I flew Orville on a couple of days. His weight is up about 20% above his hunting weight. I have been hooding and carrying him around for the past few weeks, and just had to see him flying again. His fist behavior and mews response has been so good, plus I have telemetry…
The first day he hunted lazily, but responded well. He took a very long bath, then swam back to the bank without even trying to fly off the water.
The second day (yesterday) he also hunted lazily, diving once after many minutes of head bobbing. He then took a long bath, lasting maybe five minutes. He flew off the water and headed out.
Silently, he began circling upwards, beating hard to gain some altitude, never glancing in my direction. He has never flown like this. My last bird exhibited this circling up behavior a year ago–right before he left.
Unlike last year, Orville finally returned to my offered fish but landed on his perch before flying one more leg over to me. All of this is odd. Something is going on in his brain regarding migration.
Weights have been of minor importance with my handling of ospreys since they would always come to a whole fish (not necessarily to a tidbit) if their crop was empty, regardless of weight.
You may have guessed that I will not fly him at high weights any more this fall. I may fly him back down below 1300g, but I probably shouldn’t do that until winter.
I wonder if the long baths are to hydrate before a long trip? I will do some Googling.