1st Kill! Bitter Sweet

Sayda weighed in at 587 grams at 11:30 this morning. I was pretty psyched on doing some field hawking, so I called my good buddy Judah to see if he wanted to come along. He said he was down, so I went and drove around the neighborhood while I was waiting for him. The starlings where out and about, and it didn't take long before I found the perfect slip. There where two starlings in the grass next to the road, and another about to hop up there from the street. I drove up next to them, and Sayda was slicked down and watching....once we passed, their heads went back down. That's when I slipped Sayda. She came out the window pumping hard, and dropped like a rock onto the unsuspecting bird. Right at the last minute, the starling lifts its head and lets out a panicked scream. It was too late though, and the scream was cut short by Sayda's feet slamming it's head into the grass! Sayda's head immediately goes up, and I flip the car to the side of the road. I whip the door open, and fly out of the door..........and she is no where to be seen. Sayda hates being out in the open, so I half expected this to happen. I pull out the receiver, and start walking around looking under all of the bushes. Can't find her, so I do the walk about, and zero in her location. She was either in the back yard of the house she caught the starling in, or else one of the houses on either side. I knock on the first two houses, and no one answers. I hop back their and peek around really quickly, but don't do good enough of a job to find her. Knock on the third house, and I see a kid moving around inside. He doesn't answer the door though, so I don't go check out that yard. I wait her out for a good hour and a half...maybe two hours and the signal stays exacltly the same. FINALLY, she flies up into one of the trees, and I attempt to call her down. The problem is, I couldn't really get anywhere near the tree she was in, and the call was just too far for her. She had a nice crop, and she didn't really want to do anything. She ignores me, and eventually flies off. It takes me a good thirty minutes or so to track her down, and I eventually glimpse her in the top of a tree. She flies off before I can even get out of the car, and I loose sight of her. I'm messing with the telemetry, when I hear a bunch of blue jays making noise. I drive over to them, and I find Sayda sitting up in the tree. For the next three hours, I sit there and watch her. She won't come to the fist, ignores the lure, AND ignores the live lure. About an hour or so before dark, she decides she is done preening and chillen, and she flies off again. I track her down again, but can't get a visual on her. I drove around in the same circle probably three hundred times...I knew what street she was on, but I just couldn't find her. Once it got dark, my good buddy Jeff showed up, and he brought his marshal receiver. It has a pretty sweet function where you can set in on near, regular, and far (or something like that), and in no time at all, he had her zeroed into a specific tree. Lucky for me, it's a tree in a front yard, and we will be back there at 6:30 in the morning to try and get her down. It's supposed to get pretty chilly tonight I think, so hopefully she will be hungry enough...if not, then we may have to wait till after she casts. SOOOOO....we finally caught something. It ended up pretty bad, but we caught something. Guess I'm going to have to limit her to pigeons and crows from now on, but now that she has caught something, I'm hoping it got the wheels spinning. Going to stay away from areas with back yards for a good minute too :). What's interesting, is that she is at the exact same weight that she flew off the first time...like EXACTLY. Now that she is responsive, I have been pushing her weight back up until she messed around...I guess I found the top end of her weight! LOL. Still psyched about the way she reacted to the rabbits yesterday, so I may do a little more field hawking than I had planned on. Anyways, fingers crossed I get her back in the morning