Everything goes well imprinting until it's time to reduce weight for training. At this point, your bird undergoes many attitudinal and hormonal changes as it seeks to understand the meaning of hunger and the methods it can pursue for assuaging the dreaded feeling.
Unfortunately for falconers, these methods often include tactics we find less than satisfactory. Such as harnessing their voice-box to beg for food at octaves too great for the decibel scale to even measure, or by discovering that hunger can be transferred to anger which can make for an interesting human reaction as their foot is grabbed or finger bitten, or for an even more interesting reaction as the unfortunate bird-dog in the proximity is given a sound trouncing.
The remedy for these unwanted and seemingly unwarranted behaviors is of course, training. The now hungry and frustrated young raptor will find flight, the lure, and its initial baggies as avenues for releasing its pent-up aggression, inadvertently also learning its role in life.
The first few free flights will often appear to the falconer and any unfortunate bystander to be a haphazard cacophony of exasperated pandemonium, with nothing to show for it but a few cool new scars, a sweat stained shirt, and a bird dog that is now bird-shy. However for the falcon, it is often an epiphany laden experience, filled with far more learning than is quite realized.
The falcon begins learning things such as the principles of flight, how to gain lift, how to bank and turn, how to descend, etc. The falcon also learns what wind is, and that it means you can't open your wings all the way on a turn, yet, or it will bring you away from the falconer and food. The falcon begins learning how to read its environment, its brain filtering massive amounts of visual information as its powerful eyes and newfound height allow it to rapidly scour the training field. Its sensory receptors are on overdrive as it discovers wind assistance and resistance as well as perhaps micro-thermal effects. The amount of physics and mathematics the bird is instinctively harnessing to calculate the speed and descent rate necessary in current wind conditions to successfully contact the lure is mind-blowing.
Particularly zesty of the family Falco is the Falco mexicanus, or Prairie Falcon. My good friend Caleb Stroh and I, among many other brave souls this eyass season, each pulled a female Prairie from nests located within a quarter mile from each other. Interestingly, we pulled his for the calm demeanor of the parents near the nest site, and mine for the darkness of the parents, and Caleb ended up with one of the darkest Prairies I've seen but also quite vocal, and the one I pulled from the "dark nest" ended up being standard Prairie lightness but the quieter of the two.
Anyways.
We raised these birds together and our first free flights revealed a lot about their individual personalities. One was excited to fly and quickly took to it, the other was much more inclined to access the food by the most efficient means possible, even if that meant landing on the ground by the falconer and begging.
The desire to fly by one resulted in a juvenile bird flying perhaps too high and too far, while the desire to not fly by the other resulted in a short flight and a refusal to give it another go.
They're learning, so far so good.
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