This is an excellent…

This is an excellent proposal and I'm so excited to see it become a reality. I was very lucky to receive a wild take permit the first year I applied, as an apprentice, in a year when 63 other people had also applied. While I was hunting successfully with a passage red-tailed hawk, I saw fellow apprentices forced to wait another year (some had already been waiting years!), or resort to purchasing a captive bred bird, and having a much more frustrating experience than I had. There's no doubt in my mind that taking a passage redtail provided me with the most fulfilling experience I could have had in my first year! That was how I had always envisioned falconry: taking a young bird who is statistically unlikely to survive its first year, giving it the confidence and skill to hunt large prey items, getting it through that crucial first winter, and releasing a healthy, older and wiser bird in the spring, to join the breeding population and pass on its skills to its future young. I am so glad to see that this will hopefully become an option to all falconers, every year!