Utter Chaos!!

Haven't updated for awhile but we've been making slow but steady progress.

On Thursday I acquired a bunch of sparrows and starlings for baggies (cleared out a friend's pigeon coop!) so today I took her to a field by my apartment complex and hand tossed one a short distance away. She shot of the fist and pounded it. Wahoo!

Then things went downhill. She tried to carry the sparrow, which is understandable given the openness of where we were, but this wasn't the kind of "carrying" that Dulci did just trying to get to the nearest cover, this was full blown 'I'm taking this sparrow to a tree way over yonder and you're not invited' kinda carrying. Not good. But I still have her on a light creance so she didn't go far.

I made my way over to her and about 5 yards away I noticed a large shape cruising in on my left. COOPERS! It was a big beautiful first year bird, just starting to moult out and missing a few tail feathers. It made a big circle around us not more than 15 yards out so I got a good look! Then it went and landed in a tree 50 yards away.

Of course my bird didn't like that so much so I set about gathering her up glancing back at the coops as I did so. So I'm looking at the coops and I see a big ol RT all tucked up in a shallow stoop headed right for it! The RT crashed through the tree making all sorts of racket and the coops didn't even move! After the initial pass the RT continued on its way figuring, I guess that it had at least let the coops know he was there.

After the RT left the coops decided it wanted one more look at my bird (now on my fist screaming at me) and came in one more time landing in a small tree maybe 15 yards away and looking at me trying to figure out how it could snatch a meal off my fist. It stayed a minute or two and then went back to the first tree 50 yards away and then finally heading off to the East.
I decided I should probably feed my bird up elsewhere regardless!

An exciting session to say the least.

She'll be killing baggies all this week and will hopefully be on to wild game next weekend.