Creance to free flight

The creance

A creance is a strong light line used to control a raptor during early training. Two rigging rules from the manual, and both are safety rules:

• Never tie the creance to the swivel. Remove the swivel, replace the mews jesses with slitless field jesses, pass the creance through the small punched holes in the jess ends and tie it with a falconer's knot. If the bird gets away, it then leaves with nothing that can catch on a branch and hang it by its feet. Use tough field jesses; the strain on the leather is real.
• Anchor the free end to something light that will drag, about a pound or two, so it bounces along and brings the bird gently down. The exam's answer is a pair of old sneakers, which sounds like a joke and is not. Tie a creance to something solid and the line can snap, leaving the bird loose with a length of line trailing.

Fly the creance in open spaces, where there is nothing for the line to wrap.

The benchmark

You are ready to fly free when the bird comes 50 yards to the fist quickly. Not when it comes at all, and not when it comes eventually. Quickly, and from distance.

Operant conditioning in practice

The best single description of an operant conditioning technique in the manual is jump-ups to the fist with a varying reward. Varying the reward is the active ingredient: a predictable tidbit produces a bird doing arithmetic, an unpredictable one produces a bird that keeps trying.

The first night out

Your red-tail's first free flight ends with the bird refusing to come down from a tree and you leaving it out overnight. The next step is both of the sensible things: return at first light, when the bird will be hungrier and more responsive, and call your sponsor. This is a normal event, not a disaster, and it is exactly what a sponsor is for.

Worth knowing what the stakes are: a lost passage red-tail will revert to the wild in short order. It knows how to hunt, and it was doing so a few weeks ago. A lost imprint is a different and worse problem.