Falconry World

Well here we are again. I’ve just done one week with my female Merlin, that I bought off Rob Cole from Cardiff, and got a male yesterday from Alan Horton in Devon. The female weighed in 225g when I got her last week which is about 8oz in real money. The male is 175g. After manning for all of about one hour the female fed on fist on a freshly killed quail in the Millennium stadium were I was to film speedway later that evening. Since then she has been with me most of the time. Whilst typing away on the keyboard or watching TV, she’s been steady as a rock.

If these were my first birds i would think falconry was easy. They’re so laid back its like they’ve been manned for weeks. So after the initial bits of manning and feeding on fist I’m now at the stage were the female is flying to a creance about 20ft away and she still weighs about 800g. The jack is feeding happily on fist, though is alittle bit jumpy. Both are to be fitted with Marshall radio telemetry track pack mounting systems. I’ll use a Marshall micro transmitter on both. I’ll take some photographs and maybe do a short video if I have time of fitting the Marshall track pack process which is relatively easy. I think they make a nice pair, should be great fun to fly…..Thanks to Carl cheshire from Gamehawker for the great cadge and travel box, and Steve Kelly for the indoor block. Hope all goes wel with the new site Carl . I’ll do a full review of both products soon.

Well this little brancher won’t be going hungry. This picture was taken by Garrett Smith in Secret Canyon, Utah, USA last week. They were looking for climbing areas and came across this eyrie. Good job mother wasn’t home to greet them; if she’s taking deer for her chick then a climber would be just fine as a main course for herself…… after she’s removed the North Face packaging of course.

Sometimes in life we all want to drown a bird we dearly love due to her incessant nagging, yet we don’t due to the threat of jail or worse, no ironing, sex and back to microwave meals. (I’ll soon find out if my wife reads my posts) However this wild sparrowhawks demonstrates (not the one in the picture that could only just bath itself) that darwin’s theory of the fittest and the wisest is still alive and strong…..Which is more than I can say for this magpie after….. here, you’ll not be disappointed.

My wife often tells me that during the falconry season she becomes a falconry widow. Apparently my posture changes, I stop cutting my hair and gain a musty smell like damp dog or worse if a day old chick has been forgotten in a jacket. My clothes are always the same colour (Greens and browns) and my general fashion is that more commonly seen on the catwalk of a big issue seller(homeless magazine here in the UK). Only on field meets do I request an ironed shirt and put on my Sunday best mole sking trousers, wax jacket and get out a fresh lure.

She reads me like a book and can tell my success in the field by the fact that either I enter the house with the bird on fist whistling or the glove enters the house closely followed by a Tasmanian devil, blaming everything in the world for conspiring to ruin my birds flight. [Read more]

Seems it’s not just Gyr’s and our beloved birds crooking it from this nasty fungus…

A gardener died after inhaling a killer fungus from home-made compost.

The 47-year-old went to hospital with chest pains just a day after opening a bag of rotting leaves.

The unnamed welder died three days later from aspergillosis - caused by inhaling spores of the aspergillis fungus.

Dr David Waghorn, who treated the man last May at Wycombe Hospital, Bucks, warned in The Lancet medical journal that in rare cases compost “may be considered an occupational hazard for gardeners”.