one of the things I was wondering about is the imprinting...thought that would be the only way to train them.
I am surprised you can take a wild one and train it.
It's funny I suppose, but taking the wild one and training it is probably easier than raising and imprinting one. It definitely takes far less time, and is far less complicated.
The wild-caught bird has been on its own for several weeks or months. It knows how to hunt, and the fact that it's alive means that it's successful enough to keep itself fed (eating as much as 25% of its body weight daily), in an environment where accidents and failure to succeed in hunting will claim 65% of birds in their first few months of life. Of course, it may have already "taught" itself that it's "impossible" or pointless to try catching what the falconer wants to hunt with it. It can be tough to un-train things like that... The bird will tame down easy enough, but will always be "wild", and more prone to loss.
An imprint can be as tame as a kitten. But it has to be taught to hunt (which also means it can also be taught WHAT to hunt). That wonderful tameness can also be problematic, because it can lead to some extremely undesirable behavior. Do you imprint it as a "sibling", or as a "parent"? The birds imprint to different stages at different days of age. Feeding an imprint is odd; for at least the first 40-60 days of age it must always have food, never be hungry, and never know that food comes from you. After that, you'll teach it that you'll
take it to food (or an opportunity to hunt) but do everything you can to
not let it realize that you
bring food to it.
A long time ago I watched a show on the peregrine falcon, and a guy took his bird up to 30,000 and jumped from a plane with it.....its been awhile since I watched it but I believe they clocked that bird at over 300 MPH
I have a copy of that episode. 248mph from 14000 feet. It's tough to figure out how to make a bird go "as fast as it can". That bird went fast enough to catch its lure; but was that as fast as it could go?
hell (I am sure you know this) but at one point only royalty was allowed to own them.
It's funny, actually, that we almost all think back to medieval Europe when we think about falconry. I'm guilty of it too. In reality, that was just a little snapshot of a few hundred years in a specific location, in a sport that has been practiced world wide for a minimum of 4000 years (some think 9000+). Even in those times, it was only certain birds that could only be owned by certain royalty (the gyrfalcon is a prime example). Other birds could be owned by almost anyone. The goshawk was known as the "cook's hawk".
Medieval falconry is probably best compared to modern golf, when it comes to who could do it, who did it, and why they did it.
