Finding Isabeau

September 1st is the first day of trapping season in Alabama. Apprentices are required to trap their own birds. I had decided to trap a female red tail because that is what I was most familiar with and had wanted since I was a little girl. My fiancé decided that he wanted a male because he preferred their flying style. Males are fighter jets. Females are flying tanks. In order to increase our chances of trapping what we were looking for we split up and each went with another experienced falconer. 

6:30am, no sleep the night before, ready to go.

My group set out at 6:30 in the morning. We had already spent some time scouting the area looking for suitable birds (we're only allowed to trap birds that are under a year old and don't yet have their red tail, called passage birds). We saw many adults, called haggards, along with a slew of kestrels (which are allowed in some states but not here because they are very difficult to keep healthy due to their small size), vultures, Cooper's hawks, a broad wing, and an osprey, but very few passage red tails. The first time that I threw the trap out, I did it too hard and it landed upside down. After that, we scared several off. By 3, my fiancé came to join us as his trapping partner had had to go home and they hadn't had any more luck than we did. 

Over ten hours and hundreds of miles later, starting to lose hope.

Around 5:30 that evening, I had all but lost hope that we would trap anything that day and began to resign myself to going home empty-handed. Then our trapping partner saw a female red tail high on a pole. We saw from her tail that she was a passage bird and so I threw the trap. It landed upside down again and I was sure that was the end of it. However, to our surprise, she stayed on the pole. My partner got out and flipped the trap right side up and, amazingly, she still stayed. We drove far enough away that she couldn't see us and, after getting my fiancé to back up to where we were, she came swooping down on it! 

Straight off of the trap and thinking she's dinner.

We hurried to take her off of the trap and get her secured. It was incredibly exciting to see! When trapped, they go into a state of shock where they throw their wings out wide and basically freeze in place. It makes them fairly easy to handle, but it also means that the hardest part of our job is to convince them that we aren't about to eat them! That, however, is another post entirely. She had almost perfect feathers, razor sharp talons and beak, and had food in her crop. Her weight, however, was much lower than we expected and she was much thinner than she should have been. She was hunting and successful enough to stay alive but most likely not enough that she would have survived the winter when she would have been burning more energy to stay warm. 
We took her to my trapping partner's house to spray her down for parasites, look her over more thoroughly, check for signs of illness, and get her settled on the glove. It only took three tries before she learned how to stand up on the fist. When we were satisfied that she was healthy and good to go, I loaded her up in the traveling box (called a giant hood) and took her home.

Standing on the glove for the first time.

Unfortunately, we never did get a male to come down for my fiancé. We're not giving up, though! He's been wonderfully supportive and I can't wait until he gets to experience this for himself.