pointer

It’s easy to break a dog to chickens and it still hunt feather. However when ratting around release pens and flight ponds my dogs knew not to touch the chicken like pheasants and ducks in that situation but out hunting they did take gamebirds fairly regularly. On some terrain a lurcher will take gamebirds by pegging or on the rise which is no big deal and it isn’t surprising really when you think how many are taken by unsteady gundogs.

Great read. ?

It certainly made me laugh this morning ? Just when you think you’ve heard it all ? ?

No not yet but I’m used to seeing this sort of thing on Falconry pages. It made a change from seeing posts about how Falconry is natural but other hunting is cruel ? you see that a lot.

I like to keep my ferrets in big pens rather than hutches. I have the space and they are active in there running the pipes and climbing the mesh. Now I haven’t seen a difference in a ferrets working ability as such in regards to if it’s kept in a big pen or a good sized hutch but I’ve seen a well known Falconer this morning post that ferrets kept in big enclosures kill more rabbits below ground than ferrets kept in a hutch. I think it’s some kind of old wives tale but I could be wrong. Thoughts??????

Except for the first cross I've seen a lot of pointer lurchers that looked like collie crosses.

Same here, well the whole set up anyway with kennel block, concreted yard, hawk aviary and horse stable. When I worked a lurcher I was going to the dales 3/4 times a week at £15/£20 a time and a fiver spent most other days in the week to kill rats with them or a bit of lamping more local. Food has never cost much, vet bills have varied from nothing some years to a couple of grand. One year we had to shell out £5000 on a ponies treatment. I spent a few years travelling around Britain following hounds staying at B&Bs most weekends with a few full weeks away and those seasons Hunting cost

Mine dropped her centre decks early March forcing me to end my season then nothing for over a month when she dropped several feathers in a week. It does seem a few people are experiencing slow moults this year going by the forums and Facebook pages. I don't give it much thought and always expect to be back out flying by the second week in September at the latest even if she isn't fit or all that keen. After researching feeding clover honey I couldn't find any definitive proof that it does anything to quicken the moult, same as the theory about feeding fox to moulting birds. Either way Septembe

I'll be fishing until mid August when I start hunting again with my hawk. I'll be concentrating mostly on catfish and the British shark species but want to catch thirteen new species to take my overall tally to 120. I'm sure there'll also be a bit of ratting and mooching around to do in the summer months to keep my two GWP's ticking over.

I never find rabbits sat out in the open like this when I've got the hawk with us.

When I had a lurcher to work I nearly always took her ratting as well as my GWP day or night. I didn't find it made them more hard mouthed, they seemed to know what quarry bites back and rabbits were still brought back to hand alive.

I haven't posted for a while but we've been getting out and about. I've had a slow season and maybe should have been doing more but I'm happy to go out and get a kill and feed my hawk up. We've been spending more time than previous seasons in little woods after squirrels but without much success even if the flights are exciting. My hawk caught a big rat yesterday, I thought it might be 20" long so brought it back with me but it wasn't. Still anything over 18" is pretty rare regardless of what people think and the daft super rat stories in the media. Just something a bit different to the usual

I watched the video a few days ago via Facebook. Lots of people have used lurchers and gundogs to work with hawks that catch and kill at other times. It seems dogs soon learn when they are required to catch and when they need to stand back. Several times I've had my hawk catch the first rat and then the dogs snap up another couple while she's busy on her kill. Dogs seem to just know how to behave around birds of prey and it looks like the same is true if brought up around a trained mink. Keep the videos coming.