All 48 lessons
Every lesson in the NY Falconry Exam course, free to read: 48 lessons across 8 units. Read any of them here, or open the course to answer the checks, track progress and quiz each unit.
🪶 Raptor Biology & Terms
What a raptor is, how one is built, how one behaves, and the several hundred years of vocabulary the exam expects you to speak.
What counts as a raptor
The exam opens here, and so does every conversation you will have with a game warden. Falconry law is written around a specific…
How a raptor is built
Half of the General section is vocabulary attached to anatomy. Learn the parts once and a whole class of questions turns into…
Sex, size and age class
Every legal question about what you may trap turns on age class, and every practical question about weight turns on sex. These…
The nesting year
Nest-site questions look like pure ornithology, but they underwrite the take seasons in Part 173 and the ethic of leaving a nest…
Reading your bird
You will judge your bird's state a dozen times a day for the rest of its life. Almost all of that judgement is behavioural, and…
The falconer's vocabulary
There is no way around this: a meaningful share of the exam is a vocabulary test in a language that is six hundred years old and…
🐦 Apprentice Birds
The American Kestrel and the Red-tailed Hawk: the only two wild raptors a New York Apprentice may possess, and everything the manual expects you to know about them.
Two species, and why
Your first bird is chosen for you by regulation. Understanding the reasoning behind that choice is the difference between…
The American Kestrel
If you fly one, its small margins will teach you weight management faster than any red-tail. If you do not, the exam will still…
The Red-tailed Hawk
This is almost certainly your bird. The manual devotes more apprentice questions to the red-tail than to anything else, and every…
Manning, conditioning and correction
Almost every training mistake an apprentice makes comes from importing dog training into a species that cannot learn that way.
🦅 Other Falconry Birds
Falcons, accipiters, the larger buteos and eagles: the birds you will graduate to, and the ones the exam asks you to tell apart.
What makes a falcon a falcon
The genus Falco is defined by a set of hard anatomical and behavioural facts, and nearly every question in this section keys off…
The Peregrine and the large falcons
The Peregrine is the bird most of the world means when it says falconry, and the manual gives it more identification detail than…
Accipiters, buteos and the rest
After the apprenticeship, the choice of species is genuinely yours, and it is made on quarry, terrain and temperament. The…
Names by species and sex
Old falconry names the sexes separately for each species. It is pure memorisation, it appears in several questions, and it takes…
🎯 Hunting & Training
Manning, the creance, the lure, entering, and the whole shape of a falconry season. The largest teaching section in the manual after husbandry.
Manning the new bird
The first two weeks decide the next two years. Nearly everything the manual says about manning is about doing less, more calmly…
Creance to free flight
The moment you cut the line is irreversible. The manual gives you one clear criterion for when you have earned it.
The lure
The lure is the one truly indispensable piece of field equipment. Without it, the manual says, you look no different to your bird…
Entering, and the hunt itself
Everything up to now was preparation. This lesson is about the day the bird actually gets a chance, and about not wasting it.
Hacking, imprinting and screaming
Every one of these words describes something that happens to a young bird, permanently, before you have a chance to change your…
The season, the molt and the intermew
Falconry has a calendar, and two of its dates carry real risk: the spring you keep flying too long, and the molt you try to hunt…
Field manners
Most days in the field include other people, and a small number of habits keep those days from ending badly.
🧰 Care, Equipment & Facilities
Mews, perches, jesses, hoods, food, feathers, traps and telemetry. The biggest section in the manual, and the one the state inspects.
The mews and the weathering area
Your facilities have to be approved before you may obtain a bird. The standard is written out in 6 NYCRR 173.6 and the exam…
Furniture: jesses, swivel, leash, bells
Almost every piece of equipment in this lesson has a version that injures birds and a version that does not, and the exam tests…
Perches
A bird stands on your equipment for twenty-two hours a day. Perch choice shows up later as feather damage or as bumblefoot.
Hoods
Hooding is a skill, and hood-making is a craft with two competing traditions. The exam knows the difference between them.
Food and feeding
Diet is the single largest cause of avoidable disease in captive raptors, and the wrong food from a grocery store can kill a bird…
The scale and daily weighing
Weight is the one objective number you get. The manual calls a scale absolutely essential and daily weighing mandatory in the…
Feathers: imping, coping and damage
A crippled game hawk is useless and reflects on the falconer. Feather repair is one of the few genuinely technical hand skills…
Trapping
You will trap your own bird, under supervision, and the manual has clear preferences about how.
Telemetry
Telemetry is what turns a lost bird into a delayed pickup. It is also required by regulation for one category of bird.
⚖️ Weight Management Math
The arithmetic the manual assumes you can already do: ounces to grams, flying weight as a percentage, ration sizing, and reading a weight log.
Units, and why falconry uses two of them
Half of falconry literature is written in ounces and the other half in grams, sometimes in the same paragraph. The regulation…
Fat weight, flying weight, and the percentage between
Falconers talk about flying weight as a percentage of fat weight because raw grams mean nothing across birds. The percentage is…
Rations and food quality
You control weight through the ration, and the ration has two dimensions: how much, and what. The manual is emphatic that the…
Reading a weight log
The scale gives you a number. The log gives you a pattern, and the manual is explicit that patterns are the point.
🩺 Health & Disease
The daily health check, the diseases that kill falconry birds, and the ones you cause yourself with the wrong diet or the wrong perch.
The daily health check
Nearly every disease in this unit is survivable if caught in the first days and fatal if caught late. The check that catches it…
Diet-caused disease
Metabolic bone disease and cramp are entirely preventable, entirely caused by the falconer, and they kill young birds within days.
Aspergillosis
The manual calls it the most lethal disease likely to occur in birds of prey, and says outright that prevention is the only…
Frounce
Frounce is common, it comes from food you might well feed, and untreated it kills in seven to ten days.
Coccidiosis and internal parasites
Internal parasites are normal in wild birds and dangerous in stressed ones, and the treatments are specific rather than general.
External parasites and West Nile Virus
Most external parasites are a nuisance. Two of them are not, and one of them carries a virus that kills raptors.
Bumblefoot
Bumblefoot is a husbandry failure that becomes a medical emergency, and severe cases are fatal. It is also entirely visible if…
Sour crop, stress and trauma
These are the emergencies. Each has a window measured in hours, and each has a wrong first response that seems reasonable.
⚖️ Rules & Regulations
6 NYCRR Part 173, the federal layer above it, and the reporting that keeps your license. The one unit where being approximately right is not good enough.
The three license classes
Every question about what you may own, take or do resolves to which class you hold. Learn the table and a third of this unit…
Getting and keeping the license
The application, the exam, the facilities inspection and the annual report are the four things that stand between you and a bird…
Acquiring a raptor
173.3 is the densest set of rules in the Part, and it governs the one act that gets new falconers in trouble: putting a wild bird…
Hunting law
Falconry hunting sits on top of ordinary small game law, and every obligation of a gun hunter applies to you.
Reporting, marking and disposition
173.7 and 173.8 are pure paperwork, they carry ten-day and five-day clocks, and they are the most commonly failed part of holding…
Education, abatement and the federal layer
These are the uses of a falconry bird that people assume are allowed and mostly are not, plus the federal statutes sitting above…