The trap actually works...on females

This week I redesigned my trap. I cut apart the one I had and turned it into a half barrel shape. I also added many more nooses and put hot glue at the base of each noose to make them stand up straight. It looks formidable. :)

It's kinda messy looking right now. I need to reset some of them, untangle others, and replace a few we had to cut.

I went out with my brother yesterday during lunch hour and we didn't see much, only two birds. The first landed on and around the trap a few times but never got caught. The second one didn't land on it at all, just hovered a few times. Stinkers. I went back to the same spot after work was over and tried the first kestrel again. He was on the same pole. He gave me the bird, so to speak, and landed on the rain gutter of a house and plucked up a mouse. The next bird was a female. She landed on the trap too but didn't get caught. After a few tries she flew across the street and grabbed a mouse from about 30 feet up a tree. What's up with mice and high places? Weird.

This morning I took my friend Chris and his 11 year old son out with me at 8am. We got the trap under 8 birds and each one at least made approaches to the trap. 6 of them landed on the trap but none of them got more than slightly snagged. You could tell they were caught because they'd go to fly up and jerk sideways, but they always got away. When we retrieved the trap you could see that 5-6 nooses had been tripped. We spent 3 hours doing that and came home with nothing.

While we were out I called the nice biologist lady who helped me last weekend to see if I could stop by and see the trap she uses. She said she had to take off soon but to come by later and she'd send her husband Bill out with me to trap. They're both falconers. So after lunch I went to their house and they looked the trap over and approved the design and nooses, etc. That was nice to hear, but at the same time frustrating because I didn't catch 8 kestrels that morning.

Well, we went out and put the trap under 2-3 males and they did the same thing they did this morning; landed on it, danced around, flew off. Bill was scratching his head; couldn't figure out why they weren't getting caught. We continued along and set the trap out under a female. She hit the trap very quickly after we set it down and right away she was caught! Full on, going nowhere, flapping on the ground caught! We quickly drove over and I congratulate myself that I didn't squeal like a school girl, pee my pants, or even run around like a chicken with it's head cut off. I fairly methodically got my gear out of the trunk of the car and walked over and laid the towel over the bird. It immediately stopped moving. She had her right foot trapped by the nooses with one toe stuck inside the edge of the trap, gripping the wire.

Enter the demon mouse from hell...

Well I don't know if this mouse remembered that his partner was eaten by a kestrel last week or if he just went psycho, but he proceeded to gnaw off the toe that was hooked on the trap. What?! He was so aggressive, I couldn't believe it. I gathered the bird up and held its wings to its side and the one leg while Bill tried to remove the nooses from the other foot. She had a death grip on the trap and wouldn't let go. And all the while we're having to shake the trap to get the demon mouse away from the poor kestrel's toe. Finally we had to stand the trap on end so the mouse would be down low away from the bird and we got her off the trap. We checked out her toe; it was bleeding a bit, but wasn't too badly damaged.We hooded her and put a sock on her and we weren't sure if she was passage or haggard so we decided to take her back to the house and ask his wife. She looked her over and said she was pretty sure she was a haggard so we took a couple pictures and let her go.

I know this one is blurry but I at least get to show off the hood I made riding on a kestrel.

And here she is ready for flight. Happy hunting!

We decided to head out again and see if we could get one we could keep. We drove around quite a bit and didn't see much until we came back closer to his neighborhood which, in my opinion, is Kestrel central. We saw another female and put the trap out and barely had time to turn the car around and look at the trap when she was on it and caught. Maybe it's a female thing; we sure weren't catching males. We took her off the trap and she was marked the same way as the last one we released so we let her go too.

Here she is still snagged on the trap. Luckily she didn't have hold of it as you can see Killer is waiting right there to bite whatever he can get his nasty teeth into. (bottom right under the tail)

Goodbye pretty lady.