I'll start by directly answering your question: My response is 4: feed something that my hawk has caught within the last week, with occaisional (less than 5%) suppliments of quail.Originally Posted by NoahD
Jacks are not locally available, to the extent I have to drive out of state to get access to them, but before our state "endangered" them I used to hunt them a lot. They are by far my favorite food source. My hunting season menu consists of 80% cottontail with the rest primarily made up of duck and/or crow. About once a month
I am answering your questions a bit out of ignorance. I have been flying imprint goshawks since '98, but I only got half way through McDermott's first book and I have not picked up any of the others. I'll leave the literary criticisms for another discussion.
Noah (that is your name right? you didn't sign your posts...),Trying to be spot on this year with weight control – much easier if I only feed one type of food as can predict her weight loss/hour
You don't want to be spot on with weight control. At least not all the time. For one thing, without a little bit of variation, you wont get an idea of what the weight range really is. And food quality is by far the least of your worries in terms of predicting what the weight loss will be. In my experience, food quality does make a difference with what the weight will be, but the other variables (exercise level, time spent awake, temperature, fitness level, etc.) all make a much bigger difference.
One more thing - chuck the idea of precise weight loss/hour out the window. Its more of a guideline than a reality. You can calculate weight loss for a large time interval, like Harry's 22 hour method, but this dosnt mean that in any 1 hour slice of time your hawk has burned exactly 1/22nd of that weight. The reason for this is that there are a lot of factors that go into how much food is burned off that vary throughout the day, and as you indicated in your earlier post, those factors can change from one day to the next.
For example, goshawks go into torpor at night, and their metabolism cranks down considerably. I never have run the numbers, but they use less than 1/4 the amount of food. A hawk that is in the hood in a quiet location will go into torpor fairly quickly. Conversely, if you keep the lights on a hawk wont ever go into torpor and will burn a lot more food.
As another example, if you go hunting on day 1 and your bird smokes the first two jacks that flush in short sprints and then you go out hunting on day 2 and your bird has several burning 200 yard flights before it finally pulls down game, the energy expenditure is dramatically different even if all other variables stayed constant.
Its also not healthy to keep your bird at flight weight for extended periods of time. Their system will gradually get depleted of micronutrients and other resources, in a condition Pat Redig called "mid winter anemia". Its much better to give them a good gorge once every 7-14 days or so and give them (and yourself) a few days off while they come back down to weight. I spend several days hunting and let their weight build up, then gorge them and drop them back to weight over a 2-3 day period before starting over.
I guess the real bottom line I am getting at is expect weight to bounce around some. Use that to your advantage. Trying to control some of those variables helps a lot, but the variations in weight help you to find what the current flight weight of your bird is. You don't really care where the flight weight was a month ago, other than for historical reference.
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