Quote Originally Posted by Falcon Boy View Post
Hi Guys,
Hope everyones doing well. My season is going OK, working with a passage RT that I trapped late in the season. I'll get some pics of her up eventually.

Anyway I wanted some advice for next season. I am seriously considering imprint a cast of kestrels. I start my Masters program next year so the birds will mostly be flown in the summer with only a few days a week during school [3-5 winter vs 6-7 summer].

So here's what i was thinking so far, assuming I can get two kestrels. Raise them together, but imprint as I otherwise would. Plenty of exposure to humans, dogs, cars, etc.

Feeding is one thing I wanted some opinions on. My plan is to use quail as baggies as the birds grow. The reason is 4 fold. First and foremost, it teaches them that birds are food. Second, by the time they are full grown they should be killing nearly full size captive bred quail. I'm not talking the 9oz monsters, i'm talking about normal courtinoux [sp?]. This should give them the brain that they can kill larger birds. Third, it teaches them quail are food. more on this later. Fourth, i can get them very easily.

I am thinking about raising the birds together with one baggie so the birds work together to kill the bags in the hopes they will do the same on quarry.

So about the quail thing. I think that an imprint kestrel can take a quail. I'm not talking about grabbing it in the air on the flush or anything crazy like that. I think that if the quail are flushed and the birds will stick with them, once the quail put in the kestrels could grab them. Opinions? And please only from people who have flown kestrels. Also note i don't expect this to be a common place, i'm just thinking every now and again it might work. The primary quarry would be starlings and sparrows.

So, let the flaming begin
'It won't work!', 'what are you thinking,' 'Kestrels are too small!'

haha, just kidding.

nice work thinking out of the box, I like the idea. I haven't got any experience with kestrels and qual. But I do have my own imprint going right now and plan on clicker training him or her to have immense confidence in catching birds. My idea is to highly reinforce catching larger and larger birds, and never let the bird fail or loose, thus reinforcing his confidence. The police employ this similar technique with Dogs - though they don't really understand behavior theory- they know how to build drive and confidence as well as treating and maintaining the animal bond with a particular person through feedings and a never fail attitude.
Here is the idea:
Always set the bird up to win, and you will have a bird with a huge ego.
If you succeeded at EVERYTHING you did, you would never know what loosing felt like and would have a huge ego, and would try anything because you knew you would always succeed. :P
Now I haven't thought about it enough to come up with a step by step protocol for this desired behavior. But with the idea, i'm sure you could figure out something, create situation in which the bird always catches it's prey.
G luck and keep us up to date.

Cheers,