What is your job?, a demographic of transfans. Options

[Saker]

Saker, that is really cool, but I can't help but imagine some future super villain is right now learning to train an army of birds of prey from your institution.

ha! I have to admit - I have a Lanner falcon called "Rumble". Take from that what you will...... ;)

[Gunrage]

I don't have a job, I'm currently a money-leech(i.e. College Student)

[Crypt]

Past Jobs:
Supervisor at a meat packaging/processing plant
A/V Installations for a University's classrooms
Network technician for a steel mill.
Programmer at a place that makes tests/equipment for correlating olfactory memory to Alzheimers disease
Programmer at CDC where I made a system that would display the real-time position of employees on the factory floor and how bad the chemical levels were around them.

[-VP-]

Programmer at CDC where I made a system that would display the real-time position of employees on the factory floor and how bad the chemical levels were around them.

So, basically, you stalked Dissever (IMG:style_emoticons/default/icon-hotrod.gif)

[Varnon]

Well scarily, in the UK you don't need any form of license or permit in order to keep birds of prey....hence the HUGE amount of birds that I have dumped on my doorstep from people who have no idea how to look after them. I have a zoo license and am LANTRA qualified so at least if people ask me to help them with a bird they have bought, I am in a position to do something about it! I have rescue birds that I have rehabilitated and they are now part of the flying team which is really rewarding (IMG:style_emoticons/default/icon-hotrod.gif) Other than that, all of my other birds are from breeders - Am I right in thinking that in the US you can trap wild birds? We're not allowed to do that over here!

Oh, I didn't even pay attention to what country you were in. Thats interesting. I can imagine a lot of being wanting to get that cool hawk and then realize they can't take care of it at all.

In the US, a federal law protects all native species. You can't keep anything without permits. This protects all species (and their eggs and feathers) except for the invasives like pigeons, house sparrows and european starlings.
Exotic species are fair game for anyone though. I'm sure if you really wanted you could find a harpy eagle online and keep it.

Permits are needed for hunting, rehabilitation, research and keeping for research, and falconry. There might be another permit for zoos. I'm not sure. I worked at a zoo that had native birds of prey, but did not have adequate conditions to keep them under a falconry license. So maybe they fell under another license. Some of the regulations are kind of interesting. Research licenses are way less strict that rehabilitation licenses for example. Rehab licenses also allows keeping of unreleasable birds (I think), such as those that are injured or too social with humans to be released.

If you have any kind of permit, you can take wild birds. The falconry regulations are pretty strict, and I think they are reasonable. But they are mostly wild caught birds.