The Molt
Farrah and Cisco are very close to finishing for this summer. I believed that Farrah dropped her last major (32 total primaries and retrices) today. Wrong. She has a couple of tail feathers to go. Just yesterday I did the first count and came up with 31. So I apparently included some secondaries by mistake. But we may be flying within a month. This season I carefully weighed the the hawks nearly every morning, and kept their net body weights between 5% and 10% over normal flying weights. The flying weights would be 800 grams for Farrah, 900 grams for Cisco, though Farrah carries more meat on her bones. If they were of comparable condition, the difference between them would be about 130 grams at least. The hawks were fed in their respective hawk boxes each morning, then put outside. Diet consisted of squirrels caught last season mostly by Cisco, and commercial quail, rat, and chicks. Both hawks hunted small yard creatures like grubs, DeKay's snakes, and the occasional hapless toad