Single Digits!

The widget at the top of my blog is officially in single digits. Trapping season is literally right around the corner!!

As for the check list:

Food? Check!

New Traps? Check!

New Nooses on Old Traps? Maybe tonight...

Bait? One sparrow so far in my trap and last weekend was the State club's annual picnic where I made connections with a couple people with pigeon coops who say their places are almost infested. So I'm sure we'll have plenty. Throw in a few pet store feeder mice and we'll have our bases covered.

New Indoor Perch? Materials have been priced but it'll have to wait until payday. Shouldn't take me long to put together.

Clean Out Mews? Not yet, but since that's where all my old traps are, it may be another thing to tackle tonight or at the latest, this weekend.

Get Miscellaneous Gear In Order? Check, for the most part. A member of another forum I'm on let me in on this brilliant, (if not rather obvious, duh!) piece of advice: Falconers only used left-handed gloves but they usually come in pairs...turn the right-handed glove inside out and presto, left-handed glove! So I've even got a couple of new gloves for the season!

I've been eying the local starlings every morning and thinking, "I'll be coming for you soon..." Next entry will hopefully (barring any especially exciting news between now and then...) be about trapping adventures and possibly about my new charge for the season!

I'm giddy, this is better than Christmas I tell ya!

So Much To Do And...

...So little time?

While I diligently check the widget at the top of my blog just about every day (in fact, I have a friend who will ask me every time he sees me, "How many days til trapping season?" because he knows I'll have the correct answer), it just hit me yesterday that I have a lot to do to get ready for the upcoming season and the time to have it all done is quickly approaching!

Stuff I have to do has been rolling around in the back of my head for quite awhile now:

Stock up on bird food (Check! Yesterday I picked up enough starlings to last me at least until a new kestrel is hunting, if not the entire season.)

Build a new trap (a new style I haven't tried before, just for kicks and giggles)

Tie new nooses on my old traps (I know they work)

Set out my sparrow traps (gotta have bait)

Clean out the mews (gets used mainly for storage in the off season)

Build a new indoor perch (we'll chat about that later, honey!)

Get all my other miscellaneous gear in order (Glove, leash, jesses, anklets, etc...)

I dunno, putting it in list form makes it seem less intimidating but it's a lot of small projects that are going to take up a bunch of time. Time well worth the effort however as I am really looking forward to this season (as I do EVERY season). A lot to look forward to this year, one of my good friends just got his license and will be trapping and training his first red-tail, I should be getting my upgrade to General at some point (after 15 years!), and there's a possibility that a significant life changing opportunity that I've been working on for a while will come to fruition during the season and mix things up as well...

Can't wait!

Yo-Yo's for Troops

It's been a busy summer with conferences and road trips and unfortunately not a whole lot of falconry related activities so the posting has been scarce but an internet acquaintance of mine who is over in Afghanistan right now asked me to post this. It's a worthy project so participate if you get a chance!

The Rasch Outdoor Chronicles: Yo-Yo's for Troops

Thanks to these folks for allowing me to be able to be excited about trapping season that starts in 38 days!

Urban Fox

I work in downtown Denver, literally the middle of the city, and this fellow greeted me at the front doors of my office this morning.

The crazy thing was that I don't think ANY of the other people around the building even noticed him! Or at least they had absolutely no reaction to a fox at the front doors...

I thought it was pretty cool.

Post-season Fun

Took a day off work yesterday to do some fishing with some friends. We hit a resevoir in the morning that is fishing great and I caught this beauty before we headed to the Arkansas River for some fly-fishing in the afternoon. Unfortunately the wind was blowing about 30 mph and made the river difficult but the fish were still biting. My friends caught a couple each and I missed enough that I can't complain. Besides, my fish at the resevoir was bigger than all the fish they caught put together! ;-) And even if I hadn't caught a single fish, it's always better than work! Hopefully more of these types of pics to come in the near future...

Time to Say Goodbye

I released Hayduke this morning. It was a bitter-sweet event as I'm sure you all can imagine. As much as I would've liked to keep him around I just haven't had the time to fly him lately and looking at a spring and summer filled with conferences and vacations it didn't look like I'd have enough time to do him justice. I've been feeding him up for the past week and filled him with the back third of a quail this morning before sending him on his way. He was a fun bird.

Thanks for the memories Hayduke!

Catch and Release

There hasn't been much worth posting about for the past few weeks. Slips have been hard to come by. I don't know if it's the warmer weather, the time of day, or lack of time, probably a combination of all the above but I've had only two or three slips the last two weeks.

Saturday again, the starlings were scarce but a sparrow presented a nice slip. Hayduke chased it under a car and caught it just before it got out the other side. As he typically does, he dragged it further underneath the car and began plucking. This was a fairly low riding car, its bumper just clearing the curb where it was parked so I could barely see him through the small triangle of space where the tire didn't connect with the curb. Reaching him would've been difficult so I sat myself on the curb and figured I'd just wait for awhile.

Well after 5 minutes of plucking the sparrow suddenly decided it didn't want to die (strange that it wasn't dead already since he usually kills sparrows pretty much on impact). It went into super freak out mode and wrested himself from Hayduke's grasp shooting out that tiny window of space. Not even my cat-like reflexes could prevent the escape. Hayduke came shooting out right behind but not nearly fast enough to catch up and decided that the quail wing on my fist was just as good as the sparrow.

He had it for a good 5 minutes though and there was quite a pile of feathers under the car so despite the escape I'm counting it! Catch and release...