OK, I’m about to bombard you with photos. I mentioned yesterday that I nearly volunteered as a GGRO bander this fall. If you are ever up on Hawk Hill during fall migration, GGRO does a short demonstration about the banding program at noon on Saturday and Sundays. If they catch a bird that seems willing to tolerate it, they will include the bird in their talk and conclude it with its release. I caught the demo last fall and saw a kestrel. When I was there on my field trip the other week, they had a juvenile Cooper’s hawk. I have a bunch of photos as obviously this was the closest I got to a raptor that day. Notice that the bander is not wearing gloves, which is something he brought up in his talk and which as a raptor handler I found somewhat shocking. Because they want to cause the bird the most minimum stress possible and they want to be able to best assess its health, they never wear gloves. Meanwhile I have been trained to never, ever hold a raptor without gloves. I’m not even sure why you’d want to. Some of the smaller ones might not really hurt you most of the time, but even the smallest one can put a good hole in your hand if it wants to. I’m quite confident when it comes to raptor handing and I still really want to try the banding program sometime but I’ll be honest with you, I’d be a little nervous about grabbing a Cooper’s hawk without gloves! I can’t even imagine grabbing a red tailed hawk without gloves, but I’m not sure they band those. Anyway, here are the first of the demonstration photos; I’ll have some of the release tomorrow.
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