🎯 Hunting & Training · 7 min
Hacking, imprinting and screaming
Why this matters
Every one of these words describes something that happens to a young bird, permanently, before you have a chance to change your mind.
By the end of this lesson you will be able to
- Define hack and tame hack and state when a hacked bird is taken up
- Explain what imprinting is and why an imprinted Red-tailed Hawk is a hazard
- Give the rule for avoiding a screaming eyas
Hack
Hack is the state of complete liberty given to eyases for a few weeks after they can fly. Young raptors are allowed full flight freedom until they begin to kill for themselves. Food is put out on a hack-board, and the birds are dependent on the falconer for food alone. Wild hacking gives eyases the flight experience they would have gotten from their parents, and hacked birds generally do not become screamers.
A bird at hack is taken up when it starts hunting. Not on a date, not at a weight: the moment it shows an ability or desire to start self-hunting, it is caught up and training starts.
Tame hack is the modern variant: fledgling falcons fly free for a few hours a day from a portable perch in a hack field, carrying telemetry, recovered each night, with the falconer beginning to serve quarry to them as wild parents would. Its advantages stack, which is why the exam answers "all of the above."
Imprinting
Imprinting is a transfer of identity: the bird comes to think it is a person, or that people are hawks, and specifically that the handler is a parent. What follows is an aggression and a lack of respect that wild-caught birds never lose toward humans. Carried into an intermewed bird, that aggression marries up with normal adult territorial defence.
This is why the exam says flatly that it is not advisable to take an eyas Red-tailed Hawk for falconry. Imprinted red-tails have attacked and seriously injured people, and a lost one becomes a menace to dogs and humans. New York settles the question for apprentices anyway: Apprentices may not capture or possess nestlings.
Screaming
The rule is "take the hawk to food, not the food to the hawk." With an eyas, handle the bird every day but never let it associate you with food. Take it out of its box, then place the garnished lure, then return the bird and leave before it finds the food. Never let it see you with food or lure in hand until at least a week or two after it is hard-penned. Even done well, an eyas may still imprint, but it is much less likely to become a consistent screamer.
One thing screaming does not do: frighten game. There is no evidence that quarry associates a hawk's cries with the hawk. To a duck or a pheasant, a goshawk's screaming is about as alarming as a passing aircraft. It is, however, extremely irritating to humans, which is reason enough.
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.