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Falconry – Bloodsport or Alternative Form of Birding?

10,000 Birds

Dirt hawking is a form of falconry that involves hunting rabbits and other small game with Harris Hawks (other hawk species also qualify). One of the primary reasons that these hawks make such excellent falconry birds is because they are one of only two raptor species (the other is the Galapagos Hawk ) that hunt cooperatively.

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The Queen

10,000 Birds

Just before Thanksgiving, 2010, a driver spotted a Red-tailed hawk sitting on a dead rabbit in the middle of the road. She wasn’t about to leave her rabbit, and the driver figured something was wrong, so he picked her up. She taught them how to hunt, and when they were released in the fall she stayed on her perch, dozing in the sun.

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How To Help A Baby Bird

10,000 Birds

If you cannot find the nest or it’s too destroyed, do not try and raise a chick this young. It’s illegal to raise wild birds (even orphaned ones) without state and federal permits. Some rehabbers even have surrogate ducks or geese that they can raise a lone chick with and teach it to survive.

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Listening to Falcons: The Peregrines of Tom Cade

10,000 Birds

Raised in and around the West Texas steppe country where temperatures reached 100 degrees with regularity, he began life as the Dust Bowl and Great Depression converged. Done properly, a young hawk is curtailed in a growing compulsion to fly greater distances and hunt for herself by a process sometimes called “manning.”

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Getting the Bill – Taste, Touch and Smell in Birds

10,000 Birds

Whilst catfish have around 100,000 taste buds, rabbits around 17,000 and humans approximately 9,000, birds rarely exceed 100 of these receptors. Aptly called the tube-nosed birds, on account of their raised and highly visible nostrils, these species are able to hone in on oceanic food from several miles away, based on smell alone.

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Comebackers

10,000 Birds

Not only were they a common bird, they were a common bird nearshore; indigenous peoples hunted them up and down the coast. Rabbits were introduced to the island by guano miners, which turned the previously verdant island into a giant sand dune; almost all vegetation was wiped out.

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What It’s Like to Be a Bird: A Review of the New Sibley Book

10,000 Birds

It is a book with a careful infrastructure, however (even though it doesn’t have an index), with references to one section from another, enabling the curious reader to go down structured rabbit holes, pursuing information on nesting or skeletal systems or feather structure throughout the book. copyright @2020 by David A llen Sibley.

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