Eye in the Sky

Peale's tiercel wearing camera way up over Jackson Valley (WY) from Jason Jones.

Video captioned as:

This is a short video clip from one of my tiercel Peale's Peregrine that has been at tame hack for the last 4 weeks. He is wearing a small camera on his back that faces forward. Today, this Peale's tiercel took off playing with another falcon, a male Lanner Falcon, and chased him across the valley and up into the sky thousands of feet. You can see this Peale's keep looking up; he is looking at the Lanner he is chasing. The Lanner Falcon was also wearing a camera. From the Lanner's view, I can see glimpses of this Peale's below him.

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Fly With A Peregrine Falcon And A Goshawk

The Goshawk footage is particularly good because, of course, all birds share this perspective as they zip through the trees.

Remember, as fast and nimble as a Goshawk is, there are birds that are a bit faster and a bit more nimble, otherwise none would ever escape!

Of course, few birds are as persistent as a Goshawk. Not for nothing did Attila the Hun wear an image of a Northern Goshawk on his helmet!

Along with the Northern Goshawk found in the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Asia, there is the Grey-bellied Goshawk, the Crested Goshawk, the Sulawesi Goshawk, the Red-chested Goshawk, the African Goshawk, the Chinese Goshawk, the Spot-tailed Goshawk, the Grey Goshawk, the Brown Goshawk, the Christmas Island Goshawk, the Black-mantled Goshawk, the Pied Goshawk, the Fiji Goshawk, the White-bellied Goshawk, the Moluccan Goshawk, the Grey-headed Goshawk, the New Britain Goshawk, the Black Goshawk, Henst's Goshawk, Meyer's Goshawk, Frances' Goshawk, the Gabar Goshawk, the Dark Chanting Goshawk, the Eastern Chanting Goshawk, the Pale Chanting Goshawk, the Red Goshawk, the Chestnut-shouldered Goshawk, and Doria's Goshawk.

Though the Northern Goshawk was mostly driven out of Maryland by logging around 100 years ago, there are a few pairs nesting in Garrett County in Western Maryland. I may be wrong, but I think I saw Steve Huy, a reader of this blog, on a TV show climbing a tree (a prusik knot and Jumar ascender rig) to weigh one year's batch of semi-fledged chicks.

More Goshawks are occasionally seen in Virginia and West Virginia, which serve as the southern terminus of their expected range.
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The Battle Between Fur and Feather

"Maladaptive".

It's one of my favorite words, as it explains why most predators are so cautious in the wild, and why so many prey species appear to be so lucky.

To be too bold or too aggressive is to be maladaptive. "Too bold is soon cold."

A predator cannot afford damage to muscle, joint, bone, tooth, wing, or talon.

And yet a predator cannot afford to be slow, and cannot always be cautious. At some point is has to eat.

And so the great game begins.

Every flight or run holds within it the possibility of great tragedy -- a torn cruciate ligament, a ripped claw, a shattered beak, a lost eye.

Is it any wonder that lions, tigers, and bears are generally so cautious around men? Most of the time, we represent the unknown, and the unknown always represents the chance of great harm.

It does not take much to undo a top predator. And yes, they somehow know that.

• Related Links:
  ** Maladaptive Is a Two-Way Street
  ** Maladaptive Pigeons at the Hand of Man
  ** An Unintended Lesson About Charles Darwin
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One Tough Old Bird

In the picture above, taken last Thursday, Florida Bald Eagle No. 512 is released back into the wild after being rescued and rehabilitated for the second time in 19 years.

This bird was first brought into rescue in 1996, after being shot in the leg and through the wing. Released back to the wild in 1998, she thrived until getting mugged by another eagle while attempting to defend her nesting site. It seems a younger female eagle kicked her off her roost in late November, pinned her to the ground, plucked her chest feathers, and then skewered her with her talons.

Rescued after the battle, Bald Eagle No 512 spent the next three months recovering from her injuries at the Audubon Center for Birds of Prey. Now healthy, #512 was re-released at the same exact same location she first flew to freedom in 1998.

How long do Bald Eagles live? In zoos, they have lived as long as 48 years. On average, however, 15-20 years seems to be about average, so Bald Eagle No. 512 is doing pretty well thanks to a little help from her friends.

• Related Links:
  ** Bald Is Beautiful
  ** Return of the Bald Eagle
  ** Delisting the Bald Eagle a Sign of ESA Success
  ** Dead Frozen Eagles in a National Repository
  ** Let Us Give Thanks for Wild Turkey and Uncle Sam
  ** You Gotta Break Some Eggs to Build a Movement
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Kyrgyzstan: A Rough Country from Another Time

In February, the Parliament of Kyrgyzstan voted to terminate the U.S. lease of Manas Air Base, and to require the U.S. forces to vacate within six months. Then, on June 23rd, U.S. personnel signed some paper and paid a lot of money, and the base closure was miraculously rescinded.

Funny how those things work!

If you were stationed in Kyrgyzstan, what might you see if you got outside the base?

The short story is that this is a country where most people travel on horses, and the culture seems to be stuck 250 years in the past.

The national sport, to give you some small idea, is centered around playing keep-away with a dead goat, with both teams fully mounted and galloping around at full tilt. How come we don't have fun sports like this in the U.S.?

In any case, The Boston Globe has put up a few pictures showing life in Kyrgyzstan, and I sample a few below. Click to make bigger and got to the link to see the full set. You will note that a fair number of pictures are of ethnic Kazakhs. Most folks in Kyrgyzstan, of course, are Kyrgyz.



Wolf-bating with a chained wolf. Action gets ...


Reaction.



Sheep herding in a land of wolves and horses.



A Kazakh hunter flies his golden eagle.


Kazakh hunters in full dress with golden eagles.
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2,500 Year-Old Falcon Nest

The latest from the BBC:

A 2,500-year-old bird's nest has been discovered on a cliff in Greenland.

The nesting site is still continually used by gyrfalcons, the world's largest species of falcon, and is the oldest raptor nest ever recorded.

Three other nests, each over 1,000 years old, have also been found, one of which contains feathers from a bird that lived more than 600 years ago.

Read the whole thing.

A Real Eagle-Eye View of the World

Link

So here's the concept: Strap a tiny video on top of an eagle and then see the world as she see its. This was shot in Spain, I believe. The web site is of falconer Jose Luis Ortiz. Nice!

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A Harry Potter Bird

This is a very tame Sumatran Barred Eagle-owl. Is this the perfect bird for the next Harry Potter movie, or what?
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Vultures Are Vomiters, Not Raptors

For years, it was believed that all vultures were raptors, members of the order Falconiformes.

In 1994, however, it was discovered that vultures on this side of the Atlantic actually share a common ancestor with storks and ibises. Now, New World vultures are recognized as Ciconiiformes, in the family Cathartidae, while European, African, and Asian vultures are recognized as Old World vultures (family Accipitridae, subfamily Aegypiinae). There are 15 species of Old World Vultures and 7 Species of New World Vultures.

What is a buzzard?

In the U.S. vultures are often called "buzzards," but in actually a buzzard is a European member of the hawk family. The European buzzard, Buteo buteo, is closely related to the American red tailed hawk.

Almost all the vultures you see in the U.S. are Turkey Vultures. Black Vultures also exist in the South, but they do not have the graceful flight of the Turkey Vulture and are not as common. California Condors (a type of vulture) have been retintroduced in California and Arizona, but are so rare you are unlikely to see one in your entire life unless you make a special trip to the remote areas where they have been released.

Turkey Vultures got their name from their bald red heads. The lack of feathers on their head are an adaptive mechanism -- when a vulture is eating a dead animal, it often sticks its head inside the carcass to reach the meat. Feathers on the head would trap unwanted flesh and blood, along with bacteria. A bald head, then, is an adaptive mechanism for cleanliness, as is the vulture's habit of urinating down its own legs -- another way to clean off clinging bits of flesh and bacteria.

Turkey Vultures have few predators, other than man. Their nests are scratched out of bare patches of soil on cliff faces and out of the rotting wood at the tops of broken trees. They will often nest in the sides of abandoned farm buildings as well -- old silos being a favorite location. Vulture nests are subject to predation by raccoons, but the vulture as a fairly effective defensive mechanism -- it vomits up a large masses of semi-digested meat along with very acidic digestive juices. The smell of Turkey Vulture Vomit is rather astounding, and the stomach acid is acidic enough to burn a raccoon's eyes.

You will rarely see Turkey Vulture flying in the early morning, as they launch themselves from trees, cliffs, powerlines, barns and silos only after the morning air has warmed up. A Vulture will fly into a thermal uplift, ride it up in a wide circle, and then glide across the sky at speeds of up to 50 miles per hour gently falling until they reach the next thermal which they in turn ride up again -- repeating the process adinfinitum. On a good day, a Turkey Vulture can glide for four of five hours without flapping its wings.

The feet of a Turkey Vulture are very weak and are built a bit like a chicken's -- they cannot catch small prey like a rabbit. Road kill is their primary food source, and the rise in deer, raccoon, possum and groundhog populations has meant a rise in turkey vultures. Vultures are also common on river banks where they scavenge washed-up fish.

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Winged Weapons of Mouse Destruction

A young Falco sparverius. The American Kestrel or Sparrow Hawk, sometimes called a "spar", is actually a small falcon.


Humans like to think that we see well -- a vanity we cultivate by comparing ourselves to dogs, rats and other mammals that mostly see in black and white, grays, light yellows, and blues.

In fact, most mammals have a sharply reduced visual spectrum because early mammals went through a very long period when almost all of them lived an entirely nocturnal existence.

Most mammals are still nocturnal. If you wonder where the raccoons, possum, deer and fox are in your area, the answer is that most move about only at night. The rest of the time they are resting up in thick tangles of growth, tucked up into underground dens or hollow trees, slumped into small depressions and wallows, and otherwise "loafing on the couch," just out of eyesight.

Since most humans never stray far from car or path -- and almost never venture into dense tangle or on to even slightly swampy ground -- the critters remain undiscovered.

Animals that are mostly nocturnal do well with eyes that see very little color.

The canine eye is a good example. Though your dog may sleep all night (and half the day too!) it is still only a few thousand years removed from its wolf or proto-wolf progenitor; not enough time for physical evolution of the canine eye to have occurred.

The bottom line is that dogs do not see very well -- not even sight hounds or seeing eye dogs. In fact, dogs seem to see only about one-sixth as well as humans.

Not all mammals see in a reduced spectrum, however. The progenitors of old-world apes experienced a mutation millions of years ago that resulted in more cones and rods being added to their eyes. The result is a wide range of color vision among old-world apes (chimps, gorillas, orangutans) and their cousins, we humans.

Surprisingly, some of the oldest and most primitive animals on the planet have a wider spectral rangethan humans and chimps. This includes reptiles and the likely descendants of dinosaurs -- birds.

Anyone who has tried to stalk a wild turkey knows how incredibly sharp their eyes are. In fact, all birds have remarkable eyesight. It's been estimated that a common sparrow hawk, for example, could read a newspaper from 25 yards away, while an eagle can spot the twitching ears of a rabbit from a distance of two miles.

The reason avian acuity is so high is that a bird's eye is built entirely differently from that of a human or a dog. For one thing, the retina of a bird is enormous.

The retina is the screen at the back of the eye on which an image, coming through the lens, is focused. This screen is composed of light-sensitive rods and cones, with the rods registering shapes and the cones differentiating colors.

On rods alone, the avian eye far eclipses that of the dog or the human. A human eye, for example, has about 200,000 rods, while an eagle has about a million -- five times more.

The true knockout blow for birds, however, is in the cone department. It turns out that many birds, and especially birds of prey, have cones in their eyes that enable them to see a much wider spectrum than we can, and for some birds -- such as the American Kestrel or sparrow hawk (actually a kind of small falcon) -- this spectrum includes ultraviolet light.

What's the benefit of being able to see in the ultraviolet spectrum? Simple: mouse urine glows purple in ultraviolet light (one reason "black light" is used to find old pet urine stains on wooden floors).

When a sparrow hawk hunts along a hedge, it is able to look for urine stains that mark mouse holes, runways and nests.

Mice and rats mark their burrows and runways with urine scent trails because, like most mammals, they do not have very good eyesight. Scent cues help rats and mice orient themselves in the complex world of hedge, forest, field and barn. The result is that a rat or mouse can "run" a scent trail very fast without spending time in the open trying to figure things out.

Experienced human ratters know this about rodents, and so they will drag their boot across the middle of a shed and spin long boards perpendicular to where they have been lying, all in an attempt to break up or disturb invisible scent trails. A few seconds hesitation by a confused and disoriented rat is just the edge a terrier needs to even the odds on the farm.

For a sparrow hawk, visible urine trails enable it to focus on areas where small rodent activity is heaviest. By simply flying over a hedge or field, and then lighting on a fence post, telephone pole, or dead tree near visible urine marks, a sparrow hawk can dramatically increase its chance of finding lunch.

Once activity in the grass is spotted, a sparrow hawk will face into the wind and hover low over a grassy area -- a tactic that earned it the name "windhover" or "wind fucker" in 17th Century Holland, when the terminology was considered a little less offensive that it is today.

As for ultraviolet vision, it's not all about food -- it's about sex too. It seems that all those rather drab-looking birds we see in the hedge look a lot prettier when they are seen through the lens of an ultraviolet-sensitive eye.

Birds species in which male and females look very much alike to us look very different to the birds themselves, as they have twice as many cones in their eyes and so can see shade and colors we miss altogether.

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Hunting Fox with Eagle, Saving Wildlife With Film

Felix Rodríguez de La Fuente hunting Red Fox with a Golden Eagle in Spain. Felix Rodríguez de La Fuente was a world-class falconer and more-or-less the Spanish equivalent of Jacques-Cousteau-meets-David-Attenborough.

His wildlife narratives (complete with multiple-camera crews, transportation, etc.), were paid for by a rich Saudi prince who recognized his extraordinary abilities with Golden Eagles and the fact that he was a once-in-a-lifetime character who might translate well on to film.

Felix Rodríguez de La Fuente died in 1980 in an airplane crash in Alaska, and his funeral was attended by thousands. Today, there are several statues of him in Spain, where he is a national hero for his efforts to popularize and protect Iberian wildlife.

Rodríguez de La Fuenta's films have recently been digitally remastered which is terrific, as a whole new generation of folks can now see them.

Whatever you think aesthetically about filmed (and yes sometimes partly staged) wildlife shows a-la Frank Buck, Wild Kingdom, Steve Irwin, Jacques Cousteau and David Attenborough, there can be little doubt that these things have done a great deal of good for wildlife and wild places, because they have let people know what is out there and what is at risk of being lost.

That said, it is always fun to mock these things a little bit, and the segment below is pretty rich. Can you figure out who is playing "Cousteau?" I think this might be his only good performance ever!


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Golden Eagles Hunting Chamois or Goat

In Spanish, and a bit long, but some jaw-dropping photography here. A warning that this video does show nature "red in tooth and claw." Or red in beak and claw, if you prefer.
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Extreme Hunting

Hunting roe deer with Golden Eagles. Hat tip to Isaac Nichols at Another Falconry Blog.

To see the other end of the sport, in terms of size, check out this clip of hunting grasshoppers with an American Kestrel (aka a "sparrow hawk").
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A Single Transmitter Made a World of Difference

Remember, when we were kids and people said that the birds "flew south" for the winter?

Well, believe it or not, that was about all we knew for a lot of species. Birds disappeared flying south in the Fall and came back, flying north, in the Spring. Where these birds went, exactly, and what they did when they got there, were a bit of a mystery.

All of that changed with the devopment of very small micro-transmitters capable of uploading information to satellites.

Three of the very first transmitters capable of being carried by a bird were attached to Swainson's hawks back in 1994. Within a few days, two of the transmitters conked out, but the transmitter on the third bird retained power and showed the hawk traveled from southern Canada down the American Midwest into Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica, and past Ecuador into the Pampass region of Venezuela.

Scientists quickly scurried off to see if they could locate the animal.

What they found in Argentina was both amazing and disturbing.

The amazing part was the Swainson's hawks (which are solitary hunters in North America) assembled into large communal flocks of as many as 7,000 birds on their winter hunting grounds.

The scary part was that in Argentina Swainson's hawks lived on swarms of locust-like grasshoppers, which were being systematically poisoned by organo-phosphate pesticides.

The bug spray, in turn, was killing off the Swainson's hawks in droves.

As they drove into the area where the hawk's signal had last been heard from, the scientists were alarmed to find thousands of dead hawks already dead under their roosts.

To make a long story short, that year 25 percent of all the Swainson's hawks in the world were killed by pesticides in Argentina -- a phenomenon that would never have been known had it not been for wildlife tracking telemetry.

The good news is that by switching to different type of pesticides, Argentina's farmers were able to sharply reduce grasshopper infestations while doing little serious harm to wildlife --a "win-win" for all sides.

The two tracking transmitters at the top of this post are made by an outfit that specializes in micro-tramsitters for bats, birds and other wildlife . The very smallest of birds can now carry tracking trasmitters glued or harnessed onto their backs or tail feathers, with batteries providing power for 30 days or more.

The tiny collar, pictured at right, holds the even tinier dot-like transmitter next to it.

The transmitter pictured at the very top of this post is even smaller than the one at right, and is arrayed for a tail mount on a very small bird. This is a complete rig with battery, transmitter and aerial, believe it or not.

Either one of the two micro-transmitters shown have an above-ground trackable range of 1-2 kilometres. .

4 For more information on wildlife and terrier transmitters on this blog, click here.
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Bald Eagle on Way to Work

My house is back a couple of blocks and on top of a cliff above the Potomac River. I go down a short run along a creek, and then along a 500-yard stretch of George Washington Parkway before I swing back up again to Key Bridge in order to cross into Georgetown and across the river into Washington, D.C. Today, for reasons unknown, the traffic was stop-and-go, and a huge bird sailed in to light in a tree along the Parkway. It was a mature bald eagle.

We have about two dozen bald eagles along this 10-mile stretch of the Potomac River. They tend to like it down by Wilson Bridge a bit more than up near Key Bridge (not sure why), but they sometimes come up this way, and I have seen dark-headed juveniles as well as white-headed adults. A nice thing to see on the way to work.

Related Posts

• Return of the Bald Eagle
• Bald is Beautiful
• You Gotta Break Some Eggs to Build a Movement
• Delisting the Bald Eagle a Sign of ESA Success

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Get Rich With Falconry

Get into the exciting world of falconry for profit! The Marin, California Independent reports that Indigo Redondo (now there's a great name!), who works for Vacaville-based Wingmaster Falconry Inc., has been hired to use his Saker falcon to help keep gulls away from the trash heaps at the Redwood Landfill.

Not to be outdone by California hippies, the Real Madrid soccer team in Madrid, Spain, has hired Guillermo Santalla to fly about a dozen eagles, falcons and owls over the 60-year-old Santiago Bernabeu stadium in order to keep pigeon populations at bay. Madrid's international airport also employs four teams of falcons to scare off pigeons and other birds which threaten the aircraft there.

Then there's the wedding business. Releasing white homing pigeons at weddings is a money-maker for some pigeon fanciers in the right location, but now a white barn owl is being trained to also deliver the rings. What could possibly go wrong here? Nothing!
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A Rabbit Almost Slips the Hawk - But Not Quite

Teddy Moritz sends the three pictures at left of a strange day in the field (click on pictures to enlarge).

Apparently, Suli the dachshund flushed a rabbit from a brushpile and chased it up a lawn where it tried to dive into this plastic drain pipe -- a good escape route for a small bunny, perhaps, but this fellow had gotten quite a bit bigger since he last tried this escape strategy!

The result of this ill-fated escape attempt was that the rabbit got stuck head in, and feet out. It was only a second or two before Odessa, the Harris Hawk, slammed into the bolted bunny.

End result: one dead rabbit.

Afterwards, Suli checked the pipe hoping that a few more might come out. You never know!

Teddy uses a Teckel or working miniture dachsund to bolt rabbits to her Harris Hawks. Unlike rabbits in Europe, American rabbits den above ground, like hares, but will tuck into a hole or pipe if pursued by dog or hawk, or if the weather is really terrible out (i.e. freezing rain or really bitter cold).

The Harris Hawk is a native of the Southwest U.S. through Mexico, Central America and into the northern half of South America.

A pretty brown and black bird with long legs and a band of white on the end of it tail, it was named by John James Audubon (he called it a "buzzard") after one of his longtime friends and financial supporters, Ed Harris. Audubon also named a sparrow after Harris.

Unlike most birds of prey, Harris Hawks will hunt in groups in the wild, and this natural tendency may account for why they work so well with humans and dogs. Relatively easy to handle, and often quite affectionate, Harris Hawks are now captive-bred for falconry. I do not believe any birds come from the wild anymore. In fact, it would hardly matter if they did; Harris Hawks are very common, and no one has been a better steward to wild raptors than American falconers who have not only pioneered captive breeding techniques now used all over the world, but who have also been a consistent, powerful and well-educated voice for hawk, falcon and eagle conservation across the globe.

A mid-sized bird, the Harris Hawk is a good bird to use on cottontail rabbits (which are smaller than European rabbits), pigeons, other small birds such as quail, rodents, or even mid0sized birds such a pheasant.

A Harris Hawk will typically perch in the tree line as near as possible to where the human and the dog are flushing quarry, following up the field as the hunting team progresses. If a tree is not available, a hawker may provide a perch in the form of a plastic or bamboo T-topped perch pole.

As you can imagine with four animals in play (hawk, human, dog, and rabbit) there is a lot going on in the field when you are hawking!
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Good Things Aloft in Khazakstan

Libby Bodio with Golden Eagle in Khazakstan.

The BBC reports that in Khazakstan, Saker Falcons are being hacked back into the wild, just as we did with Peregrines some years back. Though the Saker is not really endangered (and neither was the Peregrine if you look at global population numbers), a "giving back" to the wild by falconers has a spiritual quality even if it does not necessarily patch a huge hole in the sky. And 60 more falcons flying free in Khazakstan can be nothing but a good thing.

In Almaty, the Falcon Centre has become a small tourist attraction. That too is good, and not only for the Saker, but also for the Golden Eagle, which is being preserved, valued and protected as part of Khazaktan's ancient hunting culture.

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Coffee and Provocation

How do You Spell Coccidiosis?
The Wall Street Journal reports that some feline owners are fearful of professionally processed cat foods made by big companies that actually have quality control personnel and bank accounts large enough to go after. Their solution is to buy fresh rabbit carcasses that have been ground up whole -- guts, brain, bone, fur and all. Good idea? Maybe not. Here's a tip: look up a few diseases like Cryptosporidium cuniculus, Giardia duodenalis, Toxoplasma gondii, Sarcocystis cuniculi and see if they have a relationship to rabbits and cats. Remember: there's a reason we cook food in restaurants, and why wild animals that eat raw meat are generally dead at age two or three. Eating raw animals (even domestic animals) is not a good idea. Fire was invented for a reason.

Attack of the Killer Water Weed:
The New York Times reports that Caddo Lake in Texas is being eaten alive by Salvina Molesta, a type of South American water weed "with an ability to double in size every two to four days and cover 40 square miles within three months, suffocating all life beneath." No problem there!

Pet Insurance:
With insurance, the big print always seems to provide coverage, but the little print always seems to limit that coverage or void it altogether. Now consider pet insurance. When a pet insurance company denies your claim or pays out only fragmentary coverage, your only option is to hire a $10,000 lawyer in order to litigate a $2,000 claim. Not likely. So what do you do? You pay the vet, walk away bruised, and the Pet Insurance company pockets your premums and laughs all the way to the bank. Don't believe that's what happens most of the time? Then read what people with pet insurance have to say. Has anyone ever had a good experience with pet insurance? If so, tell us in the comments section (and sign it!).

Giant Alien Crabs:
Check out this picture and story over at Tom James Virginia Outdoors. Yow! Just what the Cheseapeake Bay needs -- more alien invaders.

Advice from a Mad Man:
Over at the Black Bear Blog, Tom Remington has sage advice from a mad man in Oklahoma who wrestles live coyotes: “If a coyote bites down" on you this gentleman says, “Don’t panic.” If you jerk your hand back, the coyote’s teeth will rip flesh off the bone. The thing to do is to calmly dig your fingernail into the soft roof of the coyote’s mouth. “When it lets go, grab it by the throat and yank it up. “When you get all four legs off the ground, the fight is over. You’ve won.”

Louisiana Hawking Blog Kicks Up Again:
Good news on the blog-o-sphere: Matt M. is cranking up his hawking blog again. Excellent!

Best Environmental News of the Month:
Sen. Ted Stevens's home has been raided by FBI and IRS agents looking into corruption. Corruption? No! Just because he has pimped out America's wild lands to the oil and gas lobbies, for more than 30 years? Why would you think there might be corruption there? Anyone who thinks getting a warrant for the most powerful U.S. Senator on Capitol Hill (who is also a Republican) does not know how it goes in this town. And yes, he could be as innocent as O.J.

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Beyond Flights of Fancy

A repost from 2006 of this blog.

In his book Stormy Nights and Frosty Mornings,

Paul Dooley writes of going to his first field meet with a hawking club.

He had never been to such an event before and was rather apprehensive as there were a couple of 'names' present who always talked a good game. Later he learned that some of these people, particularly one of the organizers of the meet, had never flown a bird free!

When it came time to actually hunt, nobody in this hawking club wanted to fly their own winged charge at fur or feather -- it was deemed to be "too windy" by some, while another said his bird was an ounce or two over weight and another said his bird "wasn't ready yet". It was Paul -- a novice -- who flew his bird and scored on first flight.

Paul writes: "It was quite an eye opener for me that day. The problem with field meetings for these fake falconers was that there was nowhere to hide. Some of them used to turn up without their birds just to watch. Nothing wrong with that, but why pretend that you hunt a bird when you clearly don't?"

Why pretend indeed! Yet people DO, don't they? And it's not just in the world of hawking.

I mention this paragraph, in part to highlight Paul's book, but also to note that we have the same kind of people in the terrier world, and they exist in other arenas too.

In The Survival of the Bark Canoe author John McPhee writes of Henri Vaillancourt, a maker of traditional Indian birch-bark canoes. For years Vaillancourt had been building canoes based on a mixture of book learning, theory, and pure fantasy. It was only when he asked Vaillancourt to go on a canoeing trip with him that McPhee learned an eye-opening truth: Vaillancourt had never actually paddled his own creations for any distance far from home.

His canoes were beautiful to look at, but the crafts themselves represented design choices unburdened by actual field experience. In the end, McPhee's book is not really about birch bark canoes -- it's about the collision between theory and practical knowledge.

Is it much different in the terrier world?

Not from what I can see. Some people have spent years on Internet bulletin boards, but have never actually dug five feet to a critter. They still do not own a decent shovel, and still do not know what to do with a squalling raccoon at the stop-end of a dirt pipe. Their theory of terrier work is entirely unburdened by field experience. When questions are asked, they do not pay close attention to the answers since it's all romantic abstraction. The purpose of a question is not to solicit an informed answer, but to extend idle chatter. Just as Paul Dooley's fake fliers show up at a hawking meets with birds that have never left a creance, so these fake diggers show up at terrier trials and enter their "one and done" dogs in the working terrier ring.

I was reminded of this collision between reality and fantasy while reading Matt Mullenix's excellent book, In Season, A Louisiana Falconer's Journal.

Matt is not a fantasy flyer. His book is about the reality of hawking -- keeping his bird at the right weight, finding a bit of pasture that has not been mowed flat, painting a cracked talon with Crazy Glue and nail hardener, and balancing the competing interests of job, hawk, children and wife. Every flight is not a glorious thing ending in a brace of rabbits; sometimes it's a soaking rain and a footed sparrow or worse -- mere indifference from a hawk a little too heavy to focus.

With a sense of confession, Matt explains that though his Harris Hawk nails its fair share of swamp rabbits and doves, there are also lot of cotton rats. They are, for better or worse, a primary quarry in his part of the country.

I get it. It's easy to love a rat if you hawk -- just like it's easy to love bluegill and sunfish if you fly fish. Field action of any type beats fantasy and theory seven days of the week.

Matt writes of the rising tension of a group hunt, when there may be too many birds flying, and as a consequence problems can rise up and spin out of control quickly. The same thing occurs with terriers. A solo man and his dog are under no pressure, but put more than three or four dogs in the field at once, and things can move too quickly for the human to avoid real trouble. It only takes one train wreck to ruin a day.

I do not hawk, but I understand Matt because he is actually hunting and his concerns mirror mine even though we hunt different animals on different game in different parts of the country. Matt talks about a hawk's leg turning blue after a run-in with a tree and the calculated risk that two hawks, diving for the same swamp rabbit, will accidentally grip on to each other as well as the rabbit. Is their a digger that does not understand this problem? I have felt the same rising arpeggio of concern, never mind that it is played on a different stage in a slightly different key.

In a small part of the book Matt writes of a man who "has no time for falconry." In two weeks this novice had flown his young bird only once, and then when the bird was over-matched. When Matt points out that it's pretty hard to work a hawk on a weekend-only basis, the novice replies, "but that's the time I have."

Matt does not comment. He does not need to.

What the hawker wants is interesting, but it's not really part of the equation, is it? There are some things that are required in hawking, and time with the bird is clearly one of them. Mullenix does not have time for falconry either, but it does not matter; he steals the time from family and job, from sleep and rest. He feels guilty about the theft (an honest man would), but he steals it anyway. It is what you have to do if you are serious.

With hawks, it's either all the way in or all the way out.

The dog world is a bit easier, and perhaps for that reason we are surrounded by more fakes, novices, romantics and bored housewives than the people in the world of hawking. I do not know. Perhaps I am wrong. Paul Dooley suggests falconry has its share of preening pretenders too.

All I know for sure is that the hawkers are a pretty literate and interesting lot. A tip of the hat to them, and a recommendation for this book.

I close on a slightly troubling note. In the UK, some of the mounted fox hunts are attempting to exploit a loophole in the law that allows riders and packs of hounds to hunt fox with large raptors. The result is that dozens of mounted fox hunts have gone out to purchase Golden Eagles and Eagle-Owls.

This is insanity on stilts. There is no tradition of hunting fox with golden eagles and owls in the UK. Exmoor is not Kazakhstan or Mongolia, no matter how loose the immigration laws get.

Add a novice hawker to the mix, along with a rioting pack of hounds, a couple of dozen spooked horses, a large dog fox, and a few overhead power lines and roads, and you clearly have winged disaster waiting to happen. Already, I have a report that two Golden Eagles have died from the sheer stupidity of it all.

And yet, perhaps God does have a sense of humor. There may yet be a punch line to this joke.

It turns out that after being extirpated from the UK for more than 100 years, once-native Eagle Owls have mysteriously begun to show up and breed in the wild.

I have little doubt these are captive birds that have escaped and hacked themselves back into prosperity on a diet of pigeon, starling and rabbit.

Excellent.

Mother Nature may yet bat last, and if the stupid anti-fox hunting law is repealed (as I believe it must and will be), then a fair number of captive Golden Eagles and Eagle-Owls may be yet be hacked back to the wild.

What a glorious day that will be!