After a game of tennis, yesterday, with a friend of mine - Ruth, we went to take a look at the bird cages, out of curiosity. We managed to find the bird handler - Rafi and thanks to Ruth’s language skills in Spanish, we arranged a time for us to come over to take a look at the birds and take photos during the daylight. So, after class today, we headed off at around 6pm to take a look around and learn more about these Falcons. We spent around 45 minutes walking around taking photos of the Falcons - each of them seemed to have their own character and it was interesting to see the unique patterns on their feathers. We also strolled over to the breeding cages and saw a young Falcon calling out to Ruth for some attention! Rafi gave us a few feathers to take away with us - a great memento!

Rafi feeding chicken to a Falcon:

Falcons are kept here:

Falcon on Ben’s arm - there’s one of me as well, which I’ll post later. Ben knew a bit about Falcons, as he had done a course in Falconry:

In the breeding area:

I’ll post more pictures soon.

It was really interesting to find out that these Falcons are released at 5am and 5pm to scare away any birds in the area around the airport. This is to reduce the risk and chance of bird strikes with incoming or departing aircraft.

In other news - we’ve got a welcome party on tonight for the new course… and so course 68 is no longer new now!

I’ve made this post a little longer, as Dan has noticed my entries have been getting smaller and smaller! So this one’s for you Dan! Plans for the weekend - go to the beach.. and work!