Thank you for the welcome

What chelonians do you have? As of present I'm only keeping a few musk turtles and an Ouachita map turtle. We had an older yellow bellied slider as a rescue but she unfortunately passed away not too long ago. We are hoping to get their pond build soon!

He is very handsome if I do say so myself haha. Owning him is fairly straight forward but I do have a lot of respect for him. I still have days where I'm out and about up the fields and I'm just in awe that he's right in front of me and he's my buddy. He is very much so a one person bird and prefers me over anybody else but if his weight is down enough he'll fly to most people (unless you get a new glove and he's not keen on a slightly different shade of brown haha!). He's relatively quiet, you wouldn't know he was there half of the time. He doesn't bite at all. He's quite curious and he's more than happy to sit on you for hours at a time doing his own thing. He loves flying free and likes to push his luck by going in the tallest trees or flying as far out as possible so he can loop back around. Woodland walks are his favourite because I just put him into a tree and walk off. It's like taking a flying dog for a walk. He gets exercise and he knows every now and then he'll get a good treat. As for caring for him I think it's MUCH more simple than owning a parrot. All they care about is eating, sleeping, pooping. They don't have the attention requirements of a parrot and won't need you constantly to make them happy. Once they've eaten and they've got somewhere to sit they couldn't care less. My American kestrel was a lot more clingy but I had him as a creche reared baby. Once he reached sexual maturity he'd try bringing me food and he'd scream a lot whenever I walked past but that's why people prefer parent raised raptors. My Indian eagle owl was a bit more attention seeking but again, it's usually all just based on food!

Welcome to the forums!

I enjoyed reading about hunting with birds!

Once I had a couple passing by my aviary with an Owl. They were looking for a place to train him (there are some fields behind my house and one of them was for sale, they didn't buy in the end cause the owner wouldn't sell the field without the house and other buildings) Anyway, I was really hoping to see them in action, but didn't get a demonstration...

Thank you!

It's a shame they couldn't purchase it. Watching owls fly is amazing, though they tend to be incredibly lazy and prefer walking along the ground in my experience I'll post some flying photos and videos here for you if you like!

If you have some of your birds, that would be great.

It's always different watching something made by somebody you 'know'.
I have watched some youtube clips before, and if I would have the time I wouldn't mind tending to some raptors myself.

I just have enough to do already. Now if I could make a living out of it ... I might consider a carier switch

The training process for a Harris's hawk is interesting stuff! If the human is responsible for flushing the prey, then they actually do become an active member of the hunting group, basically playing the part of a non-flying hawk.

Just a couple of desert tortoises and a red eared slider. The desert tortoises are a local species that's protected, but we have some weird regarding them here. You can't take them out of the wild, but once you do you can't release them.

The older one, Murtle, kinda came to us in a funny way before I was born. My parents found her walking along the road with a moldy shell and a number painted on it. They took her home and called the Arizona Fish and Game department, followed by the Arizona Desert Museum (who deals with unreleasable tortoises). The desert museum sent someone down to look at her, and explained that her behavior showed she was tame. They gave my parents a guide to care for her, and my parents made the entire yard tortoise-safe. While she has her own pen, it's more for hibernation than anything, but she basically owns the whole yard (and is well aware of it too ).
The second tortoise is one of her babies. Someone gave us a male tortoise and because Murtle doesn't get along well with others, we didn't expect them to reproduce. The thing is with desert tortoises is that they can stay fertilized years after insemination, so for quite a few years, we've been getting baby tortoises, and having to rehome them. We've rehomed the male so once she's no longer fertile, then maybe we won't have any more for a while. The baby tortoise is currently in a terrarium (the yard is safe for adult tortoises; not so much for babies), and we were thinking of keeping it, depending on what sex it'll turn out to be (it's too young to tell right now).

The red eared slider lives in our pond. She's a little shy, so I don't usually see her all too often. I'd honestly would love to get another turtle for the pond. Possibly another slider, though it'd have to be the same sex to prevent any reproduction or hybridization (depending on the slider species). Finding good homes for 4-5 baby tortoises each year is difficult enough, I wouldn't want to end up with 20+ baby turtles each year.

I used to keep a lot of reptiles and amphibians (aka lizards and frogs). I was almost thinking of getting into that again. I'd love to have a veiled chameleon.
Was going to adopt from our local reptile rescue, but it shut down recently due to being too low on funds.

It sounds like a lot of fun, having your hawk with you. I would honestly love to have a bird that I can go on walks with. I've seen people train larger parrots for outdoor free flight, although I only have small bird species and well...I'm not ready to take any of my birds outside again anytime soon.
Luckily the rooms are big enough for my best flyer, Lucy, to get enough exercise indoors. Now if only the other cockatiel, Alex, was better at flying... (She's getting better with practice though)

Here's some short looping clips I have on Instagram. IG does ruin the quality a lot but you can still get the idea

https://www.instagram.com/p/BFe1NvEr0R_/

https://www.instagram.com/p/BFUQZjSr0XM/

https://www.instagram.com/p/BFGt6z0L0dH/

https://www.instagram.com/p/BFD4kDFL0bZ/

https://www.instagram.com/p/BEYywwpr0Sr/

https://www.instagram.com/p/BEOf-f4L0bc/

Enjoy those! Sorry they're all short clips but they're still nice. I have a GoPro Hero 4 Black so I should really try getting some POV shots from myself to show people how it looks for me

A career in falconry is possible though most just do it as a hobby. A lot of people working with them at centres are volunteers. The best way to do it as a career would probably be pest control

Exactly! A lot of people in falconry consider them throwaway birds or beginners birds. I know of people who have been working raptors for many years and still always have a cast of Harris' to have fun with. Brilliant birds and very intelligent

I'd love to see some pics of Murtle and the babies! I think having a tortoise safe yard is amazing. Unfortunately with the temps here in the UK I wouldn't have a clue how to do it but I think some people do still. I've always been interested in leopard tortoises but they're so big it's just not possible to NOT have an outdoor enclosure

What reptiles did you used to keep?

I'm actually very interested in free flying parrots. I think with my current knowledge of raptors I at least have some sort of head start there. I'm hoping to get going in the next few years. I'm sorry you lost your bub but it's so good you got her back!

Free-flying parrots takes some very intensive recall training to really do it right, with "food management" as the recommended technique to make sure the bird comes back. The basic idea is that the bird doesn't actually starve, but it THINKS that it's starving and comes when you call because it really really wants the food. That's according to a recall group that I briefly belonged to, anyway. I don't want my birds to spend their lives thinking that they're starving, and all the hawks in the neighborhood make it pretty dangerous anyway (they're mostly Cooper's hawks). So my guys won't be doing any free flying outdoors. The guy who built my house had a cockatiel that would fly around in his yard, and he lost it one day when a hawk swooped down in the middle of a barbecue with the yard full of people and grabbed the tiel in midair.