Simon Thomsett

Category: Black Sparrowhawk | Date: Jan 17 2008 | By: admin

Quasimodo the Black Sparrowhawk.

The young male Black Sparrowhawk with a fractured spine and brain injury is doing well. Because he is a mess, stands crooked and leers at the world with his head slightly to one side I have named him Quasimodo after the Hunch-back of Notre Dame. When I received him back in Oct 2007, he lay as so many new arrivals do in the bottom of a cardboard box in a pitiful heap. His head curled round and round insanely and none of his limbs worked. I suspect that had any vet’ seen him they would have put him down immediately. But when I gave him food he tried to take it. He missed the morsel at the end of my finger tips by a good inch, but he tried until he got it, head reeling like a drunk. He had guts and wasn’t going to give in easily! I liked him immediately.

Quasimodo. Christmas day 2007. (note droopy left wing)

Scrambling about on his side I noticed that one side was more paralysed than the other. I guess more paralysed is like more pregnant. It is either one thing or another. But in his case the lack of movement was partial and it came and went. I cannot remember which side was worse because as time went on he swapped his ‘good’ side a few times. This was important as it possibly meant a brain injury rather than a spinal one, not that it matters because there was nothing one could do about it.

Even if he was fine and not spinning on his head like a break-dancer it is customary among falconers (but sadly not all rehabers) to immediately wrap up the tails of raptors and sometimes their wings in water-soluble gummed tape. Even with the best of new arrivals (and accipiters especially), they tend to throw themselves around and snap these flight feathers. Little else could be as bad. A fractured wing can take weeks to heal, whereas a fractured tail feather or primary will take one whole year before it is replaced. In some ways a fractured flight feather is worse than a broken wing. A broken flight feather will add stress to its neighbour and have a dominoes effect, making the whole lot snap. Even the loss of 2 adjacent primaries or tail feathers can so incapacitate a raptor as to render it useless in trying to catch its prey and this explains the almost fanatical idolatry falconers have for the quality of feathers. Those “rehabers” that let hawks loose in chicken wire “flight pens” for “exercise” are one of my pet annoyances. They all too often see nothing wrong in throwing tattered hawks with missing feathers into the wind and claiming that “it must be fine, because we never saw it again”.

With Quasimodo I decided to go the extra mile and wrap him up from his shoulders to his tail, leaving room for his legs and backside to hang out. He lay like a mummified pharaoh and looked even worse. The idea was to minimise any fracture or damage that he may have. I did not take him for X-ray for two reasons: One. The drive there and back will take the entire day and possibly kill him. Two. I admit to a growing alienation with the vet’s’ I use. They are overly pragmatic and given to putting hawks down when little realising the value of the animal in the bird orientated world in which I live. Quasimodo wouldn’t have stood a chance. To make him happier I hung him from a cord tied behind his back. His feet peddled madly in mid air, so I put a cushion therefor him to hold onto. He sat suspended in a large dog box during the night, and suspended outside under a large eagle perch during the day. I wrote about him back then in this “blog”, but wasn’t too sure if I should make his progress known just in case he died, or I had to put him down. But steadily he improved, and by the time I left for a two week trip to India he was able to stand and flop about so well that he was retired to a small enclosed shed some 16 by 24ft by 12 ft high. Not big enough to cause him damage, not small enough to drive him crazy. The shed had solid walls and perches so arranged as to allow him to progress from the ground up and without danger of harming himself. There he sat for two weeks but each day he was fed on the fist by either Mwanzia of Jonathan each day. He had earlier grown accustomed to feeding on my fist. Indeed when he was wrapped up, the only way he could eat was with assistance. The only way he could defecate was if I stuck a cotton bud up his rear and massaged the stuff out. You can imagine that this level of high maintenance meant that other chores such as making a living had to be put aside. The assisted defecation bit was my sole duty, as it was a little too subtle an art for Mwanzia or Jonathan to complete successfully. There came a point where I thought that I should have to put him down and get on with life. I set a date just before leaving for India and you cannot believe the relief (of us all) when Quasimodo managed this task all on his own!

When back from the Indian trip I got him out of the shed in mid December and quickly trained him using falconry techniques to hop to the fist for food. I increased the distance each day until he came some 20m on a thin cord. The process is simple enough but anyone who has trained an accipiter will know that they are often difficult and very nervous. They are usually distant and unfriendly, misinterpreting every move as a subversive attack. But despite their suspicion they are usually very fast learners and quick to fly free and hunt. Quasimodo’s problems and his prior experience meant that he was the reverse. He was and remains very well behaved and is quite happy around his select company, but his flying skills lacked co-ordination.

Flying upside-down to lure!

He would miss the fist for example, zoom past, and suddenly put on his breaks and turn around to come back. This process may have required falling to the ground, turning around and rethinking what his mission was, before getting it right. It all happened so fast however that one second he was on his perch 20 m away the next he was on the fist, but he had gone around a few times in a flurry of wings. There was something not quite right. On the fist he could sometimes stand fine with both feet gripping the glove, but when excited his right side collapses and he starts flopping about. He isn’t having a “fit” although it may look like it. His face registered intense concentration as he struggled with his body. Although it looks as though his right wing and leg are weak or not “wired” properly, it is his right foot that always catches the glove or the lure. His left leg is often left out of the business and isn’t used for clasping. There is something not entirely consistent with a traumatic injury to the brain or spine. I wonder if it may not be a decease that interferes with his motor control? This may explain why it is that at times he seems much more controlled than at others.

Flying right way up after lure.

Normally with training hawks you have to take your time and fly them on the long line for up to 50m and spend a few weeks in this process. But I knew Quasimodo wasn’t going anywhere even if he tried so I flew him free only after a few days. I noticed that once in the air he flew quite well despite the landings and take-offs. By the end of the week he was flying all over the place from tree to tree as free as any bird. He continues to crash into the glove or lure, and I wince every time he tries to land on vicious thorn trees. We go for long walks and he flies from tree or to glove for at least 2 km each day. I took a number of pictures of him standing and flying. You can see that each time he takes off his right wing is last to open and his body rolls to the right. Sometimes this is so dramatic that he is almost upside-down! I have been able to see him hunt seriously only once, after some Babblers that happened to be in a bush beneath him. He was very excited about it and although made a brave effort and pursued one over 50m to the next thicket (in which it refused to come out) I noticed he has a lot further to go before one can even think of release. He does know how to kill however. He disgraced himself by flying down to my chicken-rearing pen and nailing a chicken a bit bigger than he. I know that Black Sparrowhawks can be terrible chicken thieves. They give all raptors here a very bad name, despite nearly all not being physically incapable taking chickens. But I had no idea that he’d find them so quickly. The chicken pen is next to the staff quarters about 200 yards away. He must have heard them, and he must have had previous chicken encounters to know what to do next! I have never had any of my hawks or eagles take these chickens before, because they are well protected by thickets and pens. While the chicken definitely didn’t benefit the hawk at least showed just how powerful he is, for it was all over in seconds.Had I a bird dog I would fly him at francolin and quail, but in just over one year I had three pointers die. I have a neighbour with a pointer and perhaps we can put the two together and go out and try. I think he will be quite good at it.

Right-side-down style of flight.

Although we took great pains to keep his feathers in good shape, his constant falling about and rough treatment has meant that a few have broken. They have been “imped” back (replaced with a pin stuck in the shaft). But I see that he never preens. In handling him I noticed too that his uropygial gland (oil gland at the base of his “parsons nose”) is swollen and unused. I question if he will be able to moult properly.This illustrates a few important points about rehabing predators. The average person would see Quasimodo today sitting outside on his perch and flying kilometres from tree to tree at top speed and assume that he is fit enough for release. Most would not even have given him a chance to fly in a shed that we considered “small” and inappropriate for exercise. That he can demonstrate his flying ability 100 times more than any confined raptor is no qualification if he cannot hunt. Even if he does manage to catch things with me I have every reason to doubt that he could survive if released.

I use the term ‘release’ in a muddled way. One could assume that in wildlife rehabilitation “release’ is that dramatic moment when the cage door is flung open and the animal bounds away to freedom for its first time since capture. Release to a falconer is a very different thing. In effect they fling the doors open many times each day, whistle and it comes back. They experience a field that few rehabers ever have a chance to duplicate. Namely the ability to observe the animal in the wild state act out its various functions uninhibited by cage walls with unlimited freedom to move. The whistle brings them back. In reality they are released each day. But in falconry parlance this is simply called ‘flying them free’. To release them permanently into the wild is a lengthy process that is termed “hacking back”. It is that period in which the hawk is allowed to disassociate itself from its human partner…but in which it is still looked after. It learns slowly how to fit back into the wild. It is an anti-climax with little theatre and no tearful moment. The release should take weeks and in some cases it can last for years. If it doesn’t it is likely to be a failure, even with birds that are well proven as hunters. This should be of vast significance to those rehabers who make no such provision for their birds who have not even been allowed to fly free. The rehabilitation of raptors would be a hopeless exercise if there wasn’t the recognition of a few basic requirements. The raptor being released should be able to fly like an athlete, and no cage managed bird can ever hope to achieve this first goal. It should know how to outwit and out-fly its prey, catch and consume it away from pirates. I would have to acknowledge that this particular Black Sparrowhawk is getting close to fulfilling most of these stipulations. But finally there is another condition that needs to be met, and that is “gut feeling”. My gut feeling isn’t good. Quasimodo won’t make it. He might in a year or two. But until then I want to see him flawless in his behaviour and I should wait to see if he moults normally. Meanwhile I shall take him out flying as often as I can allow and give him as good a life as he can hope to have.