Some of us can’t help looking up. It’s a habit developed after weeks of driving on lonely rural roads, searching for an anomaly. We’re looking for visual hiccups: a bump on an oak limb, a slightly taller telephone pole. We’re bird watchers, sort of. But the only birds we’re interested in are hawks.
I belong to a tiny subculture that not only looks for them, but traps them and takes them home. If we’re lucky, these amazing birds will allow us to hunt by their sides.
We’re falconers.
As a discipline, falconry may bring up notions of medieval nobility, but it’s a modern sport with normal folks participating all over the world: I’m a middle-class woman living paycheck to paycheck in upstate New York, I do not own anything made by Barbour or Burberry, and I have never been to Europe.
I should say that technically, I’m still an apprentice falconer. I’m under the guidance of a master falconer because unlike other outdoor pursuits – like deer hunting or bass fishing – US falconry requires you to find a sponsor to take you on and teach you through a mentorship. Almost anyone in the US can take a hunters’ safety class, buy a shotgun and head out into fields to hunt rabbits on public game land. But if you want to do it with talons instead of bullets, you need a teacher.
I’ve been hunting with hawks for three years now, and I still have a lot to learn. Sometimes the amount of biology, history, daily weighing, bookkeeping and assorted regulations are so daunting that I feel overwhelmed, but I take solace in something my sponsor once told me. He said: “You can’t make someone a falconer. You either are one or you aren’t.”
That’s comforting to know as a beginner: if it’s something that’s a part of you, you can’t help but pursue it. And if it’s who you are, then how can you possibly fail?
As a US apprentice, I am legally barred from purchasing a captive-bred bird. I have to go out in the world, find a wild animal, trap it, train it and only then may we begin hunting as a team.
It took me weeks to find my first bird. I got my license late in the season and was trapping in November (when most birds are already trained and hunting with their people). My sponsor and I looked for weeks on end to find a bird so late in the season that was still sporting juvenile plumage. Since breeding-age birds are not allowed to be trapped for falconry, finding a loner out there in the cold months who was young enough to train was no mean feat; most had already migrated south for the winter.
I named him Italics and hunted with him for two years before I released him this past April. Red-tails are never domesticated. They learn to get comfortable with their handlers and get used to life in their studio apartments (called mews, game warden-approved hawk houses) but remain wild as ever. When released they go right back to their normal ways. Most falconers release a bird after a season or two to return to the breeding population. Then the falconers enjoy the challenge of starting all over with another bird.
After releasing Italics in the spring, I was hawkless for a few months but I am now in the process of training this year’s hunting partner. She’s a spunky brunette, a little on the small side, but she makes up for it with drive, smarts and sheer volume. I named her Anna Kendrick.
Part of manning, or getting the bird comfortable with a human being, is spending a lot of time with the animal. Almost every evening, I sit down to watch a movie or binge on YouTube with Anna Kendrick perched on my fist, or resting on an easy chair. I trapped Anna just a few weeks ago, but she has already seen every episode of Firefly and is used to the smell of popcorn. She doesn’t get to share it, though, since her diet is mostly mice, rats, rabbits and squirrels – the same as she would eat in the wild.
This movie night comfort is impressive to me since it was only a few weeks ago we met. The first time I saw her, she was sitting on a telephone wire alongside a lazy two-lane highway, eagerly looking down as I was eagerly looking up.
The trap I used is called a bal-chatri. Think of a small, wire-domed cage baited with gerbils (who are not actually caught by the raptors). When a hawk lands on the trap to snag the free snack, its feet get caught in small nooses tied to the dome. Falconers never leave a trap out of their sight, so within moments of a bird getting snared by the loops we are there to remove them calmly and carefully with zero injury to the hawk. From that moment on, it is our job to get them adjusted to their new lives as hunting partners.
I should add that if you’re a beginner living in New York state, you can’t trap just any bird. You are only allowed a young red-tailed hawk or kestrel (a small falcon) born in the wild. If that seems unkind, understand this: very, very few red-tails like Anna make it to sexual maturity. These hawks are not soaring overhead humming Enya tunes and praising the Great Spirit; they are trying not to die.
Nature is one cruel headmistress, and only 10% of Anna’s peers will survive to breeding age in the wild. Some are killed by other birds, others electrocuted by power lines or hit by cars. Most starve during their first winter. Anna will have a snow- and wind-proof shelter attached to my house, with meals delivered to her every day she isn’t out there hunting for herself.
When you take a bird out of the wild for falconry purposes, you are most likely saving its life. Few wild animals get that kind of assistance being raised to adulthood. She will hunt with me for a season or two and then be released as a super-competent hunter for the gene pool.
The average hunt with Anna will go like this: I’ll remove the hooded bird from a transport box with a perch inside it. While the bird is calmly unable to see (the hood allows her to relax and not start hunting before the falconer is ready), I remove her leash and replace it with thin, removable strips of leather called jesses. They are designed so that with one pull of the beak they are gone if the bird wants them off.
But Anna doesn’t care about her jesses; she cares about dinner. Once she is geared up, the hood is removed and the world becomes hers again. She rests on my heavy leather glove while we walk into the forest and fields.
Nothing is keeping her with me but the relationship we have built over the past few months. When she is ready, she takes off from my hand for a high branch and watches her human below her. My job is to scare a rabbit out of the brush. Her job is to kill it.
Every time you release a hawk for a hunt, there’s a chance you’ll never see her again. A bird that associates its human partner with food usually flies back to your fist when you call it, but the choice is always the bird’s.
The stakes couldn’t be higher in that regard: every hunt could be your last. So you savor it. You pay attention. You hike with a walking stick and hope your clumsy humanity will spook a rabbit and as you fumble through the brush.
Your bird follows above you, graceful and perfect, flying from tree to tree. If any game is sent running from cover, poetry happens. The hawk sees its quarry and takes it in a dramatic stoop. She may take the game or it might slip away, but regardless, I have caught what I was really hunting for: witnessing the try. It is beautiful and violent. It lets you forget everything else happening in the world, from wars to late mortgages, for a few seconds.
I hope I am able to do this for the rest of my life. The entire process – from learning to look up for a hawk to releasing a strong animal – has become my version of a sand mandala. You spend time crafting something beautiful, and then you let it go.
I am so grateful I found this calling and pursued it. It feels magical and primal, an alchemy few of us get to take part in any more. You can’t recreate that rush with an app or a movie ticket; it’s a feeling you need to go out of your way to find and then work your tail off to be a part of, but because of it I feel a few inches taller when she’s on my fist.
She makes me feel strong, proof positive I can do the impossible if I’m stubborn enough.
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