My first kestrel carried really bad. I talked to my sponsor who said that if I can't get her to stop carrying, then I should train her to carry TO me, instead of AWAY from me. Apparently he had done this before with some merlins. I trained her to carry to me in the house, but I don't remember why I didn't continue her training to outside. I think I just gave up on the retrieval training, and stuck to flying starlings, so she couldn't carry. I really don't remember why I didn't continue the training to be honest.

Here's how I trained her to carry to me in the house. I took a frozen whole sparrow, and tossed it down a dead end hallway. She would bind to it, and I would be standing there, blocking her path to any place to carry other than to me. As she tried unsuccessfully to break into the frozen sparrow I would slowly approach her with a good hunk of visible meat (using a tough but fleshy hunk of meat, like the fleshy part of the wing, or the bottom half of a starling drumstick), calling her with my whistle. I would then tease her up onto my glove (with her carrying her sparrow of course) like you would when you first call a reluctant bird to come. The first couple times she is really only carrying the bird a couple inches, maybe a foot is all.

I would feed her the hunk of meat, as I sneak the frozen sparrow from her, and back up down the hall to where I started. When she finished her hunk of meat, I tossed the sparrow again, then repeated the process, trying to get her to drag the sparrow to me from a farther to farther distance. I would repeat the process maybe 5 or 6 times in a training session, if I remember right, and then feed her a good meal's worth at the end.

I did this until she would fly to the end of the hall, bind to the sparrow, then carry it all the way back to me without hesitation. Then I would test her in different parts of the house. If at some point she carried the sparrow somewhere else, I would then walk near her trying to call her down with the meat. If she stubbornly refused to come, I would turn off all the lights (you must do this at night, and in an area of the house where you can reach the places she might carry) and rob her of her kill, then start over.