Are you lookin' at my bird?

Another day, another experience....this time a hawk walk.

This is something we've both wanted to do for a little while. We originally bought a voucher deal off Groupon for a place near Leyland, but they let us down twice and were very hard to book with. In the end, we gave up and rang Groupon who offered me the cost back as credit towards another experience, so we booked this one instead.
(We spoke to another couple today who'd had exactly the same problem too)

Today's experience was at a place called Leighton Hall, near Carnforth. What a beautiful place in idyllic surroundings.
We met with Jim, who is the resident falconer and he told us how he breeds birds of prey in captivity for his full time job.

We got to handle a couple of birds today; the one in my blip is a caracara, native to South America and the equivalent of a buzzard here. His name is Zorro and he was really comical and a whopping 35 years old. Still not as old a bird as me though ;-)

We took it in turns to feed him, on the ground at first and then with him flying and landing on our gloved hands.
He got a bit excited with me though when he spied I had food and before I could lower my arm to feed him, he landed on my ungloved arm!

Jim also showed us a couple of smaller birds he is still training (lanner falcons) before he brought out Jess, the Harris hawk.
She was a beauty, and again we took it in turns to stand in the centre of the field with a gloved hand, as she circled above us then swept down to land on our hands for food.

We had a walk up Summerhouse Hill, where the aim was for Jim to release one of the smaller birds so that we could watch her flying and for him to demonstrate the lure he uses for them.
This didn't quite go to plan as she flew off, back to the hall. We could just about see her perched on the top of one of the towers!
It wasn't a wasted walk though as the view from the top was breathtaking; we could see Arnside, Grange over Sands and the majority of Morecambe bay.

It wasn't quite what we expected, there was very little walking involved and out of our time with Jim we had a 30 minute coffee break and a 30 minute falconry display for the general public who were visiting the hall.

That said, we got 3 hours rather than the 2 we expected, plus an open invitation to return in winter for a 'proper' walk through the forest with the birds (free of charge).

We will probably accept this invitation, as sadly there wasn't time to look around the hall and gardens today; they were only open 2-5pm, which was the same time we were with Jim. It would be nice next time to have the time to combine the two.

Leighton Hall is a family home, which is why opening times are restricted, but the nice thing about it is that no areas are roped off, so you can get close to the exhibits in the house.

We've had a great weekend learning about the birds and the bees, but the bees were the highlight for us.

Back to reality work tomorrow :-(