I'm sure you don't need me to tell you that the weather in May has been crap! We are training a young Tawny Eagle (Aquila Rapax), trying to get a trained adult one fit and to retrain another adult bird we bought in January to make height on thermals. Well I can tell you that getting an eagle that is built for thermalling to do anything on cold, damp, windy Fife days is bloody near impossible. That said, on the few nice days we have had Floyd (the adult male) has gone up beautifully and is already making tremendous pitch (height). When the weather is right for him he goes up and out of sight with great regularity, this month though he has managed it only a few times. He is getting very fit though working the windy days when he still goes over a thousand feet up without too much trouble. The youngster has made maybe 7 or 800 feet a few times but is really being held back by the weather. She does try very hard though.

Breeding birds during 2006 has as usual been a trial! Our female white Gyr falcon (Falco Rusticolus) has as usual, failed to produce and egg, I'm quite sure she is holding back just to tease us. The male as usual is producing plenty of healthy semen, but has no egg to fertilise. We'll just have to keep our fingesr crossed for 2007. Our old pair of peregrines (Falco Peregrinus) produced a clutch of eggs in late March and they all vanished, as did the eggs from our lanners (Falco Biarmicus). The peregrines re-cycled, but sadly the eggs mysteriously disappeared after just four days.

We have a pair of very big Harris hawks (Parabuteo Unicinctus). They produced a clutch of five eggs for us this year. They are an inexperienced pair but following our aim to follow entirely natural breeding cycles, the birds were left to hatch their own eggs. The first egg hatched and sadly one of the parents ate it! We decided to pull the remaining four and place them under a foster bird that was incubating infertile eggs of her own. The second egg hatched and the foster mum ate it, - BUGGER! We quickly put together a home made hatcher/brooder and we managed to hatch what turned out to be the last fertile egg. This worked well and the bird grew steadily stronger and was eating and pooing heartily at three days old. Normally a bird would be returned to Mum at between 5 and 10 days old, however, we had to go off to Drumlanrig Castle for a weekend of demonstrations. During the travel it would have been almost impossible to keep the chick at suitable temperature in the car so we decided to pop her back in with Mum and Dad at just three days old. Morning of day four and the chick was still alive and well and we departed for Drumlanrig. We returned with the bird five days old and still very well and it is now six days old and sitting up in the nest doing just fine so all looks well. As long as the bird survives we will keep it and it will be used for hunting. We will keep one or two birds produced by this pair each year that they breed because they are very special Harris Hawks and direct descendents of wild taken birds from the USA.

On a brighter note we bought some baby owls. Our living room at home looks like a pillow stuffing factory as the downy baby feathers from two baby Barn Owls (Tyto Alba) and an Afrcan Spotted owl (Bubo Afrikanus) slowly reline the walls. We got the barn owls five and seven days old. They were bred by a friend of ours, Wayne Poole. The African Spotted Owl led to a trip down to Essex to collect.He (or she) was two weeks old when we collected it and is therefore within a day or two the same age as the barn owls. All of the owls will be fully hand reared to make sure they are always 100% comfortable in human environments as we do plan to use them in education work in schools and on open days etc. Two things to remember when hand rearing owls. 1/ They poo every where! 2/ Every third or fourth poo is a brown stinky one that looks like pickle and that will have you gagging for breath so don't have one unless you absolutely have to, the carpet and your nose will not cope!!!!!

Sadly the 2006 Jackal Buzzard (Buteo Rufofuscus) we had ordered from a breeder this year died so we'll have to wait until next year for that.

Our Great Grey Owl (Strix Nebulosa) produced another clutch of five infertile eggs this month (we have no male) that she incubated loyally to full term. She is calm and reliable on the eggs throughout and it is so sad that they are destined never to hatch. Hopefully we have secured a baby male from Falcon Mews this year so in a year or two she will have a husband and with luck that will be followed by a family of her own.