We can't lose you Brother. I watch your videos over and over and over, hoping that helps. Thank you again for your expertise and knowledge it is more than greatly appreciated! Happy Hawking
Agreed. I honestly don’t do falconry, but I love his videos. I do bird photography so his videos definitely are informative and learned a lot about the different birds of prey how the behave and operate as well as how to find where nest could be. Still despite not doing falconry watching Ben’s videos gives me an appreciation and respect for those who do falconry for a living. Plus watching videos of it I will say there is an art to falconry and I would love to watch it in person one day. As for Ben I pray his health can improve and he continue these videos I enjoy watching them and love his knowledge of the birds of prey.
You're knowledge is incredible. And not just with falconry but with birds of prey in general. I whole heartedly understand and agree that your knowledge is precious and should be passed on. Let's hope you have a very very long time to achieve that. I've been watching and rewatching your videos so much that all I have to do when running a search on youtube is type in the letter "B" and up your name pops att the very top. And I watch a fair bit on youtube so that says a lot. Keep up the good work Ben. I think you are more valued and important to us subscribers than you realise.
Brilliant addition to your catalogue of patronage to falconry both as a human heritage and as a sport. Your insights are valuable and much appreciated!
Elf Owl ❤ clever checkpoint 😊 wonderful video. I thoroughly enjoy your long form videos. With the shorter videos, I often want more. But that a tribute to your ability to narrate your videos & impressive depth & breadth of knowledge. Keep them coming
Videos keep getting better & better glad you're doing better health wise now been watching these since the beginning, even one on the thylacine. Great work always. Thank you Sir.
Man this was a great video. I used to not be too fond of owls compared to other raptors but by mind changed a couple years ago, now I love them. There's two Great Horned owls that hang out outside my office starting about 6 months ago. Sometimes when i patrol at night I'll see them swoop silently over the lot to perch in a tree or in a rooftop. I thought we only had one until a couple weeks ago when one started their distinctive call then the other flew to the same roof and joined it. Great birds. Elf Owl
Love your videos Ben! You're the reason that my interest in falconry has been rekindled! I'm on the path now to try to take my test and hopefully get a sponsor one day.
AMAZING VID!!!! So informative...errands can wait til tomorrow🤣 I sat and watched from start to finish..so cool..TY BEN!! for ur time and knowledge...We are all so fortunate to hear ur life experiences...stay healthy..ur such an asset to this community!💯👍
OOO Thank you so much!! One of my long term falconry goals is to hunt with owls, I'm very happy with this ETA: i once worked with a female EEO who put a talon through a colleague of mine's hand. He was wearing the thickest possible eagle glove. She never did that to me but she did give me bruises through the glove.
Elf owl! I like these longer form videos, excellent for background listening, but I frequently find myself tabbing back to catch a tidbit again, pausing to search up something you mentioned, etc. Good stuff!
Tawny Owls are such sweethearts, individuals as you say but they can be genuinely affectionate and cuddly. I worked with one who loved to be petted and would get upset when I stopped! They can also be aggressive, bird ringers taking chicks out of the nest have been given concussions by them before. They're the heavyweights of British owls in the wild. If anyone's interested in the wild natural history of them, I recommend Robert E Fuller's videos on them (and his British wildlife videos in general).
Thank you for sharing your experience. I have had burrowing owls that behaved similarly…. They wanted head scratches and would lean into you and run your Rand to get you to start rubbing their head. Very cool
I saw a great horned owl and thought wow that's a big owl Then I saw a eurasian eagle owl and I was like WOW THAT'S A HUGE OWL She was perched on someone's arm(educational bird) and she was as tall as the guy's torso! I love modern dinosaurs😂😂
That is fantastic. Totally amazing. Great video. We have a Little Owl at our small centre in the Orkney Islands, it is amazing for education and is clever enough to return to fist. A relation of the Burrowing Owl.
A friend of mine who studied great greys in the black spruce bog breeding areas said one of his research plots also contained a great horned nest, which is atypical. Great greys, of all ages, were regularly on the menu, especially when the owlets were fledging.
Great video! Ural owls have the same (or worse) reputation for being defensive as barred owls. In fact they are so aggressive that they are called "battle owl" or "striking owl" (slagugle) in Norwegian. Tawny owl is very adaptable, and I guess more OK with human disturbance than most (closest thing I can think of in America is great horned). BTW I have noticed that Hollywood uses tawny owl as the "standard owl sound" for some reason, even though they are European.
I have a video of Brad Wood interviewing legendary falconer Frank Beebe. Frank talked about the various raptors he worked with in his youth which included Hawk Owls. Hawk Owls, Frank said, were as fast as Cooper's hawks! Brad sort of let Frank's outrageous comment go unchallenged, but Brad brought it up again later in the interview in an effort to allow Frank to correct himself. "So," Brad said, "you said Hawk Owls were almost as fast as Cooper's Hawks." Frank got animated and exclaimed, "No! They're AS fast as Cooper's hawks!" Frank was getting up there in years and Brad didn't want to argue with the famous falconer, but it was an amusing interaction about the speed of Hawk Owls.
Sorry for the third comment but!! I feel the need to mention that if you seriously want to work with owls I recommend the book What An Owl Knows by Jennifer Ackerman. It's not a falconry book but it does involve stories of falconers' owls, as well as rehab owls and people studying them too. It changed how I look at and think of owls. The main thing I learned about owls is that their sense of sight might be wired to their visual senses, especially those keyed in to hearing more. This is something that can happen in humans where our senses cross over, it's called synesthesia (I have it), for me some sounds cause visuals and tastes. In us it's a random mutantion but owls might have weaponized it.
A few spotted owls I know are aloof, but many are tame and friendly. And I'm speaking of wild ones. It's pretty wild to give one a mouse and he will take you to his nest, then look at you expectantly for another mouse. You ought to come to Cali and work with them.
@@benwoodrufffalconry Happy to take you on a ride along one of these days! I work for a forestry company and it's my job to chase after spotted owls lol
Wow… what a impressive video! At *Some* point, I want to get some books and take the test to see how good I’ll do. Kinda intimidated by finding a sponsor but I hope it is Reasonably doable. Thank you so much for telling us about your experiences with these beautiful owls, and those you only heard of. Aside from your channel, I follow Mercer Falconry and Robert E Fuller’s content. Plus other smaller creators out there. It always makes me excited to learn and move forward. Maybe another video you could do is, “Once you pass your test and find a sponsor, here are reputable breeders for captive bred owls and/or Other raptors” because I knew of one other person who mentioned that they got a raptor from a breeder but who? I forget.. Please take care of your health my friend, be safe, stay warm.. and happy holidays! 🫶
Elf owl! Owls are definitely interesting, and I am interested in maybe one day trying to hunt with one. I just feel that they wouldn't necessarily feel as fun as the accipiters that I'm used to flying. But I also have a few unusual projects that I would like to try: Car hawking a rough legged, a broad wing, and a roadside hawk; trying two different methods with northern caracaras: an imprint using McDermott's accipiter recipe, and a passage that follows along on foot and hunt for reptiles via flipping. Aside from available time, the car hawking ones are simply just having the availability of birds to trap. The caracara experiments are for the imprint, availability of baggies, and the passage, good land to flip reptiles.
Another thing I forgot to add to my other comment, a big reason owls arent worth the trouble for me is the amount of training and typical head count when it comes to game. Everyone I know who has ever hunted an owl, mostly EEO and GHOW, has put in so much time and so much energy for maybe 10 head of game, half of which are mice and voles. While if they spent that time and energy on say a RTHA or Ferrug, they'd have 100 head of game. Not to say its worthless and not impressive, I have great respect for anyone who is able to make it work. But for me personally, its too much effort for a bird that doesn't catch enough to feed itself. Still cool birds, but imo not worth the effort of hunting them
Elf Owl. BRilliant description of all the owls. Although Imight have to disagree with you about Milky Eagle Owl. Ours is awful with many moods and dislikes. My favourite is the Spectacled Owl from Central America. Utterly brilliant to work with
In my limited owl experience, (never flown one on game but have trained them for flight displays and education) training owls is to training cats as training other raptors is to training dogs. Owls can be very finicky and some days respond great at 600g and the next day completely ignore you at 600g. In my opinion, owls aren't worth the effort to try to hunt with but are fine for educational work. Since most owls hunt at least partially by sound, it's very hard to convince them that you are something helpful and not a loud bumbling human scaring off all the prey. I definitely agree with the statement that imprint owls do a lot better than wild caught ones. Owls are cool, but personally I'd never plan to hunt one. I could see myself taking in a non releasable owl for educational displays but that's about it. From what I've seen and in my area, owls are mostly pets and glove candy.
That is a very VERY good comparison with the cats and dogs!!! Well said. That is a way that accurately explains it in a way people can understand and relate to
@@benwoodrufffalconry Ok, thank you a lot! First of all here is no falconry culture in my country anymore, so there is no one here to ask. And we have just very few zoos here. The zoo where I work, we don't have animal shows/exhibitions either. But we would like to do more things with birds in the future, like maybe freeflying, etc. We have a breeding snowy owl couple. But I don't know what would be the best age to take an owl chick into human care if the goal is to get a tame and manageable bird. Should parents be allowed to take care for the chick for how long? Days, weeks...? Or what is the best way to work with owls?
Sorry ! I haven’t had any first hand experience with them. I know they are widely worked with. I should have included them. I’ll have to do a follow up at some point
Have you already done a video about this way they use their muscles? I know you brought it up in one of your videos recently when you were talking about when you had done an autopsy on a raptor. Just wondering if there is any other more detailed video. Here is a short clip that motions the thing I am trying to say ua-cam.com/users/shortsB-_OrOCz2W0?si=UCegTYibdhP1r1Yi
We can't lose you Brother. I watch your videos over and over and over, hoping that helps. Thank you again for your expertise and knowledge it is more than greatly appreciated! Happy Hawking
Thank you so much!
Agreed. I honestly don’t do falconry, but I love his videos. I do bird photography so his videos definitely are informative and learned a lot about the different birds of prey how the behave and operate as well as how to find where nest could be. Still despite not doing falconry watching Ben’s videos gives me an appreciation and respect for those who do falconry for a living. Plus watching videos of it I will say there is an art to falconry and I would love to watch it in person one day. As for Ben I pray his health can improve and he continue these videos I enjoy watching them and love his knowledge of the birds of prey.
You're knowledge is incredible. And not just with falconry but with birds of prey in general. I whole heartedly understand and agree that your knowledge is precious and should be passed on. Let's hope you have a very very long time to achieve that. I've been watching and rewatching your videos so much that all I have to do when running a search on youtube is type in the letter "B" and up your name pops att the very top. And I watch a fair bit on youtube so that says a lot.
Keep up the good work Ben. I think you are more valued and important to us subscribers than you realise.
Thank you. I deeply appreciate that
Elf owl! Thank you so much, first time viewer. Perfect length to convey depth of knowledge. Thank you. Will send question!
Thank you so much
Brilliant addition to your catalogue of patronage to falconry both as a human heritage and as a sport. Your insights are valuable and much appreciated!
Elf Owl! Thanks Ben, loved every minute. Vid went very quick
Elf Owl ❤ clever checkpoint 😊 wonderful video. I thoroughly enjoy your long form videos. With the shorter videos, I often want more. But that a tribute to your ability to narrate your videos & impressive depth & breadth of knowledge. Keep them coming
Videos keep getting better & better glad you're doing better health wise now been watching these since the beginning, even one on the thylacine. Great work always. Thank you Sir.
Man this was a great video. I used to not be too fond of owls compared to other raptors but by mind changed a couple years ago, now I love them. There's two Great Horned owls that hang out outside my office starting about 6 months ago. Sometimes when i patrol at night I'll see them swoop silently over the lot to perch in a tree or in a rooftop. I thought we only had one until a couple weeks ago when one started their distinctive call then the other flew to the same roof and joined it. Great birds.
Elf Owl
Elf owl! Thanks Ben for another great video!
Love your videos Ben! You're the reason that my interest in falconry has been rekindled! I'm on the path now to try to take my test and hopefully get a sponsor one day.
AMAZING VID!!!!
So informative...errands can wait til tomorrow🤣
I sat and watched from start to finish..so cool..TY BEN!! for ur time and knowledge...We are all so fortunate to hear ur life experiences...stay healthy..ur such an asset to this community!💯👍
Thank you so much!
Elf owl . Great video thank you!!
Elf Owl . Interesting to the end . Thank you
Thank you!
OOO Thank you so much!! One of my long term falconry goals is to hunt with owls, I'm very happy with this
ETA: i once worked with a female EEO who put a talon through a colleague of mine's hand. He was wearing the thickest possible eagle glove. She never did that to me but she did give me bruises through the glove.
Elf owl! I like these longer form videos, excellent for background listening, but I frequently find myself tabbing back to catch a tidbit again, pausing to search up something you mentioned, etc. Good stuff!
This was an excellant video. I really really enjoyed it.
Thank you very much!
Elf Owl. Fantastic video. Owls are my favourite bird to work with. Would love to work with an Elf owl. Keep these great videos coming
That was a great watch Ben; nice one
Great video brother. I loved the Verux Eagle owl at the World Center of BOP! The anatomy and fun facts are so good
Elf owl,actually love the longer videos!!
hi Ben loved the video have you heard anything about the Australian owl called the powerful owl seems to be an interesting Bird take care a be well
Fellow Utahn here Ben - loved the long-form video! From the Eurasian Eagle Owl to the Elf owl
Elf owl. Great video! Would love a video on short-tailed hawk in the future!
I raised some of owls in Cambodia. I just saw some similar to the owls here, the small ones. Thanks for sharing this knowledge. :)
Elf Owl all the way ! Thanks for the awesome info I will put them to use for my certificate of capacity for nocturnal birds of prey!
Tawny Owls are such sweethearts, individuals as you say but they can be genuinely affectionate and cuddly. I worked with one who loved to be petted and would get upset when I stopped! They can also be aggressive, bird ringers taking chicks out of the nest have been given concussions by them before. They're the heavyweights of British owls in the wild. If anyone's interested in the wild natural history of them, I recommend Robert E Fuller's videos on them (and his British wildlife videos in general).
Thank you for sharing your experience. I have had burrowing owls that behaved similarly…. They wanted head scratches and would lean into you and run your Rand to get you to start rubbing their head. Very cool
Tawny Owl breeders are hard to find in the US . Long waiting lists and frequent disappointments ( death of breeding pairs .)
I saw a great horned owl and thought wow that's a big owl
Then I saw a eurasian eagle owl and I was like WOW THAT'S A HUGE OWL
She was perched on someone's arm(educational bird) and she was as tall as the guy's torso! I love modern dinosaurs😂😂
That is fantastic. Totally amazing. Great video. We have a Little Owl at our small centre in the Orkney Islands, it is amazing for education and is clever enough to return to fist. A relation of the Burrowing Owl.
A friend of mine who studied great greys in the black spruce bog breeding areas said one of his research plots also contained a great horned nest, which is atypical. Great greys, of all ages, were regularly on the menu, especially when the owlets were fledging.
My experience with owls is limited to the year I volunteered at the Cascades Raptor Center. So interesting to spend time with!
ELF OWL….enjoyed the video!!!! Happy Hawking Ben
Happy hawking!
Great video! Ural owls have the same (or worse) reputation for being defensive as barred owls. In fact they are so aggressive that they are called "battle owl" or "striking owl" (slagugle) in Norwegian. Tawny owl is very adaptable, and I guess more OK with human disturbance than most (closest thing I can think of in America is great horned). BTW I have noticed that Hollywood uses tawny owl as the "standard owl sound" for some reason, even though they are European.
Thank you for the detailed info. That is so cool! Hopefully someday I can see a Ural owl in person
Elf Owl😊, Thank you once again Ben for your Always helpful information brother! Praying for you Always 🙏🏼.
EWL OWL. I love these longer videos, just listening to your thoughts and experience, thank you.
You are welcome. Glad you enjoy them
I have a video of Brad Wood interviewing legendary falconer Frank Beebe. Frank talked about the various raptors he worked with in his youth which included Hawk Owls. Hawk Owls, Frank said, were as fast as Cooper's hawks! Brad sort of let Frank's outrageous comment go unchallenged, but Brad brought it up again later in the interview in an effort to allow Frank to correct himself. "So," Brad said, "you said Hawk Owls were almost as fast as Cooper's Hawks." Frank got animated and exclaimed, "No! They're AS fast as Cooper's hawks!" Frank was getting up there in years and Brad didn't want to argue with the famous falconer, but it was an amusing interaction about the speed of Hawk Owls.
That’s really cool!
Sorry for the third comment but!! I feel the need to mention that if you seriously want to work with owls I recommend the book What An Owl Knows by Jennifer Ackerman. It's not a falconry book but it does involve stories of falconers' owls, as well as rehab owls and people studying them too. It changed how I look at and think of owls. The main thing I learned about owls is that their sense of sight might be wired to their visual senses, especially those keyed in to hearing more. This is something that can happen in humans where our senses cross over, it's called synesthesia (I have it), for me some sounds cause visuals and tastes. In us it's a random mutantion but owls might have weaponized it.
Amazing!!!!!
please cover hawk eagles from spizaetus and nisaetus genus in your future videos .
A few spotted owls I know are aloof, but many are tame and friendly. And I'm speaking of wild ones. It's pretty wild to give one a mouse and he will take you to his nest, then look at you expectantly for another mouse. You ought to come to Cali and work with them.
That is so cool!!!
@@benwoodrufffalconry Happy to take you on a ride along one of these days! I work for a forestry company and it's my job to chase after spotted owls lol
Wow… what a impressive video!
At *Some* point, I want to get some books and take the test to see how good I’ll do. Kinda intimidated by finding a sponsor but I hope it is Reasonably doable.
Thank you so much for telling us about your experiences with these beautiful owls, and those you only heard of.
Aside from your channel, I follow Mercer Falconry and Robert E Fuller’s content. Plus other smaller creators out there. It always makes me excited to learn and move forward.
Maybe another video you could do is, “Once you pass your test and find a sponsor, here are reputable breeders for captive bred owls and/or Other raptors” because I knew of one other person who mentioned that they got a raptor from a breeder but who? I forget..
Please take care of your health my friend, be safe, stay warm.. and happy holidays! 🫶
Elf owl. Useful video thanks
Thank you for informing us sir.
Nice
Elf owl!! Great video. We have a pair of eastern screech owls that nest on our property every year. They are a mixed couple with one red and one gray.
That is so cool! I love that you get to experience that every year
Elf owl!
Owls are definitely interesting, and I am interested in maybe one day trying to hunt with one. I just feel that they wouldn't necessarily feel as fun as the accipiters that I'm used to flying. But I also have a few unusual projects that I would like to try:
Car hawking a rough legged, a broad wing, and a roadside hawk; trying two different methods with northern caracaras: an imprint using McDermott's accipiter recipe, and a passage that follows along on foot and hunt for reptiles via flipping.
Aside from available time, the car hawking ones are simply just having the availability of birds to trap. The caracara experiments are for the imprint, availability of baggies, and the passage, good land to flip reptiles.
Another thing I forgot to add to my other comment, a big reason owls arent worth the trouble for me is the amount of training and typical head count when it comes to game. Everyone I know who has ever hunted an owl, mostly EEO and GHOW, has put in so much time and so much energy for maybe 10 head of game, half of which are mice and voles. While if they spent that time and energy on say a RTHA or Ferrug, they'd have 100 head of game. Not to say its worthless and not impressive, I have great respect for anyone who is able to make it work. But for me personally, its too much effort for a bird that doesn't catch enough to feed itself. Still cool birds, but imo not worth the effort of hunting them
SUPERB!
elf owl! loved it thanks for the info!
You are very welcome. Thank you for your support!
Oo forgot ; elf owl hehe
Elf Owl. BRilliant description of all the owls. Although Imight have to disagree with you about Milky Eagle Owl. Ours is awful with many moods and dislikes. My favourite is the Spectacled Owl from Central America. Utterly brilliant to work with
Spectacled owls seem amazing! So cool that you get to work with them. Hope to get the chance someday
In my limited owl experience, (never flown one on game but have trained them for flight displays and education) training owls is to training cats as training other raptors is to training dogs. Owls can be very finicky and some days respond great at 600g and the next day completely ignore you at 600g. In my opinion, owls aren't worth the effort to try to hunt with but are fine for educational work. Since most owls hunt at least partially by sound, it's very hard to convince them that you are something helpful and not a loud bumbling human scaring off all the prey. I definitely agree with the statement that imprint owls do a lot better than wild caught ones. Owls are cool, but personally I'd never plan to hunt one. I could see myself taking in a non releasable owl for educational displays but that's about it. From what I've seen and in my area, owls are mostly pets and glove candy.
That is a very VERY good comparison with the cats and dogs!!! Well said. That is a way that accurately explains it in a way people can understand and relate to
@benwoodrufffalconry my sponsor taught me that comparison and it holds true
Elf Owel
Elf Owl
Ben thank you for very informative chanel!
Can I consult you something about raising/taming an snowy owl? I work in zoo...
Absolutely
@@benwoodrufffalconry
Ok, thank you a lot!
First of all here is no falconry culture in my country anymore, so there is no one here to ask. And we have just very few zoos here.
The zoo where I work, we don't have animal shows/exhibitions either. But we would like to do more things with birds in the future, like maybe freeflying, etc.
We have a breeding snowy owl couple. But I don't know what would be the best age to take an owl chick into human care if the goal is to get a tame and manageable bird. Should parents be allowed to take care for the chick for how long? Days, weeks...?
Or what is the best way to work with owls?
Elf Owl.
elf owl! but I love owls anyway, I mean how could not? they're like cats with wings!
elf🦉
Hey what about me 😢🦉😥
Sorry ! I haven’t had any first hand experience with them. I know they are widely worked with. I should have included them. I’ll have to do a follow up at some point
Elf owl
Have you already done a video about this way they use their muscles? I know you brought it up in one of your videos recently when you were talking about when you had done an autopsy on a raptor. Just wondering if there is any other more detailed video. Here is a short clip that motions the thing I am trying to say ua-cam.com/users/shortsB-_OrOCz2W0?si=UCegTYibdhP1r1Yi
elf owl
Elf Owl
Elf Owl.
Elf owl
Elf owl