I’ve been trying to understand why Clovis took off a week ago. This morning I found a dropped primary under her perch:

Things just got clearer! I don’t fly during the moult for a couple of reasons. First, managing the bird’s weight is tricky. If you go too low while the falcon is making new feathers, you risk fretmarks – lines of weakness on the feather that mark moments of stress, especially nutritional stress. Second, and germane to the question at hand, moulting is part of a bunch of hormonal changes kicked off by longer days. One of the other effects is readiness for bonding/mating/nesting. My current best guess is that Clovis took off because it’s time to fly around, establish a territory and find a mate. It hasn’t been any kind of season anyway, so packing up the telemetry and the vest is NBD but still, dang, I was hoping for some more flights!

I had a post all laid out in my head; I was going to write it last Friday afternoon after I flew Clovis. Something about all the sammiches I ate while in Los Angeles for Xmas. She had other plans, though…

Friday started well enough. I didn’t forget anything and the folks at the site next to me, who came along, were ready early. We got to a spot on the west edge of the San Rafael Valley, I set up the drone, beeped up* Clovis, put the drone in the air close, but not too close, to us, and struck Clovis’s hood. She did what she normally does: look around, rouse, give the lure hanging under the drone a good hard stare, and launch herself off the fist. She took a couple tight circles gaining altitude, then flew off a bit and continued to mount. I didn’t think anything of it – she’ll often go a ways away to take advantage of wind and to give herself a more direct climb to the drone/lure combo. But this time, ah, this time. She spiraled up and then turned and headed south along the edge of the grasslands. I pulled my regular lure out, whistled and swung, but she was gone. We walked to the next ridge south, I called again, nada. Back to the trucks, load up and head south – luckily the Apache Rd. heads southwest from where we were. We drove until the telemetry said she was 90 degrees to our left (generally, SE), parked, and N and I started after her, while J stayed with the vehicles. We chased her for a little over an hour until I called it off: it seemed like we were bumping her. We’d get within a quarter mile, then the distance would jump up by a half mile or so, lather, rinse, repeat. I went back out later in the afternoon to make sure she was in the same general area – I wanted her to settle down for the night…

I was up well before dawn Saturday morning, with high hopes. The sun was just brightening the sky when I got to the Apache Rd.

I turned on the telemetry receiver. Silence. I drove down every left-leading Forest Service road I could, until stopped by gates. Nothing. TL;DR – I spent Saturday driving around trying to get a signal with no luck at all. I was pretty crestfallen Saturday night  My plan was for more driving Sunday, then, if she was still out, look into buying a couple hour search via a light plane.

Sunday morning I needed to zip into Tucson to pick up a package – I decided to come home via Sierra Vista and the Coronado National Memorial/W Montezuma Canyon Road. Once I was though the pass, I was high above the San Raphael Valley moving southeast to northwest. I thought I’d have less interference from ridges, and be able to hear her if she’d moved south in the Valley. More driving, more silence, more worry. One of the best pieces of falconry advice I’ve ever gotten is, ‘when you are out of ideas, go back to where you turned the bird loose and reset’. I did. Back to the beginning – I parked the truck, got out and swung the lure & whistled for 10 minutes. Still no Clovis, but when I returned to the truck, the iPad told me it knew where she was!! At this point, the transmitter was in super-battery-saving mode and only pinging every ?5? minutes (note to self: look it up) so the stop helped but also meant that if she was moving she could be long gone by the time I got to her last known location, a mile and a half away. But I had a place to go to!!! Got as close as I could with the truck and walked towards the marker on the iPad – a pair of cottonwoods 1500 yards away. There was a fence between us. so I stood way back and called. No luck. You don’t want to call your bird anywhere near a fence – that’s how wings and necks get broken. So I *whispers* shimmied under the rancher’s fence, stood up, and SAW HER. Got well away from the fence, whistled, and swung:

And that’s the story of my weekend. Clovis’s weight was down but not way down – she’d fed herself at least once. Currently we’re resetting – I’m making sure her weight is stable so I can cut her back to flying weight and then we’ll do a couple short flights!

Today’s task – after a morning visit to the Tumacácori Mission – is another drive to Tucson, this time to pick up a steel plate with high-tech tape on the bottom. The long distance telemetry antenna has a magnetic base, my truck has an aluminum body, the cap is fiberglass, and the pinched nerves in my neck won’t survive another session of holding the antenna onto the roof with my left arm 😉 .

*attaching the transmitter to Clovis’s tail mount

The initial (Friday) flight: