Feeding your mature Imprint Goshawk only quail?

I have a second year female imprint Goshawk Albidus.
As a chick- fed her only 8 week old Coturnix quail from rodenpro.com. Once I started entering her on baggies- she fed on sparrows, bobwhite quail, pheasant, rabbits. Once hunting successfully in the field- I transferred her over to blacktail Jackrabbit- as I would feed her up on kills + put a lot of meat in the freezer. Looking back through my notes and highlighting my failures… I noticed that her weight jumped around a bit (despite me trying to follow the McD II recipe). She face attacked a few times, and was pretty aggressive + loud. As the season progressed and she became more successful in the field- her behavior improved.

Since the moult – she is a completely different bird. Calm, quite, sweet. I took her up to about 1380/1400g through the moult on nothing but 8 week old coturnix quail. I have reduced her weight to 1250 today very slowly.

Question: for people hunting Jackrabbits
1. Does anyone only feed their imprint gos coturnix quail?
2. Does anyone mix quail and Jack?
3. If you only feed quail- what do you do with the Jacks? I could always give to my friend with an HH… but just checking to see how others solve for this

Trying to be spot on this year with weight control – much easier if I only feed one type of food as can predict her weight loss/hour

why give it away? Why not keep the jack it for the moult? or mix it 50/50

I fed a large mixture of cottontail, pheasant, duck, pigeon, jack, squirrel, day old chicks and rarely quail last season to my second year female gos. I guess after years of flying I have a good idea of relative richness of food, cottontail is very light, duck very rich etc., and feed accordingly. Usually I am pretty close to the wt. I expect. I don't have to worry much about aggression as my bird is parent reared, but I still tend to err to the high side and fly her fat more often than having her sharp. I like the idea of a varied diet, and I don't like the idea of buying food and letting carcasses go to waste. I do some shotgun hunting in addition to falconry and also use those carcasses for hawk food [I always shoot non toxic shot]. The vast majority of what my hawks eat comes from the wild.

Hi Noah...I try to fill my freezer to have a steady supply of wild game to feed throughout the moult. Rabbit heads are given to the birds and I rarely have to cope beaks. I also get muskrat carcasses from a local trapper and make this the mainstay diet, although I will not feed them to young eyasses. A varied diet is best in my book!

Noah,

There are 5 active hawkers here and during the molt we all feed 50% frozen quail and 50% jack. We have HHs, one Cooper's, and my gyr aplo hybrid.

Naturally we feed what is caught during the hawking season.

Harry.

All-
Very much appreciated. I guess I got the idea in my head from Paul Hofsommer’s video “Rose”. But I may have misheard or misinterpreted. In terms of different food choice and quality- McDermott has an interesting chapter in his book Accipitrine Behavioral Problems which speaks of a birds demeanor when feeding different “quality” foods. Again I may have misinterpreted his message- but sounded as if Rabbit lead to more aggression + weaker flights. Once I get the book back in front of me- I will reference the page #.

- Believe I will feed ½ rabbit ½ quail- and no carcass ever goes to waste.

Lastly – this chapter in McD’s book ABP- makes a mention of different specific diets requiring a subject bird to have the same hunting response at different weights. Ie. Rabbit allowed bird to be heavier, while quail required the bird to be sharper. Maybe has something to do with fat content in the food? I will provide a page # tonight.

Your mixing up cottontails and jacks, they provide very different qualities of food from one to the other.

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Originally Posted by NoahD

Question: for people hunting Jackrabbits
1. Does anyone only feed their imprint gos coturnix quail?
2. Does anyone mix quail and Jack?
3. If you only feed quail- what do you do with the Jacks? I could always give to my friend with an HH… but just checking to see how others solve for this

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I'll start by directly answering your question: My response is 4: feed something that my hawk has caught within the last week, with occaisional (less than 5%) suppliments of quail.

Jacks are not locally available, to the extent I have to drive out of state to get access to them, but before our state "endangered" them I used to hunt them a lot. They are by far my favorite food source. My hunting season menu consists of 80% cottontail with the rest primarily made up of duck and/or crow. About once a month

I am answering your questions a bit out of ignorance. I have been flying imprint goshawks since '98, but I only got half way through McDermott's first book and I have not picked up any of the others. I'll leave the literary criticisms for another discussion. ;)

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Trying to be spot on this year with weight control – much easier if I only feed one type of food as can predict her weight loss/hour

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Noah (that is your name right? you didn't sign your posts...),

You don't want to be spot on with weight control. At least not all the time. For one thing, without a little bit of variation, you wont get an idea of what the weight range really is. And food quality is by far the least of your worries in terms of predicting what the weight loss will be. In my experience, food quality does make a difference with what the weight will be, but the other variables (exercise level, time spent awake, temperature, fitness level, etc.) all make a much bigger difference.

One more thing - chuck the idea of precise weight loss/hour out the window. Its more of a guideline than a reality. You can calculate weight loss for a large time interval, like Harry's 22 hour method, but this dosnt mean that in any 1 hour slice of time your hawk has burned exactly 1/22nd of that weight. The reason for this is that there are a lot of factors that go into how much food is burned off that vary throughout the day, and as you indicated in your earlier post, those factors can change from one day to the next.

For example, goshawks go into torpor at night, and their metabolism cranks down considerably. I never have run the numbers, but they use less than 1/4 the amount of food. A hawk that is in the hood in a quiet location will go into torpor fairly quickly. Conversely, if you keep the lights on a hawk wont ever go into torpor and will burn a lot more food.

As another example, if you go hunting on day 1 and your bird smokes the first two jacks that flush in short sprints and then you go out hunting on day 2 and your bird has several burning 200 yard flights before it finally pulls down game, the energy expenditure is dramatically different even if all other variables stayed constant.

Its also not healthy to keep your bird at flight weight for extended periods of time. Their system will gradually get depleted of micronutrients and other resources, in a condition Pat Redig called "mid winter anemia". Its much better to give them a good gorge once every 7-14 days or so and give them (and yourself) a few days off while they come back down to weight. I spend several days hunting and let their weight build up, then gorge them and drop them back to weight over a 2-3 day period before starting over.

I guess the real bottom line I am getting at is expect weight to bounce around some. Use that to your advantage. Trying to control some of those variables helps a lot, but the variations in weight help you to find what the current flight weight of your bird is. You don't really care where the flight weight was a month ago, other than for historical reference.

Geoff-
Thank you for the response. Will start to think of 22 hour method as a guideline- not exact science. While hunting my imprint last year- I would feed her up on her first 10 jackrabbit kills. After that I would go for the occasional double and feed her only the heart and lungs on her first kill. She ended the season with 25 heads- which I was pleased as she was slow to gain success in the fall.
I took note of your reference to “mid winter anemia” – which makes a lot of sense. “Their system will gradually get depleted of micronutrients and other resources, in a condition Pat Redig called "mid winter anemia".”
Noah Drever

Jeff- sorry to confuse re rabbit vs. hare. Not sure exactly what McD was referring to- believe it was Cottontails. I have always understood Jackrabbit to be leaner than cottontail- made the assumption that they would have similar effects on the birds disposition- possibly exaggerated with hare as contains less fat?
Noah

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Originally Posted by NoahD

Jeff- sorry to confuse re rabbit vs. hare. Not sure exactly what McD was referring to- believe it was Cottontails. I have always understood Jackrabbit to be leaner than cottontail- made the assumption that they would have similar effects on the birds disposition- possibly exaggerated with hare as contains less fat?
Noah

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I haven't experienced other hare species, but jack rabbit is very rich food. Almost as rich as pigeon or duck. Cottontail on the other hand, is very light food. Jack is usually lean in terms of its fat content, but it is dark very nutrient dense flesh.

One other variable I just realized is that there is a lot of variation on nutrient content with the different parts of the animal. Feeding up on the legs of a cottontail, for example, is quite different from the back strap, or the heart/lungs, or the brain. Its important to feed the whole animal over the long term. A bird feed on nothing but legs is not getting a complete diet. That also makes it a challenge to be precise with making an exact weight at an exact time. Its easy to get close with some practice though.

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Originally Posted by Ross

I fed a large mixture of cottontail, pheasant, duck, pigeon, jack, squirrel, day old chicks and rarely quail last season to my second year female gos. I guess after years of flying I have a good idea of relative richness of food, cottontail is very light, duck very rich etc., and feed accordingly. Usually I am pretty close to the wt. I expect. I don't have to worry much about aggression as my bird is parent reared, but I still tend to err to the high side and fly her fat more often than having her sharp. I like the idea of a varied diet, and I don't like the idea of buying food and letting carcasses go to waste. I do some shotgun hunting in addition to falconry and also use those carcasses for hawk food [I always shoot non toxic shot]. The vast majority of what my hawks eat comes from the wild.

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Also, I think it would be nice to fly the same time every day,but the reality of my work schedule and variable weather conditions I often switch things up to be able to fly. Some days first thing in the morning, some days lunch hour and sometimes late afternoon. I adjust feeding accordingly, or sometimes adjust my flying schedule to what I fed. Like, if I reward a hard flight/ difficult quarry with a big crop I may wait 36 hours to fly. If weather is terrible late in the day, I may feed just a bit and fly in the morning etc. The 22 hr. schedule thing I think works best for people who need lots of regime in their lives. I like falconry being a less regimented part of my life.