Close-up
Ancient sport of falconry casts spell in 21st century

By Thomas Curwen
Los Angeles Times

DON KELSEN / LOS ANGELES TIMES Falconry seems a sport better-suited to William Shakespeare's era than the modern, blood-wary one. Its allure? Raptors, including the eagle above, and watching the play between predator and prey. Working with a bird, one falconer says, is like "walking a dog in three dimensions."

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The jesses are off. And the leash. A step, a leap and only the air remains, and that's all that's needed to swoop low and then rise over rooftops and power lines until the world is a circle and everything within it is game.

Wings flick against the wind, pausing, kiting, hovering, steadily staircasing higher, widening this gyre and watching everything within it — blades of grass, patterns across the water, errant sparrows, cottontails, solitary field mice — but waiting for a cue from man and dog.

They trek slowly across the field. A familiar flutter stirs beside the man, streaking fast, and everything stops. Wings jet back, and the world, instantaneously rising, blurs, except for the speckles on the back of the pigeon's nape. Feet and talons extend. Thump.

Only the air remains, now filled with torn feathers. A flutter in the grass, and another pass, and another, and the pigeon is on the ground. It barely stirs. One shredding bite of feathers and one tearing bite of skin still it, and soon the skull is laid bare.

The dog circles. The man watches.

"She's like a bottle of fine wine," he says, referring to the bird, Brooke. "A nice piece of Spanish peregrine. No junky hybrid. This is the purest stuff."

Tom Stephan stands in the open field. His yellow Lab, Buckshot, noses and pokes his way through the weeds. Brooke will eat a while longer before she is jessed-up, hooded and the world goes dark.

	Tom Stephan's falcon returns to his hand. Falconry, like other pastimes that involve killing game for pleasure, is rich with contradictions. One expert says, "A falconer needs to be both predator and St. Francis."

Mysterious, barbaric and arcane — what more needs to be said about falconing? That like other pastimes that involve the pursuit and the killing of game for pleasure, it is rich with contradictions.

"A falconer needs to be both predator and St. Francis," says naturalist and sportsman Stephen Bodio.

Falconers can wring the neck of a rabbit or toss a pigeon to the mercy of their birds while arguing for the protection of grassland habitats or the preservation of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Theirs is the Ducks Unlimited brand of conservation — save the pond to hunt it — because hunting is, after all, at the heart of their sport.

Push aside stereotypes about who a falconer is — a refugee from the Renaissance Pleasure Faire, a Saudi prince disaffected by his recent European tour, a pierced and tattooed idler from the Venice, Calif., boardwalk. If falconers seem less exotic than their sport warrants, don't be surprised.

Falconry is all about discipline and sacrifice. As one Web site asks prospective falconers: Are you willing to dedicate your waking hours to a creature that merely tolerates your presence, is as affectionate as a stone and will cause you heartache and puncture wounds?

Getting started

Elisa McCormick, 32, a former religious-studies student from the University of California, Santa Barbara, is not your typical candidate for this boys' club.

Falconers will tell you that the demographics of the sport are changing, that more women are getting involved, but they'll also tell you that female hawkers are driven more by maternal instincts than by killing instincts.

Save it for Naia, McCormick says. Naia is McCormick's red-tailed hawk, now flying from telephone pole to billboard looking for game.

"Hohohohoho." McCormick is trying to draw Naia's attention to a rabbit. She's standing near a freeway interchange in what once was a vineyard and is now a debris-strewn lot with three abandoned and fast-collapsing buildings hard up against a junkyard.

McCormick, of Los Angeles, began her 100-mile, round-trip drive to the vacant lot before dawn. Her two-door Nissan is rigged with a perch in the backseat that sits on top of an old blanket and shower curtain.

McCormick, an apprentice falconer, is following a course set by the California Department of Fish and Game for anyone who wants to handle one of these birds. She passed a multiple-choice, true-false test. She bought a hunting license. She found a sponsor (every new falconer is apprenticed to a master falconer), built a coop, known in the sport as a "mew," and purchased all the necessary equipment.

Then she had to set a trap.

McCormick and her helpers saw Naia perched on a lamppost and slowly drove beneath her, barely stopping to open the passenger door and lay out a cage topped with a tangle of monofilament fishing line, and baited with a store-bought hamster. Then they hid behind a warehouse and waited. Naia wasted no time, quickly descending but getting caught in the mesh. McCormick and her friends rushed out to retrieve her. Holding her wings, they untangled her legs from the trap and leashed her ankles with jesses and two leather straps with bells.

"When they handed the bird to me, it was a feeling of panic and wonder," she remembers. "She was so beautiful and looked about as wild as she could get. When I first felt her on the glove, I was totally convinced of the power of her feet. The compression is phenomenal. It's like putting your hand in a vise."

Naia flies down from her billboard perch. McCormick runs the distance to where the bird stands on the ground with a cottontail caught in that grip.

"Oh, you got it," she says. "Good girl. Good girl."

Stare into a raptor's eye, and you stare into a long history of domestication that began in Central Asia thousands of years ago. The sport spread along the Silk Road into the Arabian world and then into Europe at the time of the Crusades and west into Japan. Falconers are not shy about celebrating this past, from the bizarre accoutrements to the texts of the sport, most of which seem to have been written before William Shakespeare was born.

Beyond these trappings, however, lies the deeper appeal of the sport: Where else can you have such an intimate relationship with something so wild? Feed a raptor, train it well and it will always — almost always — return to you. Working with a bird, one falconer says, is like "walking a dog in three dimensions." And who wouldn't want to fly a dog?

Taint of blood sports

On a dirt road overlooking a large open field near Sacramento, Calif., nearly 200 people have gathered in the cold, clear dawn. They stand around in knit caps with Styrofoam coffee cups in their hands, dogs on leashes and little kids jumping about.

Once called — in less sensitive times — a pigeon derby, the event is a simulated hunt, in which the falconer lets go of the bird, watches it circle and climb into position high overhead and then signals for a racing pigeon to be let loose. Judges grade each falcon based on how high and fast and aggressively it flies after the pigeon.

For the pigeons, the odds are better than even: More escape than get caught. Which says something about how well they fly, for an attacking falcon is not easy to elude. In clocking a falcon's stoop — that precipitous fall from the height of its flight to the quarry below — researchers have clocked these birds at more than 200 mph.

"When you think about what these birds go through in a stoop, it almost goes outside the scientific arena. It takes you into a metaphysical world. It seems beyond Newtonian physics and how we normally regard falling objects in a gravitational world," says Pat Redig, director of the Raptor Center at the University of Minnesota.

Factor in that raptors can see at 160 feet what we see at 20 feet, have an extraordinarily fast flicker fusion rate (the point at which the oscillations of light disappear to become a continuous stream) that allows them to see the slightest movements, and you have flying — and hunting — machines without equal.

Like all blood sports in this increasingly blood-wary age, falconry faces questioning.

Before launching into a discussion of psycho- and sociobiology, genetics and natural selection, falconers trot out common sense: Wild birds have a shorter life than captured birds. Falconers are only sharpening the bird's natural instincts. Most of these birds can be released into the wild at any moment and survive.

Remembering the afternoon she captured Naia, McCormick admits that at first she had concerns. "But I don't see anything wrong with being a spectator of natural selection. It's all about the play between prey and predator, and I have seen how incredibly well-adapted the prey animals are in eluding their pursuers."

Falconers see our species immersed in an eat-or-be-eaten continuum of predators and prey, as much a part of the evolutionary, biological cycles of life as any other. They say that denying this, or distancing ourselves from this truth, feeds a dangerous hubris.

"Our relationship with nature gets messed up when we think of man and nature as being apart from one another," says Stephen Layman, a guru in the falconing world.

Louie makes a kill

Dave Cherry lives in rural Southern California with his wife, Lisa, their birds, three dogs, two cats and Jenny the burro.

In the past 20 years, like many falconers, the Cherrys have found themselves moving and moving again in an attempt to escape suburbanization.

Cherry maneuvers his pickup along a washboard road hemmed by a muddy shoulder and barbed-wire fence. He turns left on an access road and stops in the middle of a field of winter wheat. It stands 8 inches high, its blades shimmering green and yellow in the breeze. Meadowlarks sing. It starts to rain.

Undeterred, Cherry grabs a pheasant from a carrier. He tucks its head under its wing and waves the bird around and around to disorient it and then places it under a lone tumbleweed some 50 yards away.

Today he's flying Louie, his 2-year-old gyr/peregrine. Louie's feathers are charcoal with white flecks, his eyes dark and amber. Cherry opens up the back of his pickup where Louie is perched, hooded and unaware.

He places a homing transmitter on Louie's leg and on his tail feathers and then puts on his glove and unties Louie from his perch. The bird steps onto his fist. In a series of graceful one-handed maneuvers, Cherry removes Louie's leash, jesses and hood.

The bird rouses his feathers and is off.

Once Louie is high overhead, Cherry calls out to his dogs — "Where's the bird?" — and the field is soon laced with their crisscrossing search.

Jamie, the English pointer, gets there first but keeps her distance. Sally and Jessie, the Springer spaniels, are less reserved. The bird takes off. Louie drops on it like the lightning that approaches from the south.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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