Jeff,Originally Posted by PHILADELPHIA CITY HAWKER
Excellent comments.
I really wanted to whup on what Jack said, but you gave me a great starting point to do this.
Its very tempting for me to call Jack’s statements a misunderstanding, but that would not be accurate. He understands accipiters, very well. He has been working with them a long time. McDermitt too. And I could of course add other names to that list.
But the mental model that Jack is presenting is incomplete. Same goes for the often quoted model used in the recipie.
Jack, and many others describe accipiters as being “solitary” or “non-social” animals. This is coming from a bianary mental model used to describe the social lives of animals, where one group does not prominently engage in social interactions, and another group does. This mental model is not inaccurate, but it IS very limiting, and leads one to have an incomplete understanding of the behaviors one sees.
I fell into the same trap myself, and only gradually and even reluctantly came to a more complete understanding. I remember a time when I was raising my first goshawk, who spent a lot of time with my daughter who was about 2 at the time. I was sitting in the shade in my back yard with a couple old time falconers and my ~40 day old goshawk on a summer afternoon when my daughter got up from a nap and came out to see “her” bird. My goshawk reacted with excitement as soon as my daughter came into view, and my falconer pals were really surprised by that.
Over the next several years, I gradually noticed the evidence before my eyes. What I have come to understand is that its much more accurate to think of accipiters, and indeed all higher animals, as being social animals. Some animals are more social than others, but all are social to one degree or another. Rather than think in bianary terms (social OR Solitary), its more accurate to think in terms of a sliding scale between very social and less social. On one extreme of this scale are creatures like sheep which have a complete mental break down if they are alone for any period of time, and on the other are creatures like mantids that always eat each other.
Accipiters are certainly less social than most other animals we are in contact with. I’d even go so far as to say they are the least social raptors. But they still are social animals, with social urges and instincts to interact with others of their kind. Accipiters don’t need companionship on the terms that you or your dog do, but they do crave and even need it to some degree at some points of their lives, PARTICULARLY the entire time before and shortly after dispersal. After reading a number of scientific publications on goshawks I was quite surprised at just how social they really are.
And to get back to the point original raised a couple years ago… Raising an eyass in isolation is not going to yield predictable results. The young hawk will have strong urges for companionship and social interactions with its parents/siblings that will not be expressed, and will not run their course, and then those urges will be transferred onto the falconer when its taken up. How that eventually plays out will depend entirely on how skilled the falconer is at interacting with those behaviors and/or dumb luck. Scott’s description of the results from raising his goshawk in post #8 are EXACTLY what I would expect.
Chamber rearing – where the baby hawk is raised by another "parent" hawk – is something all together different. Crèche rearing is also something different because the hawk can socialize with "siblings".
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