[QUOTE=Nimure;305702

It seems like sometimes it works okay, and sometimes it doesn't. What is the difference in hand feeding that makes one bird great and another a screamer?[/QUOTE]


Concentrate on what you need now. If you are an apprentice you will not have an imprint as the birds you will be working with will be passage and way past the point of imprinting.

To answer you question, kind of, no one KNOWS for sure what does or does not produce a good imprint. Some, including myself, have had good imprints and horrible ones. A falconer can use the same methods to imprint two birds and have two completely different outcomes. Imprinting is as much luck and experience as it is skill or longevity. It is also a huge undertaking to explain it with no frame of reference. There are tons of threads here on imprinting, read all of them. By that time you will know what we all know, not much.