Falconry Basics | How to handle and feed your bird of prey

[Music] [Music] [Music] hi everyone today I'm going to talk about how we hold and handle our birds and the way in which we approach them and how we feed them in the right manner these small things will make a massive difference to the way that you react to your bird and your bird reacts to you when we ask our bird to sit on the glove it's really where the beginning of all the trust develops so the way in which you pick your bird up will spell the difference between potentially a good or a bad session it's going to set the pace and the feel of the day so if you handle your bird in a comfortable and safe manner your bird is going to trust you a lot more than if you're miss handling it and making it an uncomfortable journey so the way in which we hold our birds not only for safety but also for their comfort has a massive effect on their trust in us so before I pick up a bird and show you with the bird on my hand I just wanted to talk about the glove itself and the way in which we hold our hand so the position of our hand firstly something that people forget about falconry gloves is that you need to be able to feel through the glove you need to have a glove that is actually supple so that when you move your fingers and you can actually feel what's happening this is made out of deer I always seem to get gloves out of deer and they can often be made out of calf hide and you can find that calf is very very tough whereas deer still has that toughness in terms of protecting our skin from the birds talons but it's a lot more supple so I can open and close my hand this glove fits me perfectly and I can feel with my fingers exactly what I'm doing although most of our work is done with our bare hands usually your right hand because most people will hold their bird on their left hand I still never need to be able to feel where the jessee's are going the swivel what's going on the birds feet so it's good to have a glove that you can actually move your fingers in if you can't move your fingers close your hand properly you won't actually have control of the birds furniture and potentially that's going to make the difference in the handling so we don't need a glove that's super thick and we don't need a glove that is overkill and I have larger gloves I'll show you those as well but for most of my smaller falcons owls and small Hawks that I fly this single thickness wrist length glove will do me absolutely fine I don't need anything bigger than that for my larger more powerful Hawks I have a slightly longer glove so this will sit my female got soft and female Harris Hawk quite happily on here and it's double thickness but if you see I've still got exactly the same amount of flexibility even though it's a lot of thicker and I've still got that freedom of movement which means I can safely hold my Birds the position that we should be making with our hand is a closed fist on top of that we want to be aiming to put the thumb up towards the sky so a lot of people tend to hold their hand more rolled forward if I bring my glove over here so that there's this big flat platform this whole part here facing up but what we want to do is I actually tuck those fingers in and it will make sense when you see my hand in safety with the bird and this thumb should be pointing up so I'll just turn my hand so that you can see so a lot of people hold it this way really you want to rotate your wrist a bit so your thumbs pointing up so basically the bird should be sitting along your thumb it almost acts like a miniature branch and you'll find that its feet will stick much more naturally on the glove that way than if they have to spread their foot over the whole top of your hand there so try to roll your hand back a little bit and you'll see the difference that it makes the other thing to bear in mind is where our arm is where our elbow is in relation to now our hand so some people hold their bird really square on like this and I'm not exaggerating this look pretty silly down here special bird and so they hold their hand like this if you roll that finger up and bend your elbow a little bit so your hand is slightly higher in your elbow you'll find again that the bird will sit much more comfortably it's also more comfortable for us I have to turn side on here so you can see so this is my natural position not that basically it means that if the birds wiggling around the lower hand is the more likely the bird is to climb birds won't actually want to sit on the highest point so if you drop your hand down they will naturally flap and climb their way up and if you weren't holding on to Jess's for example they're going to end up on your shoulder and that's not because I love you or they want to sit on your shoulder they're just looking for the highest safest perch to sit on so going back to being side on this is the natural position when I carry a bird I'll do it from this side as well like this not like this it means that the birds more or less eisah I level with me and he's got a nice flat perch to sit on my arms not going to get tired because it's close into my body which for the larger birds is quite important because they weigh quite a lot for their size so if you're carrying them out for a couple of hours if I'm out hunting with the female goshawk that's going to get heavy after a while so me holding my arm out here is going to tie pretty quickly so I'll now switch on to putting a bird on my glove so you can see how he's naturally set on the glove with me and Brent again just rotate round so you can see it from a few different angles but he sat how I would naturally hold him so on top of my finger here I'm a little chap if I turn him this way you can see how he's almost eye to eye with me my elbow slightly dropped although my hands slightly higher than my elbow my hands totally flat well as holding our hand in the right position we need to hold the bird in safety so when you hear about the safety position basically all it means is that the Jess's which coughs you come down from the anklets here go behind your thumb so underneath the thumb and then they go underneath your middle finger so your third finger close your fingers in he sat on my thumb here and you can see the swivel is locked in I can then loop up all this excess leash because we don't want all of that dangling down you can see it's as almost as long as he is underneath so if he was to bait off my glove he's going to get wearing his head even may be trapped in there so you never want to walk around with this dangling around loop this up into your bottom finger there's no particular way help but just make sure it's out of the way and now that birds in safety position so we can carry him comfortably we also know that he's not going to get caught up and if we do let go if we fall over trip up as we throw our hand out he's still attached by the d-ring where the Falcon is not [Music] moving on from how we safely and comfortably hold our bird this then ties in very well with how we should be correctly feeding the bird a lot of people put the food up underneath the therm where the jessee's have actually come down this causes two problems firstly it will cover your birds furniture in food if you're holding on to Jess's they're going to get food on the Jess's but secondly it makes for some incredibly uncomfortable eating so if you put the food up underneath the therm under here the bird is going to have to lean down under his own Ches under his crop in order to eat so when he bends right underneath himself he's taking his eyes off his surroundings and it's a lot more uncomfortable because even our captive bred birds of prey will naturally look out and around them to make sure there's no other predatory threats that might take their food what am i feeding a bird on our glove and this is particularly important for a young bird or a bird that's just started training we want to build that trust and build that bond and the way to do that is to present the food in the right manner so that the bird can eat their food but they're not going to feel like they have to take our eyes off us the way in which we should feed them isn't by pushing food underneath the phone but instead putting it in front of the thumb now if you've not seen this before it will look quite strange initially but if you take a look into the history books on falconry you'll see exactly how to do it and it's something that you'll see follow through time and time again you should be gripping the food with these fingers here so if you remember your bird start on your thumb here your jess's are come down behind the thumb and then you've got this big part here and that is where you should grip your by putting the food here out in front the bird still bends down to eat but he doesn't have to bend right underneath himself so it makes for a much more comfortable experience when he's eating it allows him to feel safer he can look around and it will increase that trust bond that we're developing look at his position now that the food and the thumb you can see the difference in the way that he eats [Music] so I'm going to show you exactly the same process feeding with my goshawk Elwin and he's less excitable than the vulcan around food [Music] you can see clearly how much room his feet have and the fact that he can still eat his dinner as well so it's quite clear to see the way in which you hold your glove is not only critical for safely handling a bird of prey but also for building that bond of trust between both of you if you can present food in the right way you can handle your bird in the right way that allows them to be comfortable and secure they are the building blocks for when you move on to your training and your flying sessions a bird that knows it's what somewhere comfortable and safe to sit will consistently want to come back choose the person [Music] you

Channel: Falconry And Me

Views: 132,088

Keywords: falconry, bird of prey, falcon, goshawk, handling birds of prey, falconry training, introduction to falconry, starting falconry, owl

Id: L4JCpGkHn6I

Length: 12min 19sec (739 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 31 2020