Killer Instinct

Warning: This post contains pictures of a red tail hawk on a kill.  I'll try not to post anything too graphic, but if in doubt, skip this post.

Isabeau got her first squirrel!!!  *Happy dance!*  Okay, just had to get that out.  Now to tell about it!
In my last post, I reference the dance between the falconer and the hawk in the field.  Sometimes the bird changes steps on you so quickly you have no choice but to follow.  As much as I would like to say that I took the lead for Isabeau's first catch, I'd be lying if I did.  She was placed in the top of a tree at the end of a stand of trees.  The area we were in had an open area on the right and another stand of trees on the left.  I turned left and continued walking toward the next stand of trees.  However, I didn't hear her bells when I expected, so I turned around to see what she was doing.  Rather than watching me, she had flattened herself until she was parallel with the ground and her wings were out.  Before I registered what was going on, she was diving toward the ground away from us! We all took off running and as I came around a bend, we saw her in the grass tumbling around with a ball of gray fur.  She had caught a squirrel!  I think I vaguely remember shouldering my fiance out of the way like some kind of football star about to win the Super Bowl so that I could get to her.  She was stomping and grabbing and looking around rather than at the squirrel.  When she saw me tearing toward her, she lowered her hackles and looked straight at me like she was asking what now!  I saw that it was still alive and that it had its mouth on the back of her leg.  Squirrels can do major damage to a hawk's legs and feet with their teeth, so my first priority was to get it off of her.  Fortunately, it had just grabbed a mouthful of fur.  I quickly dispatched it and as soon as it stopped fighting her, she relaxed, dropped her wings, and began to eat.

A well-manned bird.

 The amazing thing about this is that it's really, really common for them to do what's called mantling over a kill.  When they mantle, they spread their wings out to protect their catch from being taken away.  It's a testament to how well-manned she is and how confident she is that I'm not going to steal her food that she didn't mantle over it.  She didn't try to grab me with her feet to ward me off.  She let me touch it and her and didn't react at all.  My fiance, a falconer friend of ours who had come to watch her fly, and I were all laying on the ground at her level and she didn't react.

Happy hawk, happy falconer.

For the first few kills, most falconers allow the bird to "crop up" which is when they eat until they're full.  Full for a raptor is a little bit different from full with other animals.  Raptors (as well as some other birds) don't have to worry about their stomach getting full because they have an expandable storage sac built in called the crop.  When they eat, the crop fills up and it empties as they digest the food in their stomach to make room.  So I let her eat until she was done (about half of the squirrel!) and then I traded her off of the kill onto my glove with another piece of meat.  She came right to me and even allowed me to pick the remainder of the squirrel up and hold it for a picture without protest. My fiance is a deer hunter and he said that the tradition when you kill your first deer is to paint your face with the blood of the kill.  It's something about respecting the life force of the animal and claiming yourself as a hunter. I would have to get him to clarify sometime when my adrenaline isn't through the roof.  Anyway, he rubbed squirrel blood on my face. 

Partners.

It'll take some time for that to digest and for her weight to normalize again, so she'll get a few days off to just relax.
I'm so proud of her!  She is fierce!