[Photos by Jessica Farrell-Churchill]
Stekoa was first up and flew actively, keeping always ahead of the field and watching alertly, but owing perhaps to a stiff wind, no quarry was spotted. I finally called him down, but it took a few tries: one of the items in my tidbit bag was a rabbit kidney surrounded in soft white fat, and Stekoa's jesses twice slipped through my greasy fingers as he snatched a tidbit and bated off the fist. While I was waiting him out, he caught a deer mouse in a cedar tree. Finally, on the third attempt, I called him down and got him tethered, and to my surprise he stood the fist well on the hike back to the car.
[Photo by Pat Stull]
We relocated to a line of riparian woods along Dry Sandy Creek, where Rick Fariz, a recent transplant from Florida, took his turn. His intermewed passage female, Melissa, is a squirrel-hawking veteran, and chased both bushytails and cottontails before catching one of the latter flushed from the woods out into a field of tallgrass.
[Photos by Pat Stull]
Dry Sandy, incidentally, lived up to its name, with not a drop of water and a deep bed of sand and fine gravel. Flotsam hanging on the low branches of the trees proved that it at least occasionally runs deep. In the meantime, though, it was by far the easiest route back to the vehicles.
[Photo by Pat Stull]
[Photo by Jessica Farrell-Churchill]
We again moved a short distance to fly Amanda Kaufman Escobedo's passage tiercel, Storm. He got one good flight at a rabbit, but the only other game flushed was a covey of quail. Stormy chases bunnies with enthusiasm, but so far hasn't shown much interest in birds. Amanda called him down soon afterward, as this had been his longest hunt to date, and she didn't want to push him too far.
[Photo by Pat Stull]
Finally, we moved back to the section of Dry Sandy Creek that we had hunted with Melissa, and got Stekoa back out. Amanda flushed a rabbit that ended up running along the edge of the creek bank, almost directly under Stekoa; when he hit it, the two of them tumbled down the bank to the sandy bed. Stekoa held on just long enough for me to get hold of the rabbit, then jumped clear, evidently ready to keep hunting.
Not too much later, we flushed a rabbit out in the field adjacent to the woods, and Stekoa bound to it. Whether he let it go or it just struggled free, it ran off just before I could grab it. (I'll take the error on that one, and credit him with two bunnies.) Stekoa's the sort of hawk who would rather hunt than eat, and he still wasn't ready to call it quits, so we continued on a bit longer; after catching another deer mouse, he condescended to accept an offered rabbit leg, and we called it a day.
Other raptors spotted throughout the day: An immature Cooper's hawk flew alongside Jessa and me as we left Lincoln, giving us an extended look and again whetting my appetite for a small accipiter. (I still miss my passage sharpie, Talkeetna.) Numerous redtails were spotted on the way, and two bald eagles (a juvenile and an adult) passed overhead, apparently following the Blue River south of Milford. A couple more baldies were seen high overhead while we were hawking, and several short-eared owls flushed silently from the cedars as we searched for rabbits during Stekoa's first outing.
[Photos by Jessica Farrell-Churchill]