NEWSLETTER NO 3 CHRISTMAS 2008 Edited by Jemima Parry-Jones MBE
INTERNATIONAL CENTRE FOR BIRDS OF PREY NEWENT, GLOS, GL18 1JJ EMAIL JPJ@ICBP.ORG
WWW.ICBP.ORG
NATURE IS THE BANK ON WHICH ULTIMATELY ALL CHEQUES ARE DRAWN
R O S F E RD L I C B A E R I H M T — ND ! ! ! A D T E V EN A S W E N
Merry christmas to All and the Happiest of New Years
Yes its true, a last minute miracle, its incredible, its wonderful and I, the birds, the dogs and all those who love the Centre and have been hoping like hell that it will have a future, have an amazing family to thank for it. The Chenevix-Trench family have stepped in at the last minute to help to buy the Centre at Newent, so that the birds here at Eardisland can have a proper home again. I hope that over time many of you will meet the family and they you, because I am very lucky to know some wonderful people. Its been a very tough time, with some very unpleasant happenings, but also some great friends made both in the US and here. Meeting the ChenevixTrench family within days of failing made the difference and we will have a long term relationship on into the future together, long I hope after I have repaid their generosity. When I returned from the US it was hard to get excited, because I knew what I was facing. I knew the struggle it would be to start again and that financially it was going to be very very difficult. I did exactly what I tell other people not to do, I had a collection of 170 birds, for a bird of prey centre, and that is the wrong end to start. You need to obtain the birds absolutely as the last part, once everything else is in place, but sadly I did not have that option. Many of you have said over the last couple of years that you were convinced I would manage and get back on my feet in this life long career that I have had. And I have to admit that there have been times when I have wondered how on earth you thought I would do it! To have that support has been wonderful and I thank you. There is a huge hill to climb, the world is in a financial crisis and its going to be tough. There is a ton of work to get the
Centre back to where it was, and even more to pay back those that are helping in the outset. It is not all going to happen quickly but with help from you and others and a tremendous amount of very hard work it will happen. I can’t wait to get started, and you will forgive me if I do many things at the run! We will be short staffed for the first couple of years as we are going to run everything on a shoe string. So please bear with us if emails do not get answered as quickly as they might and the phone is not always answered by a real person. Just by visiting you help us, by joining as a member, by volunteering, by donating funds or equipment, all of this helps, and the moral support of knowing you are there will make the difference in the hard times.
SO WHAT IS NEXT? - NEXT WE OPEN FEB 1ST 2009!
Help!!!
We have to get all the enclosures cleaned and disinfected to move the birds in. There are repairs and renewals to do. Perches to re do, signage to get done. The gardens need work, the paths need a lot of work. The Car Park needs to be cleared and tidied. All the enclosures need to be painted inside and out, the two flats need to be emptied, cleaned and redecorated. I want to spruce up the shop. Birds need to be got out, jessed up and handled. Mowing needs to be done, the wood needs to be thinned. The hedges need to be laid, etc etc...... I am not expecting to do all this in one month, just most of it! But I will have space in the house if people want to come and stay. It will not be very warm as I will not be spending on heating. I can’t have people’s dogs or birds as it is going to be very busy, plus my poor dogs need to have a life without stress for a bit, they have had a tough time of it. I also need a team of people over at Eardisland once the birds are moved to take down and de-nail all the timber so we can use it again at Newent. If you want to help, just give me a ring on my mobile which is 07871 749250 or email and come and join the fun - Yippee!!
THE
BREEDING SEASON
Having failed to hatch the early Griffon Vulture eggs, which I was not surprised about, but they were both fertile, we were very pleased to have our first babies hatch with their parents. Although obviously breeding Eurasian Kestrels is not staggeringly interesting or special, it is when you have kept the parents indoors for 10 months with no UV light, and when they have travelled 3600 miles within the last year. She laid six eggs, hatched five babies and reared them nicely. We handreared two as we wanted some extra tame ones for flying in the indoor flying hall next year. Incidentally I have to tell you
year before were two Yellow-billed Kites who are named after my South Carolina experience to remind me of how wonderful the executive director and the Board were to me. In the end we have kept two kestrels one barn owl, and we have been given a lovely Lanneret, and a rather less lovely peregrine. That is actually a little unfair to her, because she is beautiful, but the screaming she does is close to unbearable. I have hoped that with all the noise she would at least fly well. Sadly to date she flies appallingly badly. She and her sister were spotted on a drugs raid, but by the time the PWLO came the birds had disappeared. They turned up a couple of days later on a hotel and were rescued by Raptor Rescue, sent to a friend of mine, who assessed them and so did a vet and they are classed as non releasable. I was sort of hoping that the one who came to me and was quiet on arrival might be releasable, but having trained and flown her, the answer is most definitely no. You might be interested if I explain the problem of releasing imprint birds back to the wild. To understand the problems you have to know that normally any bird ends up wanting to breed with what it thought its mother was. Hence Blackbirds breed with Blackbirds and not sparrows and so on.
that the photo is a cheat, the babies and the eggs are not related!! The eggs were laid (all seven of them!) by Sole the Albino Kestrel, pictured here below. She may not be a white Gyr Falcon, but she is convinced that she is huge and very very important. And rightly so.
If you hand rear a bird in the wrong way (and there are right ways to do it) you will imprint it badly on humans. To the point where they will attack other birds of prey, including their own species, they never grow up because they never become independent, they scream, mantle, can be very aggressive and generally are not nice to deal with. If you release them in a fat condition they may well be
wild and quiet, but the second they run short of food and get hungry they will tend to look for humans to feed them. If by chance they do make it in the wild, being aggressive they can take and hold territories but will not pair up, and so stop a potential pair from utilising that territory and breeding. For this reason and many others it is not a good idea to release them.
We chose a theme for the names for the birds this year or at least our vet Martin Flamank did—motorbikes!! We missed out on last year, and the only two birds that I kept to fly the
This is she—Mito very beautiful, flying at 1010 grams or in real money 2lbs 3 and a half ounces!! She is so fat you can’t even find her keel bone, and still she screams. I only hope she improves in flying and stops looking like an airborne crab. I felt slightly better about her when I phoned Bob to find out how the other bird, her sister was doing— noisy although not as noisy as mine I think, ‘And Flying?’ I asked—dreadful, he said, (although he has not seen Mito!!) We have also been given a male Ferruginous Buzzard.
would have been wrong to turn them away. This year so far we have had brought in, either from the public or vets, two Barn Owls, two Tawny Owls, one Sparrowhawk, one Buzzard, two Peregrines if you count the imprint and a Hobby. The Sparrowhawk did not survive, the Tawny Owls, Buzzard and one of the Barn Owls were released, the Hobby will now have to wait until the spring as it is too late for him to get fit and migrate and he and one of the Peregrines have both been shot. Why anyone would be stupid and moronic enough to shoot a Hobby heaven alone knows, its tiny and insectivorous apart from the breeding season when they catch small birds. These X-rays show the juvenile female peregrine. The shot is still in her, and she really has been doing very well. Alasdair trained her, and she flew extremely well, she looked a tiny bit odd when flying toward you, but twisted and turned after the lure with no problems. We had arranged only this week for her to go up to North Wales to a falconer who was going to hunt her for the rest of the winter and then release her, she was going in four days. However she made the choice herself and released herself this week. We have thousands of starlings redwings, field fares, pigeons and crows eating the tons of fallen apples here, and when a flock flew up in front of her that was it. These large flocks of swirling birds are like waving a £20 note in front of a child, the birds just can’t resist. Even the young lanner I have been training has been trying to catch them, so much so that I had to ground him this week, until the apples are finished and the flocks have moved on.
INJURED WILD BIRDS Although we have not really been in a position to take in injured birds, nevertheless some have arrived and it
Well the Peregrine was stooping to Alasdair’s lure, one of the flocks must have been disturbed and flew, and she literally changed in a second from a stooping to the lure bird, to a ‘I remember what this is all about’ bird and she disappeared off after the flock. We lost sight of her quickly and because we have been flying her with no bell or telemetry, just in case she did go, we were not able to track her.
Alasdair spent several hours looking for her and swinging a lure, and I flew the other Peregrine in case it would bring her in. But no sign, and I suspect she shook herself and said ‘OK I am off now!’ There is a lot of food around at the moment. There are tons of silly tame pheasants in the fields around us, lots of flocks of pigeons eating the new shoots and plenty of flocks of small birds, so although this cold snap is not what I would have chosen for her, hopefully she will do well and survive.
THEFT AND DECEPTION In the 169 birds that I brought back from South Carolina, only four of them were birds that I had bred over there, and Theft and Deception, the two Yellow-billed Kites were two of those. I hand reared them as I wanted to try training a pair together that were tame to start with. Kites in general are tricky birds to train as they can be very nervous and suspicious, so I had hoped that hand rearing them would get over that problem. Sadly I could not properly test that theory as I was not allowed to handle and train them while in South Carolina, so as soon as we were able we got them out this year. Generally they both behaved like parent reared birds, not surprisingly as they had not been handled at all in two years, and to a certain extent they still behave that way, apart from Theft being noisy. Theft came on very quickly and was soon flying loose and now is better than Lambrusco, our usual working YBK. He flies high, catches well and comes into the fist promptly. So much so that he has flow free at nearly every external demonstration I have done this year. Deception proved more difficult, and once loose which took much longer than Theft, he tended to go and sit on the ground under the apple trees—not a scintillatingly interesting demonstration. So we took him back to square one and started again. By the end of the season he improved, catching and feeding on the wing and staying airborne for a longer period. So we have high hopes for him next season after he has had a good moult. We have tried Theft and Lambrusco together and they fly brilliantly, but Lambrusco will not allow Theft to sit on the same perch. I have only tried Theft and Deception together once and Deception is not ready for that yet. Theft did some excellent demonstrations this year at the various shows, and I was very pleased with him. So far, luckily they don’t live up to those they have been named after, thank goodness!
VARIOUS SHOWS
THROUGH THE
SUMMER
As I thought, there would be people in my long lists that I forgot to thank for all their support and help, one was Bob Dalton, who very kindly organised three weekend flying demonstrations for me this year, including the Falconers Fair all run by Ron Morris. I was a little concerned as I knew that many of the birds had not been flown for nearly four years, and that is a long break, I also knew that I did not have the perfect feather condition that we used to aim for at Newent. However, six weeks before the first show, we had finally moved all the birds and built a temporary weathering so out came three falcons, three kites, three eagles and two Harris Hawks. The Saker finally got grounded as he got too independent for this site at this time, and he was replaced with another Saker—who did the same damn thing! The Lanners improved hugely over the summer and at no point let me down. Of the three Yellow Billed Kites, two did demonstrations all summer and London the Harris Hawk, who refused to fly with any other male Harris Hawk, did well in most of the
demonstrations. Chalky (elderly Tawny Eagle) needed more work than we have been able to give him this year, but both Hard Tackle and Hare the Indian Tawny Eagles have done us proud. Both did fairly well at the Falconers Fair, where in fact the weather was not wonderful, they managed OK at the next one—which was a Game Fair at Harewood house in Yorkshire, and hellish windy, we had 60 mph gusts and on the second day my A frames kept blowing over! There we had the added bonus of at least 1—5 wild Red Kites flying during the demonstration, but the wind on the last day made it all a bit tough. This year it was the 50th anniversary of the CLA Game Fair and I was delighted to be asked to be there and give the main ring demonstrations, in front of Blenheim Palace—a pretty magnificent setting as you can see. It was hot as hell, but the birds did superbly and I was particularly delighted when I was offered clothing sponsorship by an Australian sporting Clothing company called Tuk-Tuk, who really appreciated the way the birds flew and the interaction between bird and human. Which as has been said before is similar to the sort of relationship that natural horsemanship requires between horse and human. They have some super clothing. It was a pleasure to fly at the Game Fair and indeed all the other shows, and what was so nice was to see old friends and have them come up and say they were pleased I was back. Also the comments from old friends and people who I had flown birds for before, prior to my leaving the UK. Add in of course the settings, there is nowhere like the UK for stunning settings to fly the birds. Below is a lovely email I received after the CLA Game Fair.
“Over the 20 or so years that I've been attending the game fair I've seen your demo on a number of occasions (as well as at your old Newent place). It's true that familiarity can breed apathy. It's also true that losing something you take for granted really opens your eyes to it's true worth. So can I just say that all was well with England again, watching Parry Jones back home and flying at the game fair. I saw exactly the same as I've always seen only this time I cherished every wing beat of the demo and saw it for what it always has been - unbelievable skill and mastery. It was taken away but now it's back. England should be proud. Good luck with the new venture and don't go buggering off again woman.” Those sorts of comments make the whole thing very worthwhile.
The Little Owl In the UK we have five species of native owls, the Tawny Owl, which is the commonest and the largest, the Barn Owl, the Short-eared Owl, the Long-eared Owl and the Little Owl. On rare occasions there are Snowy Owls found on the Northern Isles of Scotland, but no breeding has been recorded since 1975. Of those five species the Little Owl, normally found in Europe is technically not native, it was introduced into the UK. Although they were supposedly to be found in Britain about half a million years ago, they disappeared again until releases at the end of the 1800s. The first successful release was of 40 birds in Kent, following that a larger number of Dutch birds were released in Northamptonshire, with more releases in Hampshire, Hertfordshire and Yorkshire, which were successful as well. This little bird was not a threat to other species as it filled a niche not taken by native predators. It has spread until it is found through much of England and Wales. Sadly numbers have declined in the last decade, with an approximate UK population of 7000 pairs. Why – possibly lack of good nest sites, and a probable lack of insects for feeding as they too are declining due to pesticides and herbicides and modern farming practices. It is a farmland bird, often seen in the evenings or early morning sitting on fence posts and telegraph poles, in a good hunting position. It feeds mainly on insects, worms, small mammals, and small birds, but is a voracious hunter and has been seen to catch baby rabbits, which are almost bigger that the Little Owl itself. Sitting tall and thin and then short and fat, it ‘still hunts’ from posts and tree stumps. Nesting in cavities in trees, buildings walls, and even under discarded sheets of corrugated iron. When seen in flight it has an undulation motion, flapping fast and climbing and then a few seconds of gliding and dropping only to flap again. Although when chased by a Sparrowhawk it is all flapping and no gliding. We have trained only one Little Owl and to watch it flying was a pleasure. I took a pair to the US, but the female died over there. I brought the male back and I have to say if I was going to name him Houdini would be appropriate, he has escaped into the café barn more times that I want to think. He has spent at least ten days loose in the main barn and managed to get out of three different enclosures, bearing in mind that we are using temporary housing now, and not the most expensive of materials. However he has behaved in a much less ambitious fashion recently and we are hoping that he has decided against leaving us. All we have to do now is find a suitable female for him and hope they will breed. We used to get a few brought in from the wild when I was at Newent, and we released them back wherever possible. They are one of the easiest to release because if you fit up a light bulb outside their enclosure you can attract a ton of insects for them to catch and all you have to do is check their pellets and you can tell exactly when they are ready for release, which makes for an easy bird to manage. It’s a real pleasure to see Little Owls in the wild, sitting on poles or posts, so watch out for these little birds and enjoy them when you get the chance before they flit away into the twilight.
Merry Christmas to All Thank You Chenevix-Trench Family