Quote Originally Posted by RyanVZ View Post
when I was flying my falcons, ya know, real falconry.
Apparently, spell check didn't catch Ryan's error. He didn't mean "real" he meant "easy." Just thought I'd clear that up.

Okay, so here's the nutshell version of the 2 times I've attempted pulling chicks without imprinting them;

In the mid-nineties, I climbed a tree here in Maine and pulled a 26 day old female gos from her nest. At that time, I had two very close hawking buddies, and we all trained our birds together and helped one another quite a bit. We decided that she was too old to be raised and treated as a full-blown imprint, so I stuck her in a chamber that I had that allowed no view of people, or anything other than a stream and some woods. We watched her through a one-way mirror, and fed her through a food chute, and after she was hard-penned, we pulled her from the chamber, seeled her, and waked her for 2 or 3 days, and progressed through training her normally, as though she was a passage gos. She did great! My buddy Pete flew her on ducks for a few seasons and eventually started having big behavioral problems with her, so he transferred her to me for a change of routine, and she really pulled herself together. I hawked her on woodcock and squirrels for a few years and really enjoyed her, but noticed that all of her behaviors were totally in line with what you would expect from an imprint. Every falconer who ever met her assumed that she was an imprint, and I passed her on to Jimmy G in Rhode Island. He flew her for a year or two and then donated her to a breeding project. She was definitely an interesting bird. We thought we'd done everything we could to avoid imprinting, but over time, discovered that she displayed pretty much all of the bad behaviors that you would expect from a poorly trained imprint. I really enjoyed her, and she hunted well, but she was very dangerous to handle.

Most recently, I pulled a pair of merlins from the same nest at 16 days of age, and a friend raised them together in a chamber that he has. Food chute, etc.. After they were hard-penned, we pulled them out, seeled them, (to make hood training a smooth process) and trained them as you would train any chamber-raised longwing. Both birds worked out great. My female is a lovely little bird. Still hoods well, flies strong, very reliable (I've never had to pull out the receiver) kills game, handles nicely with good manners, etc.. I would definitely do it again. Actually, the experience has me thinking that from now on, instead of pulling eyass birds from the nest, I would prefer to let nature raise them, and then go in to the nest area and trap them once they've become branchers. It seems that you'd get the proverbial "best of both worlds" from this approach.