🧰 Care, Equipment & Facilities · 8 min
Food and feeding
Why this matters
Diet is the single largest cause of avoidable disease in captive raptors, and the wrong food from a grocery store can kill a bird in one meal.
By the end of this lesson you will be able to
- Identify safe and unsafe foods for a falconry bird
- Rank common food items by caloric density and describe the effect on weight
- Explain the role of tirings, water and casting material
What not to feed
- Beef heart looks and reads like pigeon but promotes a calcium/phosphorus imbalance. Not recommended.
- Chicken necks and backs from the grocery are too fatty and the bones are dangerous. A neck or backbone swallowed whole can lodge between the crop and the rest of the digestive tract and kill the bird before you know what happened.
- Hamburger or any meat without bone: never. Hamburger's calcium to phosphorus ratio is about 1:20 where the appropriate ratio is 2:1. One meal is enough to start metabolic changes.
- Wild-caught pigeon carries real risk, including trichomonas (frounce) and herpes. Even healthy-looking birds.
What to feed
Whole-animal diets: four week old cockerels, Coturnix quail, mice or rats. A diet of exclusively freshly killed rodents is excellent for Red-tailed Hawks, Red-shouldered Hawks and American Kestrels, approximating their wild diet with the vitamins, nutrients and roughage they need. Alternating mice and rats is better than either alone because of the greater muscle mass on rats.
Remove the gastro-intestinal tract. Gutting reduces the chance of clostridium infection and keeps the mews cleaner and free of maggots. It is not true that intestines are a valuable vitamin source worth the risk.
Caloric density and weight
Dark meats carry more calories than white meats and hold a bird's weight longer. Duck and large mammal meat is heavier and must be fed in smaller amounts than chicken or upland game bird. Fed equal amounts of duck, chicken neck, washed meat and rabbit, a raptor gains most from the duck.
The consequence is exact and testable: a raptor that maintains its weight on 2 ounces of whole pigeon per day will lose weight on 2 ounces of rabbit. Pigeon is rich; rabbit, young chicken and pheasant are pale meats that cannot be fed in the same quantity for the same effect.
Washed meat, soaked in cold water, is used to lower a bird's weight or to increase hydration. It is the modern descendant of the medieval "enseam."
When a bird needs more
Captive raptors need more food energy in cold weather, when flying hard, when growing, and when recovering. All the factors compound.
Water
Provide fresh drinking water every day. Most raptors drink every day or two in small amounts, and many enjoy drinking after a meal. A bath should always be available; many birds prefer a fine spray. A change in drinking habits is an early indicator of failing health. The bath container required by 173.6(a)(4) is two to six inches deep and wider than the length of the bird.
Tirings and castings
A tiring is any tough part of a quarry, mostly feather, sinew or fur, given to a bird to tear at rather than for nourishment. A game bird wing with very little meat is ideal. It exercises the back and neck muscles, keeps the beak trimmed and keeps the bird from getting bored. A pigeon wing makes a good tiring and doubles as a way to occupy a bird and to keep it from bolting food.
From the field
It is Sunday, the freezer is empty, and the grocery store has chicken necks. What do you do? Not that. A chicken backbone can lodge past the crop and kill the bird, hamburger can start metabolic damage in a single meal, and beef heart unbalances calcium. Feed a smaller quantity of the correct food, or feed nothing for a day and manage the weight, and fix the supply chain tomorrow.
This lesson is part of the NY Falconry Exam course. Open it in the course to answer the retrieval checks that go with it, track what you have read, and quiz the whole unit. Lessons, quizzes and the glossary are free.