Climbing back up...

Things seem to be slowly improving. He's back up above his trapped weight, but keel still feels very sharp. He was so fat yesterday he didn't want to fly at all, just pulled a foot up in his belly feathers and sat there looking at me, whistling away at him. Hrmph!
So he went out to weather and enjoy the chilly Oregon sunshine. I pulled a 3/4" disc of ice out of his bath pan, brr... no wonder he hasn't been bathing! He's looking decidedly worse for the wear, as I don't think he's been preening for the last week or so. His tail is also pretty ragged, he's been spending nearly all his time on the gravel floor of the mews instead of perched.
Was hoping to take him to hunt this weekend at the Oregon Falconer's Association Winter field meet, but he's pretty weak, so no hunts for us for a while. We're just doing relays of ground-to-glove jumps, and short flights to build up his flight muscle and bring him back into condition. I may haul him to the meet just to have a field of experienced folks look him over and help me figure out how to proceed from here, but we'll see.
In either case, I'm really looking forward to the meet. It's a lot of fun to hang around these folks, quite aside from the incredible hawking I expect we'll see. Also, I have for donation to the raffle, an amazing handmade hawking hoodie from Heidi of Urban Ninja Wear, with a hawk pulling-up on one shoulder and running rabbit coming around the hip.

I'm down with some kind of stomach bug today, but even still there's no break from this. He's exactly at trapped weight today so should be expected to show some kind of response--on the theory that if he was hunting when trapped he must have been hungry, or he wouldn't have come down to the trap. Combat weight is expected to be roughly ten percent lower than trapped weight, but his keel still feels awfully sharp to me.