While the children were off doing childreny things this morning myself and my younger son again went on another adult activity. Before coming here we both went through the list of activities available and came up with a shortlist from which we picked two things that we were interested in doing. Yesterday we did archery and today it was the turn of falconry.
Center Parcs has a falconry centre on site which, I suspect, they drive the birds in to every time there is a session to be run, although that said, they do run six sessions a day.
We arrived and were all given an oversized leather glove to wear. I sorted through the pile of gloves looking for a right handed one and was disappointed to find that there were none. It transpired that there were only left handed gloves and I was, once again, going to be expected to spend an hour with my bad armed aloft. *sigh*.
Over the course of the next hour we got to see four birds: a kestrel, harrier hawk, turkey vulture and finally, a white faced owl. We formed a circle with our gloved hands out with the birds being coaxed from one hand to another with the offer of a small meat bribe. While the birds were hopping glove to glove the handler gave us an interesting running commentary about the birds and even an impassioned plea to reevaluate our view of vultures which, she felt, was based on Disney’s portrayal in The Jungle Book.
It was an interesting talk and helped fill the time when you didn’t have a bird sat on your hand but ultimately you needed to be a bit of a twitcher to get the most out of the session.
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