My First Jack Hawking Experience

February 2006

By Roger Petersen

 

The plan was to meet at Fred Reinhold’s home at 2:00am Sunday morning so that we could pack up the birds etc. and leave by 3:00am.  Rob Lyttle was spending the night at Fred’s place as he was going to ride with Fred.  Kevin Minnihan and I were to ride together in his vehicle.   I figured that I needed to get up around midnight to shower, gather all of my stuff including the bird and drive a half hour to Fred’s.  Since I hit the sack around 7:00pm Saturday evening I didn’t sleep very soundly and kept waking up to glance at the alarm clock.  “I’m too excited to sleep” caption from the Disney Worlds’ commercial is appropriate here.  On one of these glances I noticed that the alarm indicated 1:18am!  In a state of panic I jumped up cussing the alarm clock and jumped into the shower.  My poor wife was awakened by my noisy start and hollered at me while I was in the shower stating that I had set the alarm to go off at 12:00pm instead of 12:00am!  If I was going to be at Fred’s by 2:00am I’d have to be on the road in twelve minutes!  Fortunately I had packed everything needed the previous day and staged it by the door but still knew that I was going to be late, damn!   My wonderful wife got up to assist me in anyway that she could, what a gal!   After packing up the truck my last task was to get the bird out of the mew, weigh her and put her in the giant hood.  Before I entered the mew I knocked on the door and called her name so that she wouldn’t be surprised by being awakened this early.  I carefully walked in and saw her sitting on her high perch where she sleeps.  I then bent over to move the stool closer so that I could step up and get her on my glove.  As I stepped up on the stool she flew down and crashed into my head (ouch!) and then landed on the floor.   I got her on my glove and took her to the basement where I weighed her and then put her in the transport box.  Blood was streaming down my face as I jumped into the truck but I had no time to do more than dab my wounds with a slightly used napkin from Mickey-D’s.  I finally arrived at Fred’s at 2:15am.  Fortunately Kevin was also late because he had set his alarm clock incorrectly too, so I didn’t feel like such a big dummy.  Misery loves company.

Once arriving in Amarillo, TX our first stop was at Wal-Mart to purchase hunting licenses.  This shouldn’t take but a few minutes as we were anxious to start hunting.  This was not to be the case however as the sales persons couldn’t figure out how to work the machine that issues the licenses.  An hour plus later we bolted out the door with permits in hand.  Fortunately checking into the motel went without a hitch and we were off to the fields a little after three.               

We hunted Rob’s Goshawk first and as expected she smoked a monstrous jack shortly thereafter.  As we strolled through the field I noticed many large fissures in the soil from being so dry and as we walked on the vegetation it made a crunching sound like walking on very dry snow.  One spark is all it would take to set this huge field ablaze and with the incessant wind it would spread rapidly.  Fred said that it was my turn next and that he was going to take me to a field with higher than normal grass in hopes that my female passage RT wouldn’t realize the size of the creature that she was to catch until she had already bound to it.  My bird’s weight was right on target for hunting cottontails but I was concerned that she wasn’t low enough to snag one on these ‘bunnies-on-steroids’.   The wind had died down considerably so I decided to put her on the T-perch.  It wasn’t long after starting our hunt that we flushed a jack and off she went but just before she caught up with it she checked, and landed on the ground.  #$%@!  I called her and she came right away so we started again.  A few minutes later we flushed another jack and once more she started the chase but again checked it at the last moment.  I said to myself, “I guess hunting jacks is not her thing at least at her present weight”.  I called her and once more she came right back to the perch.  It was now starting to get dark and I figured that we were only going to have a few more minuets of hunting before calling it quits for the day.    We once again started our march across the field when all of a sudden the bird sprang off of the perch and headed down wind in earnest.  This was definitely a flight for prey but none of us could see what she was after.  At 200 plus yards she did a wingover and nailed something as we could see her wings flailing once she hit the prey.  We took off running towards her.  Rob and Fred got to her first (I’m considerably slower than those two) but I arrived soon after to be surprised to find that she had actually bound to a JACK!!!   Now I’m not really sure if a bird can display expression or it’s just my imagination but by the way she was leaning back with hackles raised seemed to say “what the hell have I latched on to?”  After dispatching the jack we let her chow down on it for a bit then gathered her up and headed for the truck.  My vest felt like I had 3 or 4 cottontails in it.  What a great start for out trip. 

We got up at 6am the next morning, ate some breakfast, loaded the birds, and headed off to the fields.  We flew Rob’s bird first and then Fred’s and Kevin’s Harris’s.  These birds were awesome as they would double and triple team the unlucky jack they had targeted.  I tried my hand at video taping the flights and soon discovered how difficult it was to keep the action in my view finder, my hats off to Jason as he has mastered this.  I did eventually manage to get some good shots however and look foreword to putting them on disk.  That evening I got my RT out and attempted to repeat the performance of the previous day.  Fred took me to an abandoned portion of an airport that had an abundance of light and telephone poles in hopes that she would feel more comfortable crashing down on jacks.  As we got out of the trucks we could see jacks just milling around the parking lot, so my hopes were high that she would score another jack.  I tossed her up onto a light pole and headed over to a bunch of yucca plants to see if we could shake something loose.  Fred kicked a plant and bingo a cottontail sprints out heading across the parking lot right at the bird.  Soon thereafter the bird was off and set an intercept course around an old radar dome then smacked the rabbit hard.  It was one of those textbook flights where one is able to view the entire process from start to finish.  Way cool!  I tossed her back up onto a pole and attempted to flush a jack but we didn’t have any luck as all of the jacks we previously saw had vanished so we decided to go over to brushier area and just let her get some cottontails.  In short order we managed to kick up a bunny which she latched onto promptly.  Cotton tails were plentiful here so it wasn’t long before I had several in the bag and since it was getting dark we called it quits for the day.

Tuesday was very warm with southwest winds from 15-25 mph.  The birds weren’t very interested in hunting but appeared to be happy just sight seeing from atop the T-perches.  We did however end up with a few jacks and cottontails before we headed to the motel for the day.

On Wednesday Fred’s and Kevin’s birds were on fire as they worked together to bring down jack after jack after jack!  Later that day Kevin and I split off and went to a place we called ‘the wedge’.   Not long after we started walking a cottontail (wouldn’t you know it) sprang to life and headed down wind.  My bird took off across the field and once over her prey did a wing-over and pinned it to the ground.   After performing a smooth trade I put her back on the T-perch and proceeded down range.   Soon enough we flushed a jack and the bird took flight but checked it milliseconds prior to her talons contacting its’ fur.  Rats!  She flew back to the perch without landing so we continued our pursuit.  A few minutes later another jack popped up just a few feet in front of us but she just watched as it scampered towards the horizon.  I said to Kevin that there was no point in continuing here because it was clear that she wanted nothing to do with jacks so we decided to try a different area that was full of cotton tails.  By this time it was very, very warm with temperatures in the low 80s.  After I tossed her up into a tree we started to beat the brush.  Not surprisingly we flushed several rabbits and she stooped at one but missed.  After that miss she turned off her ‘hunt switch’ and went into an observation mode regardless of what we put under her.  In fact I had a heck of a time just getting her to come to a ‘flying’ dead rabbit.  Once she was back in captivity I put her up and called it quits for this trip as we were leaving early the next morning.   Even though she had only gotten one jack, I considered the entire trip to be an over whelming success and can’t wait to do it again.