Stress!

Witch Hazel is a demon. I was actually thinking of naming her Tisiphone which is the name of one of the three furies in Greek mythology. The name means "vengeful destruction". Yeah. I'm still keeping a look out for the Baron around the area. Please come back!

I will say some good about her. She is a very quick learner and she has ninja skillz. On the second day she learned to return to my glove when she bates away. The Baron never learned that. She can jump up and turn around in mid air and land back on the glove in the opposite direction and throw you a glare that will tear a scream of fear from your throat. On the second day she flew 4-5 feet to me for food. Very quick progress compared to my slower pace with the Baron.

However...

Each morning when I go to get her out of the mews she bates away from me and gets ready to ninja my brains out. Then I have to slide my hand along the leash to her so she doesn't fly onto my head and then she spends a little time hanging upside down until she decides she wants to stand on my glove. It's like she resets each night and in the morning we start all over again. She's also very difficult to get onto the scale to weigh her. Today I tried to get her to fly a little distance to me, about like what she did the second day. She wouldn't do it that far so we had to basically start over and work up the distance. She's just so inconsistent. When I feed her she's careful enough and doesn't rip it from my fingers; she just takes it gently. But she's ready to bite you any other time. My patient animal whisperer daughter worked with Hazel a bit today to get her to let you stroke her belly. She made a little progress. I think with repeated work she'll get there. But for now she perfectly fits the description I heard of a hawk's mentality toward the falconer: feed me, fly me, or leave me alone!

I noticed that a couple of the scales on the top of her feet are white and asked my sponsor about it. He told me to put some sort of cream on it to keep it moist and clean so I used some anti-bacterial cream to make sure there was no infection starting. Of course to do this I needed to hood her so she wouldn't bite me as I touched her feet. Getting a hood on her is next to impossible without a major tantrum from either her or me. At this stage in the game I have to grab her from behind around the hips with her wings held against her back and keeping her feet below my hand. Then it's a matter of timing the bites to get the hood below her open mouth and onto her head. Mercy. I got the hood on her and expected her to be a wet noodle like the Baron was. Oh no. Not even close. She immediately transformed into the Tasmanian Devil and blindly break danced her way onto my bare hand where she clawed and bit me, drawing blood in three places. Dag, yo!

After we got through all that my sponsor came over to look at her feet. He said that the white scales were loose, probably from the constant bating and the leather I used for her anklets was too stiff and thick. He gave me a small scrap of kangaroo leather to use for her anklets. Yeah. That meant I had to hood her again AND wrap her up so she didn't go all raptor on me. I felt bad having to do it but it was for her own good so I could fix her equipment. So I wrapped her up and changed her anklets and when I was done she was shaking, the poor dear. I put her in a dark room for a bit to calm down while I finished some new jesses I had braided yesterday. These would be lighter weight and easier to slide in and out of the anklets (so I thought). Of course now there was one more drama to perform: changing out the jesses. Theoretically this should be easy, but the ones that she had on were thick leather and didn't slide through the grommet very easily and were very hard to get out. And then putting the new ones in was additional drama and all this with no hood. At the end of the day we were both worn out and stressed and just needed to chill. I fed her a good meal as recompense for the poor treatment she got at my inexperienced blundering hands and put her in her mews for the night. Hopefully we can be better friends tomorrow.