Imprints

[Andrew Connor]

can you breed with imprint because i thought once you imprinted a bird it thought it was a human ish like it thinks your its mom so please tell me i would like to know because wouldnt it be harder?
atb
james

[Jackson]

yes it is possible!!!

[Killer Harris]

Hi ,Im no breeder but I would of thought with imprints it would be done by artificial insemination ,Ive thought about how they did it ,well how they got the seman untill I watched the imprint goss hawk

[Altai]

There are many forms of imprinting. Have a look at Nick Fox book, "Understanding the birds of prey". Birds of prey can imprint on many things; parents, siblings, nest structure, food species etc. Different species or individuals will imprint more strongly on some of these things than others, they also may vary as to the timing of their imprinting.

It used to be said that the best imprints were the ones isolated from parents and siblings, carried around day and night with the handler, exposed to everything. I now think that the imprint reared with one or two others, and carried around all day and night by the owner untill it can fly, then kept in isolation makes a more reliable bird for AI.
Imprints can be "turned", reared as some form of imprint that later breeds naturally. Many big breeders have "pairs " where they go in and strip semen from the male and inseminate the female. The birds do everything else themselves and make perfect parents. I know of a pair of falcons where the female is an imprint and solicites to any human yet she is in a wire fronted aviary and breeds naturally with what I asume is a "straight" male.

There is a lot of variation in how a bird can be reared and how it will turn out. The key is to know how, exactly, it has been reared. If you do not know for sure you can waiste years trying various ways of breeding from the bird. That is the reason why it is a good idea to buy a young chick, if you know how to look after it, and rear it yourself, then you know what you have got.

If a breeder will tell you exactly how a bird was bred/reared, and you trust the breeder, then a parent hatched and reared bird taken from the parents not to early or late, (varries from one species to another), should be the easiest to breed from later. However, the Peregrine Fund found, in the early days of captive breeding, that groups of peregrine chicks reared together by humans, paired off before fledging, and allowed to fledge in the aviaries where they themselves would later breed, performed very well.

It is a huge subject and could warrent a book all of its own, but I repeat, have a look at the Nick Fox book.