Wing and a Prayer

I saw a bald eagle on my way to the rescue this morning. It flew over the road in front of my car and I stopped to watch it soar away across a cornfield on its way to the Sassafras River. There is something so majestic, so undeniably fierce and free about an eagle that seeing one stops me dead in my tracks every time. A few years ago, on a winter vacation to Yellowstone National Park, I was fortunate enough to see a golden eagle dive on a duck and take it right out of the air in mid-flight. The sheer power of the bird took my breath away.
In fact, I have always been fascinated by birds of prey. Driven to the edge of extinction by the effects of DDT poisoning, hawks, osprey and eagles were a rare sight while I was going up. I read extensively about raptors and while I had no real interest in hunting, I often wondered what it would be like to train and fly a hawk or a falcon. So when I read recently about a school in Vermont that offers hands-on lessons with trained birds of prey, I jumped at the chance for this once in a lifetime experience.
The British School of Falconry is located in Manchester, Vermont and offers both introductory lessons and the opportunity to take a walk in the woods with an experienced handler and a pair of hawks. While the school has several kinds of raptors, their introductory lessons use Harris hawks. The Harris hawk is a medium sized bird of about 20 inches with a wing span of 3 to 4 feet. They are the only type of hawk known to hunt cooperatively in the wild and are favored by falconers because they are relatively social and easy to train.
My lesson was to start at 10 am on a relatively cool morning in April and we began in the hawk barn where I was given a large leather glove or gauntlet to protect my arm and hand from the hawk’s talons and introduced to the basics of handling the bird. The hawks wear jesses, a thin leather straps around their feet that are used for controlling the birds when they are perched on your arm. My instructor showed me how to hold the jesses between my thumb and forefinger, how to perch the bird on my arm and how to return the bird to a correct perching position if he tried to fly off while I was still holding on to the jesses. Once he felt like I had control of the bird, we went outside to a field that had high perches spaced across its length.
Training a hawk is very different from training a dog or a horse because a bird of prey does not form any kind of relationship with its handler like the horse or dog would. While food rewards can be used to reinforce training with a dog or horse, with a bird of prey, it is all about the food. My instructor explained that the hawks were weighed every day. A hawk will not hunt unless it is hungry. By trial and error during training, each hawk was found to have a particular weight at which it seemed to be most willing to cooperate with the handler. That was deemed to be its “flying weight”. When a hawk was at this flying weight it will be most eager to react when a bit of food is offered.
The bird my instructor handed to me was surprisingly light on my arm. With his jesses firmly grasped in my fist and holding my arm as level as possible, I carried him out into the field. When a falconer sends a hawk off on a hunt, he actually throws the bird to help it get up into flight. This is harder than it looks because you have to throw the bird up with your arm while releasing the jesses from your fist at the same moment, but I managed a credible first throw and my hawk flew off to one of the tall perches scattered around the field. I was feeling pretty pleased with myself as I listened to my instructor explain how I was going to get the bird back onto my arm. He gave me a small piece of meat and instructed me to hold it with the thumb of my gloved hand. Then he told me that when I was ready, to lift my arm up, holding it level from wrist to elbow. That would be the signal to the bird to fly back to my arm. He warned me that as the bird came back, I had to be careful not to flinch away so that the hawk could land.
I looked at the hawk sitting on the perch. He was about 100 yards from where I was standing and he didn’t seem to be the least bit interested in what we were doing. Not sure that I was going to be able to entice him back, I gripped the small piece of meat in my gloved hand and lifted my arm as instructed. The change in the bird was both immediate and startling. His head came around and he seemed to crouch down while fixing me with his piercing stare. Then he launched himself from the perch and flew straight at me. It was all I could do to hold myself still as this fairly impressive bird of prey bore down on me. As he got closer, he actually swooped down lower than my arm and then rotated his wings to slow himself and fly slightly upward toward my gloved hand. I was expecting to feel quite a jolt when he finally hit my arm but was surprised at how gently he landed and then took the small piece of meat from my hand. It was a thrill it but it also was a little bit intimidating, to have this fierce and wild bird flying directly at me.
After we had practiced for about half an hour and I had somewhat mastered the art of throwing the hawk correctly, we headed back to the barn and exchanged my initial hawk for another pair of birds for the hawk walk. We loaded these birds into travel crates and drove to a wooded area with a walking trail. We sent the hawks off and started down the trail. The hawks, flying free, sometimes flew ahead and sometimes followed along. It took some practice to keep and eye on where they were and at one point, the pair spotted a squirrel and were in the process of working together to corner it high in a tree. Since it wasn’t really hunting season and we weren’t hunting with the hawks, my instructor tried to call the birds back to us without much luck. The birds, intent on getting the squirrel, didn’t seem to be too interested in the little bits of meat we were offering. He finally had to resort to using a feathered lure which he swung around his head, to lure the hawks back to us. Watching the two hawks fly free in the woods and then having them return to us was exhilarating.
Studying Parelli™ Natural Horsemanship I have spent a lot of time learning about predators and prey animals. I even live with three small feline predators, perhaps the least domestic of any of the domesticated animals. But I have never had an experience that compared to holding that Harris hawk on my arm and watching it fly free in the forest. There was such a barely concealed ferocity about that hawk, a feeling that even with all of its training and handling, at any moment it could tap into its essential nature and return to the wild without a backward glance. It was like holding a spirit being on my fist. It just took my breath away.