Ember

When thinking about names I kept having fire come to mind. I saw a car last week with a fire fighter symbol license plate and the license was EMBER. That stuck in my head so Ember it is.

He has lost most of his fluff and his tail is almost fully grown. He is showing three black bars and the fourth will be coming very soon. His tail was looking kind of grimy and gross, kind of like a teenage boy's hair when they don't shower often. Yeah. So recently while feeding him out in the yard I brought a pan of water and set him in it after he was done eating. He started drinking and dipping his bum in the water pretty quickly. He didn't take a full bath but he sure did want his bum clean. He dried off in the sun afterward and now his tail looks gorgeous. I'll be making the bath a regular meal time event for him. My kestrels never touched the water, but then I was working with them mostly in the winter so perhaps they would have taken it if it wasn't so cold.

My main focus with Ember now is to get him completely comfortable eating on my glove. Each meal is loaded onto the lure and I present the lure to him while he's on a perch in the yard. He jumps right to it and after a minute I pick the lure up with him on it and sit in a chair while he eats his meal. If I'm quiet and don't move around a lot he's fairly content. But if I talk to him while he is eating he chirps at me (which sounds cute but really is the equivalent of "Don't annoy me").

I recently gave him a whole thawed starling to give him the chance to pluck and tear into it himself. He did well and knows the drill so that's checked off the list. Bella thought it was very interesting and came over to watch. She's usually afraid of the birds because they can make a lot of fuss some times. But she couldn't resist the interesting smells I guess. Ember didn't have a problem with her being there either.

One thing I should document for future is how to avoid tangled jesses. He has longer jesses on while he's still in training so it's easier to handle him, but he gets tangled in them easily. They wrap around his legs and it's just a mess. My friend told me to get a piece of tubing and slide it up the jesses to pull them together so they are "shorter" though they still retain the length. So instead of the jesses making a V shape from each anklet to the clip, it's a Y shape. The shorter free ends make it so he doesn't get tangled and the swivel doesn't bounce in between his jesses and get tangled up as easily. The piece of tubing I used was three inches of the straw from my boss's Dr. Pepper. How's that for cheap ingenuity?