sponsor gave him a good amount of water out of one of those right-angle squirt bottles used in science labs. I didn’t man him at all after I got home, since he had such a rough day.

Other than that, I think the two videos do a pretty good job at explaining the various steps involved. Please comment if you have any questions or observations.