After the villagers drew lots to collect the collective property and then distributed it equally according to the number of villagers in the village, the next step came, which was more important in the eyes of ordinary people.

Divide the land!

There is no shortage of land in the Northeast. Even in Xing’an Village, a small mountain village at the foot of Changbai Mountain, the total amount of land controlled by the village collective is not small.

In the next few days, Wang Jianguo led the main backbone of the village to measure and calculate one by one, and then coordinated the actual amount of land.

After all the data are counted, they will be distributed by lottery based on the number of villagers in the village.

Of course, this kind of land distribution by drawing lots can only ensure superficial equality. In a society where favors are favored, officials will never treat their own people unfairly.

It is easy to become an official because you have connections in the court, and there is a village secretary who is the father-in-law. The land allocated to Yue Feng’s family is naturally in an extremely advantageous location, with a good location, flat ground and fertile soil.

There are four people in Yue Feng’s family. Each person owns seven and a half acres of land, which totals nearly thirty acres. This is a number that is unimaginable for farmers in other places except the three northeastern provinces.

After the household contracting of land was completed, it was already mid-April. The weather continued to warm up, and the willow trees along the roadside had begun to sprout, looking prosperous.

Under Yue Feng’s strong advocacy, the land allocated to his family was contracted out to villagers in the same village. Yue Feng’s family only kept a small piece of land for growing vegetables. It can be said that he freed his family from agricultural production.

After a few more days, spring plowing began and the new house was basically dry, so we asked a carpenter to help us start building windows, furniture and other items.

Let’s not talk about these infrastructure matters for now. There are two things that Yue Feng has put on the agenda.

The first thing is that after the temperature warms up in spring, the eagle at home begins to shed its feathers. The falcons, which are almost idle in autumn and winter, begin to gradually shed last year’s old feathers after feeling the temperature warming up, and then re-drill their quills to replace them with new feathers.

When it comes to molting, the progress of adult eagles and eaglets is slightly different, but overall there is not much difference.

In the falconry business, the process of molting a falcon’s feathers is called cage falconry.

Yue Feng built several cages in the breeding farm on the mountain specifically for molting the feathers of ordinary eagles and kites. The iron-backed red eagle, the blue kite, and the large earth kite, the three main falcons used by the hunting team for small-scale hunting last winter, were all sent to the mountain to be caged and molted.

As for the dairy hawk that my father has always liked, it almost eats and sleeps with the old man, and they are very friendly to each other, so it doesn’t need to be put in a cage at all.

The dairy hawk follows Yue Lei to and from get off work every day. During the day at the company, if he throws food on a tree, the hawk will eat it by itself. When he gets off work in the evening, he will just whistle and the dairy hawk will follow his owner home.

The Eagle Yuefeng used by the hunting teams at home have basically been settled. Uncle Zhao is at the breeding farm on the mountain. He can take care of them with a little effort every day, not to mention providing water and food, and regularly cleaning the cages.

It is worth mentioning that Yue Feng kept a big black eagle and a white spear in the house.

When Ye Jianjun came before, Yue Feng also mentioned that he wanted to pair the two eagles to try breeding.

The molting season for the two gyrfalcons began after the black eagle was found to have dropped its first primary feathers.

However, compared to other eagles that were directly kept in the breeding farm and made Uncle Zhao worry about them, Yue Feng had no intention of leaving these two precious gyrfals to Uncle Zhao to serve.

For wild-caught birds of prey to have normal estrus and pair up for reproduction, extremely high requirements are placed on the eagle’s physical fitness and hormone levels.

After a hunting season of actual combat training with two gyrfalcons, one black and one white, Yue Feng has completely trained them.

In order to make it easy for the two eagles to molt, Yue Feng still put in a lot of effort to guide them into mating while ensuring normal molting.

Yue Feng built the warehouse in the east room of the new house directly according to the shape of the raptor breeding cages he remembered. The two eagles used to sit on the falconry with their hats on most of the time during the hunting season, but now they take off their hats and roam freely in the falconry all day.

Simply letting them roam freely is not enough. Yue Feng takes the two eagles out for at least two to three hours every morning and evening to ensure that the two eagles get enough exercise.

The temperature has warmed up and the activity level has increased. The two eagles stay together almost 24 hours a day. As the hormone levels in their bodies increase, the big black eagle, which has always looked down on the little white eagle, finally goes into heat.

That morning, Yue Feng came to the door of the eagle house after breakfast to take his daily walk.

More than ten meters away from the warehouse, I heard a series of small cackling sounds coming from the eagle house.

Judging from the sound quality of the call, it was a big black eagle. Yue Feng’s heart moved, and he immediately tiptoed to the cage door.

I looked inside through the door and saw a big black eagle with its head down and its tail sticking out, nodding and cackling.

The female eagle is in heat. The thing Yue Feng has been worrying about for so long has finally come to fruition.

Faced with the olive branch thrown by the big black eagle, Bai Mao was extremely excited. He also drooped his head and moved to the side little by little. In the blink of an eye, he jumped onto the back of the big black eagle.

Wow, watching an eagle film live early in the morning! Yue Feng was watching it with great concentration. I won’t go into the details, but after the two eagles finished their work without any shame, Yue Feng immediately prepared some extra nesting materials such as pebbles and dry branches for them.

The nests of wild gyrfals are extremely simple. Most of them are natural terrains such as stone caves on cliffs. They can be considered well decorated if they are paved with some stones and branches.

What’s worse is that some people don’t do anything and just lay eggs in bare stone pits.

In the next few days, Yue Feng observed that the two eagles had brought a lot of nesting materials to the base of the artificial nest and simply laid them out. The nesting behavior indirectly confirmed that the two eagles had completed their pairing.

Another day passed. When Yue Feng opened the door early in the morning to let the two eagles out for some fresh air, only Xiaobai flew down from the shelf. The big black eagle lay in the house, squawking, and refused to move.

Now, Yue Feng knew that it was most likely that the gyrfalcon was preparing to lay eggs or had already laid them. It was already late April, nearly a month later than the breeding time in the gyrfalcon’s native habitat.

In the next few days, the two birds, Big Black Eagle and Little White, seemed to have made an agreement. In the morning, Little White Eagle went out for a walk, and in the evening, Little White Eagle took turns staying in the nest while the Big Black Eagle went out.

Taking advantage of the interval between the two parent birds changing shifts, Yue Feng also observed the situation in the nest. The number of eggs was increasing at a rate of one per day until five eggs were laid, and then the number stopped increasing.

At first, according to Yue Feng’s plan, the two parent birds only needed to incubate eggs and raise chicks, and they did not need to worry about food issues.

However, I don’t know if it’s because it’s a breeding season for birds of prey and has higher requirements for food. One morning when Yue Feng was taking Baimao out for a walk as usual, this guy didn’t fly around as usual, but flew farther and farther, and directly disappeared from Yue Feng’s sight.

If it were hunting season, Yue Feng would definitely be a lot more nervous if Xiaobai showed up like this, but now he was not afraid at all, because his wife and baby were in his hands, so Xiaobai would not run away even if he was asked to.

Sure enough, Baimao came back soon after being out of sight for less than an hour.

The difference is that this time it did not come back by itself, but brought back a female pheasant weighing several kilograms.

Seeing this scene, Yue Feng was happy.

Wow, he is indeed a ‘male eagle’ with a family. Now he can even solve the problem of food by himself.

After this experience, Yue Feng became much more relaxed about the management of the cages.

In front of the two eagles, Yue Feng directly opened the windshield on the upper layer of the window, so that both the big black eagle and the small white spear could enter and exit freely.

Without the constraints of the cage, Xiaobai would go out hunting two or three times a day. His food was quite varied, ranging from small turtledoves to large sand chickens and pheasants, and occasionally half-grown hares and wild pigeons weighing more than a pound. As long as Xiaobai could fly and carry the prey back, he would almost always bring it home to the cage.

Faced with the self-reliant gyrfalcon couple, Yue Feng did not completely relax the food management of the two eagles.

In this era, although pesticides and other things are used less frequently, Xiaobai still has a chance to encounter things like rat poison and hunter bait.

Raptors are limited to the number of times they can eat each day, and most of the time, the food they catch is placed on a platform next to the nest.

Yue Feng checks the food that Xiaobai brings back almost every day. If he finds anything abnormal, he will deal with it in time to prevent the parent birds from accidental poisoning.

Fortunately, there is a vast forest behind the village, and Xiaobai’s hunting grounds are all on the mountains. The food has always been relatively healthy. Except for the occasional discovery of an unknown lump in the abdomen of a big rat that was replaced by Yue Feng, the quality of other food has always been acceptable.

Unconsciously, another ten days have passed and it is the Beginning of Summer.

There is an eagle proverb that goes, “Kites fly during Qingming and big eagles during Grain Rain, and they hunt pine trees in the three days since the Beginning of Summer.”

This sentence refers to the approximate time when domesticated hunting birds of prey migrate through northern China in the spring.

During the Qingming Festival, kites (sparrowhawks) are the first to begin migrating from their wintering grounds to their breeding grounds.

Around the time of Grain Rain, eagles (goshawks) begin to return to their breeding grounds.

Around the beginning of summer, the Japanese sparrowhawk is the latest to start its reproductive migration to its northern breeding grounds.

The two words “花松” in the proverb refer to the subadult sparrowhawk that has not yet completed its molting.

The areas where wild eagles spend the winter have high temperatures and sufficient sunlight, so the sparrowhawk will shed its feathers earlier. During the spring breeding migration, some of the old feathers on its body have been shed and replaced with new ones. The old and new feathers are mixed together, making it look a little mottled, hence the name “sparrowhawk”.

The temperature is warming up, and it’s time to catch pine trees.

Years ago, Yue Feng mentioned this to Uncle Chen. When the flowering pine nuts migrated through in the spring, Yue Feng would go and catch more pine nuts and form a falcon hunting team for pine nuts in the summer.

Now, the time has come, and Yue Feng immediately begins to prepare. (End of this chapter)