Moving On

The middle of June was the end of my two years as an Apprentice. I put in my request for the upgrade to General. I still haven't heard anything back but I'm going forward as if things are fine. They almost never get back to me on things; they are very understaffed it seems.

Meanwhile, my sponsor hatched a plan to have me take a Cooper's hawk brancher. His idea is that the young bird will not have developed its own hunting style yet so will be more apt to take to my style of hawking. It will also be old enough to not imprint which avoids a lot of problems if you're not prepared or experienced enough to work with an imprint.

So the last month I've been wandering around different canyons and foothills looking for likely places that a Cooper's hawk nest would be. Until today the most I had found was 3 old nests and a lot of nothing otherwise. The main problem is that so many people these days are posting no trespassing on their private property. In the past it wasn't that way but with all the law suits and liability issues people want to be covered. I can understand that. So in order to work within the law I've used the Utah County parcel maps online and identified the land owners and called a few to try and get trespass permission. The one big win was a mining company that owned a large swath of the foothills with lots of good trees. They were kind enough to allow me access. I only had a short time to explore one corner of their property and didn't find anything.

Last week I started working on a hood for the new bird. I got about half way done with it and had to let it sit. My wife at one point told me "You know, the reason you haven't found a bird is because you haven't finished your hood yet." Hmm. Ok. So I finished the hood Thursday evening. Today is Saturday.

My sponsor had been telling me about a spot of land he kept seeing that attracted his eye as a good Cooper's nest spot. I finally asked him to point it out to me today since I just couldn't figure out where he was talking about. It turns out it's not too far from home, has a fairly steep slope to climb up a series of deer trails (thank you deer!), across a meadow, and down the other side into a ravine or small canyon. Here's the fun part. I came off the meadow and just started down the slope when a female Cooper's hawk busted out of the tree tops yelling (kak-kak-kak-kak) at me all the while. Surprised the heck out of me! I was looking over the trees down in the canyon and she kept circling the area about a hundred yards wide and yelling the whole time. I continued walking toward the center of the circle she was flying and she got more and more agitated, flying closer to me and landing a few times nearby to yell at me. Knowing that the Cooper's is one of the more aggressive nest defenders I picked up a 4 foot branch and held it over my head and waved it around like a flag when she came by. Once she flew straight at me and only veered off about 5 feet away after I waved my arm at her. Mercy! Once I got down under the canopy she stopped coming at me and just circled around without yelling; but any time I was visible from above she let me have it.

I found the tree at the base of the slope. The nest is about 25 feet up and it's fairly climbable if you can get past the first 8 feet or so. I was really tempted to climb it but with the mother around and being alone, I didn't want to chance a fall from the tree. Plus I'm scared of heights. >.< So took a few pictures and headed home to recruit some help. I'll go by on Tuesday and see how they are progressing. If they're close enough I'll take one then, otherwise I'll target Friday.