Her chart read “Baby.” I never called her that, but I was watching “Dirty Dancing" excessively around the time we trapped her. Baby was my first micro. She was a January-trapped haggasaurus rex. 143g with an empty crop and a five on the keel. I can’t remember if her system was empty or not, and I didn’t record it on my log. I was quite green. Though based on her flight weight when I look back at my logs now, I’d say she was shitting bigger than dime-size when I brought her home.
Yak yak yak yak yak. I didn’t know any better. Hell, Ray didn’t either, and he’d flown two kestrels before me. I didn’t even read Matt’s American Kestrels in Modern Falconry until a week before we planned on trapping. I’d just come off my first successful squirrel hawking season, and all I had on my mind was a big female kestrel. In my tiny, little, inexperienced brain, I chose size over age.
“Haggard and eyas kestrels are uniquely challenging. Many adult birds remain nervous and difficult to manage in captivity.” -Matt Mullenix, American Kestrels in Modern Falconry
I admire Matt’s ability to downplay the constant yakking and wildness of the hag kestrel and turn the description of the experience into something almost poetic. “Uniquely challenging.” No shit! I always laugh when I read that line now. Baby remained wild, noisy and hesitant to pounce starlings despite her size. She was 102g of feathers and stubbornness. A true asshole.
Baby didn’t teach me much, but what she did teach me laid the foundation for every other kestrel I’ve flown since. Because of Baby, I learned while I never say never, I don’t plan on flying a haggard kestrel again. What makes the lesson even more important, is that it led Ray and me to learn how to identify passage birds better.
I didn’t take a single head of game with Baby. I hawked her a couple times, and she refused even good starling slips. While she could have had an extremely narrow weight window I never dialed in properly, her wildness and loudness made her an unsuitable falconry bird for me. I was constantly annoyed, and that’s no way to do falconry justice. More importantly, I worried about her hurting herself at home.
I fed Baby up, and Ray released her while I was away on summer vacation. He did, of course ask, but I think he’d have released her anyway, even if I protested. That bird belonged in the wild. Neither of us have thought much about her since, but she still managed to teach a couple newbies a valuable lesson. Barring extenuating circumstances, we’ll stick with passage kestrels from here on out.
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