The magic of a new season is always so alluring for me. I often feel like a kid imagining all the possiblilites of a brand new season. Trying to decide what bird I am going to fly and what my season goals are. This year is no different. I have raised a beautiful female Harris Hawk that is now catching jack rabbits in California! She is so beautiful and extremely nice. I trained that female HH up until she was ready to take game and then sold her to a young fellow in California and then trained another passage bird for a friend. After all of that, I caught a passage RT for myself and hunted him this season. He caught 30+ squirrels, a tropical tree rat, a sparrow and a woodcock off of my new Drahthaar's(Minka) point. I only hunted the RT for a couple of months total. He was a very fast bird with very small feet. He lost many, many squirrels, but he could get to them as good as I have ever seen.

I sold my little male dachshund this year. He won his Field Championship in the minimum of 3 trials!

Minka, my Deutsch Drahthaar is turning out to be a great dog. I really like this breed of dog. She has been quite a help even though I was already hawking when I got her at 8 weeks old. She was helpful on squirrel, rabbits, quail, woodcock and ducks.

I have a new Gyr/Prairie falcon that I will be working on the rest of the season. He has a pitch problem, but has caught a couple of dove the year before. I don't really expect to take much game with the falcon this year, but I expect to learn a lot. He is really going up well now which was my main goal this year with him. He will hit anything I toss from cock pheasant down to a 40gram bird. The season is almost over and I may end it without him catching wild non-bagged game, but I have established a good working relationship with him and learned a great deal myself about those pointy winged things. He also no longer has a pitch problem. He will go out of sight almost every time he is released. If he doesn't go out of sight, he still goes WAY UP! I sold him to someone as a big game hawk. He wasn't interested in small game, but I can't imagine how great he will be on ducks and pheasants!

I stopped flying my RT early this year, so when I look at the numbers, I am a little disappointed. However I did train a juvie HH, juvie RT(for a friend) and then my own. Also, what I learned from the G/P priceless. It has prepared me for my new tiercel peregrine X prairie this summer. Look for updates in the 2006/2007 section this summer!