Originally Posted by
blackfalcon
I would be interested in hearing about the flight style of your Anatums, i have seen a few over here but none flown.
Cheers for now
Chris S
Both of my birds are the rocky mountain type of Anatum. About the only thing they have in common is that they are pretty aggressive hunters and they both seem to hit pretty hard.
I have to fly the male several times a day at least 5 days a week to keep him motivated, but when he is in really good condition, he gives a nice classic style flight, waiting on for a long time anywhere from 400 feet to out of sight right overhead. He has taken a lot of different kinds of ducks as well as partridge, pheasant and quail. I try not to fly him at Mallards because he hits them so hard, he is sore for a couple of days. Maybe someday he will learn to take only head shots on the bigger ducks. He's not as fast as the female but one time, when the dog was pointing a covey of partridge, the male Peregrine saw a flock of pigeons flying about 1/4 mile away. He was able to climb up above them and stoop and kill one. I have seen him do that type of thing with flocks of different kinds of birds.
The female always tries hard no matter what condition she is in. On ducks, she waits on very well but on game birds, where she can't see the game, she wanders around the sky, even with a dog on point. She has been lost twice; once for 2 months and once for 5 months. On the 2 month trip, she was picked up over 1,000 miles away. On the 5 month trip, she was picked up 700 miles away. Since her last time in the wild, she seems much more focused and skillful and her average pitch seems to be about 600 to 800 feet. She seems to be pretty fast. One time when I released her to hunt ducks, she took off climbing straight away. I had to watch her with binos. She flew out and rounded up two small flocks of Canada Geese, herded them together and chased them back to the small lake where the ducks were and intimidated them into the water right in front of me. Then she took a pitch and when I flushed the geese she tagged one in the head but not hard enough to make it fall all the way to the ground. She had never bothered geese before and I think she was just feeling them out.
Another time when she impressed me with her speed and endurance was when I was using her at my job at the air base. There is a ditch right next to the runway that never freezes and when it is really cold, a lot of northern Mallards congregate on it. One morning, the temperature was about 0 degrees F and the wind was blowing about 15 mph and there were about 100 ducks on the ditch. The falcon had killed some of the ducks in that flock before and they didn't want to leave the ditch. They would just fly down the ditch and when the falcon would start to stoop, they would dive back into the water. The falcon finally got tired of this and came down to about 15 feet and circled off downwind. When the ducks felt safe, they took off upwind. When the ducks were up about 100 feet, the falcon went after them. I thought she was goofy but she caught up with them and worked her way up into the flock, selected a duck and grabbed it by the foot. Since she wasn't going much faster than the duck, she couldn't flip it to hang below her and they just tumbled all the way to the ground and really made the snow fly when they hit. She had tried things my way and when that didn't work, she did it her way. That type of flight isn't good for a falcon's pitch but I was being payed to get rid of the ducks.
Neither bird is perfect, but they are Peregrines.
Reply With Quote