Fraptorday: Weekly Raptor

And now for something completely humongous…

It’s the 2001 California Hawking Club annual meet, and one of the evening sessions featured a demonstration of restrained flight to food for purposes of keeping muscle mass and tone. Jamaica Smith chose to demonstrate this with her ferruginous hawk. The systematists are having an extended argument over whether the species is a large buteoine hawk or a small eagle. It’s still a lot of bird any way that gets resolved, and it really, really wanted the bit of rabbit on the floor. It’s likely that by poundage this exercise program bulked up Jamaica more than her bird. We were impressed, sitting there in the front row and having a bit of breeze from the the wingbeats.

Later on, Jamaica helped us find a good place to trap Harris’s hawks in Arizona when we came up with two out-of-state trapping permits. She flew her plane down from her home to meet us in Carefree, Arizona, and spent a day with us and her apprentice who lived there. The picture in the banner showing me with the backpack frame and two birds was made possible by Jamaica’s generosity, since those two birds were the ones we trapped on that trip.

The photographic data… Canon Pro 90 IS using the builtin popup flash… not pretty, but it got the job done.