Passed: One Falconry Exam!

In case you are not following Blog, She Wrote on facebook or Twitter (but I'd love it if you did!), E13 and I received the news yesterday that we passed the New York State Falconry Exam! Two stuffed envelopes arrived to give us the news and the paperwork for the next steps. It's only given locally once a year and we took the exam with three other people (other folks were in the room taking different licensee exams). We're excited! He triumphed with one point over my 93% and I'm glad since he'd been studying for much longer!

Harris Hawk - native to the American southwest. If you go there, look for the birds stacked by 3s on the shoulders of each other on a saguaro cactus. For real...we didn't get an A on the exam for nothing! This one we saw at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology at the Migration Celebration.

What is the next step? Well we need to move the people in our house to the new house (we are moving in July) and get settled there. Then we can think about building the mews to house the raptor. Once the mews is built and we have it and our equipment inspected by a DEC staff person and E13 turns 14, we can get our permit to trap and catch ourselves a red tail hawk or an American kestrel as apprentice falconers.

In the meantime, I need to take my hunter safety class and we both need to get our small game hunting license. We'll do that closer to when we build the mews because then things will be coming together. Our main obstacle at this point is the hawkhouse.

For now, E13 has a stack of books to read about birds of prey that I picked up at the book sale last weekend. I'll come back and share those soon. Books are the thing! And we'll be doing plenty of reading this summer and on into high school. High school!