The other day I came across an interesting Tweet on Twitter where Travellingwithourkids asked her followers what their top 3 bucket list destinations were.

www.travellingwithourkids.co.uk is a UK Blogger who writes about her family travels with her husband and 2 kids, great writer with some fantastic posts on destinations across the world and lots of travel tips, you should check her out and give her a follow if you are on Twitter

I Found the question interesting but what intrigues me more is the why not so much the where, for us its really difficult going anywhere as a family and when we do its mostly about outdoors, animals and falconry as its what we love but I do have a couple of places I would love to go for completely unrelated reasons.

My 3 where Yorkshire, New Orleans and Dubai.
 
Yorkshire because its such a beautiful place you could send days exploring the countryside and seeing visitor attractions and the kids have never been.
 
New Orleans because I would love to experience the music and food for myself and I would love to experience the Mardi Gras, my friend’s parents where there earlier this year and took home some of the Mardi Gras beads some of which my girls got which was amazing.
 
Dubai is the big one and top of the list, this one of course is all about the falconry, to go out to Dubai and experience Falconry at its finest would be amazing, Ideally, I would like to go at the back end of the year when the falconry museum has the falcons on display for sale, and to attend the falconry races in the dessert, one day this will become a reality!!
 
So who wants to tell me the ‘why’ about their top destinations? would be interesting to find out if peoples destinations are connected to their everyday life or something completely unrelated, comment below
 
Darren & Clare

 

Lana is our White faced Scops Owl, although a few years ago, the powers that decide on species split them into two different species and they became known as the Northern White Faced and the Southern White faced.  The northern and Southern is referring to Africa where these owls originate from.

They are also known as the ‘Transformer owl’ for their defence mechanism, which I can tell you is absolutely fascinating to see!!!

Due to its small size, in the wild they are good prey so they have developed mechanisms when faced with a threat.

When they are faced with a small threat they will try to present themselves as large as possible by throwing out both wings and raising all their feathers, like a fan and open their eyes as wide as possible, Lana did this when we got a kitten and they seen each other for the first time.

When they are faced with a much larger threat or don’t want to risk any confrontation they pull themselves in and elongate their bodies, narrows and squints their eyes and their tufts point straight up, they attempt to disguise themselves so the threat will see them as a tree branch and back off.

It is these amazing survival techniques that has earned this little owl its big name ‘The Transformer Owl’. It is fascinating to read about but even more so when you see it in action.
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Our Lana has the most amazing nature and is great around people and she has the most beautiful big orange eyes.

Darren & Clare​
 
 

, Hello everyone and welcome to 2017!! I hope you all enjoyed the festive season? We had a wonderful time, it’s always nice to have a little break and enjoy some family time.


It doesn’t completely stop for us though as the birds still get flown daily and there is always jobs to do, but it was certainly done at a more relaxed pace than normal!!


We started off the year with a couple of birthday parties, Chloe from Elgin celebrated her 5th birthday and Dylan from Buckie celebrated his 8th Birthday. Darren attended with the owls and everyone got the chance the fly the birds and learn about them, everyone had a great time and Darren enjoyed the sessions.


We have some care home visits coming up, next week we are visiting a care home in Inverness that we have visited before so I am looking forward to seeing the residents again but this time I will have Jessica and Kate coming with me.


This year is already looking promising for us as a family and as a business and we are excited about what new arrivals spring time may bring for us.


I like to post up fairly regular blog posts giving you updates on what we are up to and doing some informative pieces, but the question there is what do you want to read about?


Is there a certain bird of prey you want to read about or learn more about? us and a bit more on what we get up to? Falconry around the world?


Leave us a comment and we will be sure to write a blog post about your preferred subject in the future.


Darren & Clare

Hi everyone, been a busy start to the month for us here but I’ve finally squeezed in a little computer time to work on our next blog post.

One of our services we offer is Animal Assisted Therapy, this is aimed at Care homes, therapy units, people with physical and mental disabilities. Our care home visits have been a huge success with some places planning to invite us back after the new year.

I love visiting the care homes, it’s a real honour to meet some of these people and hear some of their personal stories and It really is amazing to see people’s faces light up and the reactions they give when they spend a short time with the birds.

People most commonly associate dogs, cats and horses when they hear or speak of Animal Assisted Therapy (AAT), but other animals are being used more and more.

You can’t however pick any animal and just decide to use it for AAT, the animal’s wellbeing is extremely important and should never be compromised. Whatever animal you use must be fully trained and accustomed to the methods you will be using and surroundings they will be visiting.

We use Owls for our AAT visits. All our owls are imprinted from hatch and hand reared so are very much a part of the family, and are introduced to different sights and sounds almost immediately and get accustomed to people coming and going and getting up close to them. Once they are old enough we slowly use the same process out and about.

AAT is defined as a guided interaction between a trained animal and an individual or group. It is widely researched and documented with the majority of findings being highly positive. It has proved extremely beneficial to residents of elderly care homes and dementia patients. AAT works to reduce the loneliness or isolation sometimes felt by elderly residents, it encourages social interaction and emotional connections, am sure some of the activity co-ordinators we have seen in recent weeks will confirm that it is a stimulating and exciting activity for the residents and lifts their mood. It also works in reducing stress and anxiety and has also been proved to reduce the restlessness that can affect people with dementia.

​ AAT is also used to benefit people with depression, autism and substance abuse with reports showing Improved mood and communication skills and a reduction in stress

These sessions have been extremely popular in care homes; we have had bookings all over the north east and look forward too many more.
 
Darren & Clare
 
 

The history of Falconry is such a vast subject and being a bit of a history geek I could go on forever, so instead what I’ve decided to do is to tell you a few different facts and things that I personally find interesting and hopefully you will too.

Falconry is the art of hunting wild quarry in its natural habitat using birds of prey, Falconry is also referred to as Hawking.
                                                                                  
Evidence suggests Falconry began in Mesopotamia or possibly china around 2000bc and possibly introduced to Europe around 400-500AD, by 875AD it was practiced widely throughout Western Europe.

Due to lack of recorded details from these times the true origins of the sport have been of much debate, although we have the date of around 2000bc the records indicate falcons were seen as a suitable royal gift and that falcons were being used by humans for hunting, suggesting that falconry was already well established at this point. But without recorded data no history records can be made.

Falconry is detailed as being one of the oldest sports and historically Falconry has been described as the sport of kings. It was a status symbol among the nobles and was largely restricted to the noble classes, but falconry within the lower classes may be underestimated.

Falcons were valued so high that punishments for harming falcons or to steal or destroy eggs or nests resulted in one-year imprisonment or other punishments such as your eyes being poked out or your hands being cut off. In the 5th century the Burgundian penal code of the period proclaims that the penalty of the theft of a hawk was the removal of six ounces of flesh by said hawk from the thief’s buttocks!!

At one time falcons were so highly valued that they were worth more than their weight in gold. During the late 14th century the Ottoman Sultan Beyazid 1 kidnaped the son of Phillip the Bold, Duke of Normandy and refused Phillips ransom offer of 200,00 gold ducats and instead wanted and was given something much more valuable, 12 white Gyr Falcons.
                                 
Mary Queen of Scots was a keen enthusiast of Falconry with a love of Merlin’s and enjoyed going lark hunting. It has been written that during her long imprisonment she was allowed to fly her merlin.

Around about the late 18th century falconry was in sharp decline as firearms began to overshadow the sport, with people preferring to hunt by shooting rather that with a falcon.

Falconry did however make a comeback with a lot of books being written during the 20th century on the art of falconry, which soon led to falconry being introduced to North America.

In 1927 the British Falconers Club was founded and is today the largest and oldest falconry club in Europe.

Falconry today is very much alive and practiced worldwide. We can enjoy the rich history of falconry and practice and promote the best of modern falconry.

There are so much more interesting finds out there on falconry, different countries have their own history with the sport and their own traditions and it makes for very interesting reading. I hope in the near future to write some posts on a couple of different countries, including our own and their story with falconry.

If anyone wants to know about a specific country please feel free to comment, some interesting pages to look at are

www.iaf.org
www.r3.org
www.antithetical.org
 
Darren and Clare
 
 
 
 

Wow well we finally went and done it!!!

The last few months have been a bit of a whirlwind and a bit surreal, now we have started out I reckon the real challenges we face are yet to come, but we look forward to it and hope to really make something of our new venture.

Falconry has always been Darren’s passion and after following him around everywhere with his birds and the realisation that they were number one and not me I figured I might as well join in!!!

Starting a business was always in the plan just a matter of when and how, but before we knew it we had a house build, a baby, a wedding, quickly followed by another baby and the business plans were suddenly shelved.

Now the girls are growing up and life in general is easier to manage talk of business was back on the table and when we seen an opportunity we went for it.
So here we are as Speyside Falconry, finally in business.

We have the webpage and Facebook page up and running and we will use the blog to post on a range of subjects such as the History of Falconry, Our birds, Falconry around the world, Animal Assisted Therapy, updates on the business and life in general.

We have already taking our first bookings and look forward to many more!!
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Hopefully you will pop in from time to time and maybe leave a comment or two.
 
Darren & Clare
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