Falcons and Foxes in the U.K.: The Making of a Hunter

By A. Lee Chichester

A once-in-a-lifetime experience chronicled with humor and passion, this memoir details the life-altering 1995 summer during which a nature-lover becomes a hunter. One of those rare quantities, a woman falconer, Chichester discovered that her outlook on the world, nature, and herself changed radically during her pursuit of the ancient art in a foreign country. Training captive-bred, hybrid falcons; riding horseback to the flight of a falcon in pursuit of a crow, belting across the fells and pastures of the United Kingdom; the author deals with fears, preconceptions, and a very steep learning curve, after which she is changed forever.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 26, 2003
• ISBN: 9781465329912

A. Lee Chichester

A. Lee Chichester has been freelancing for 25 years. She has written another book, a young adult novel: The Secret of the Cibolo, co-authored with Billie Matthews (© 1988 Eakin Press). While published in literary, nature, falconry, and outdoors magazines, the majority of her credits are in electrical trade magazines. As an accredited instructor of outdoors education, she conducts programs surrounding raptors and environmental conservation for groups ranging from 4-H to garden clubs. Currently living in Meadows of Dan, Virginia, she hunts two Harris’ hawks on a variety of game species native to her corner of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

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Copyright © 2003 by A. Lee Chichester.

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Preface

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Chapter XII

Chapter XIII

Chapter XIV

Epilogue

Glossary of Terms

Acknowledgements

When I first saw the advertisement for junior falconers to learn the art of falconry in the United Kingdom, from one of the foremost raptor biologists in the world, hunting in the esteemed and long-standing traditions of the sport, my heart skipped and ached for the chance. I stared at the periodical in which I’d found it, opened to the notice itself, on my desk for two weeks before I shoved it at my husband, Jack.

He read it, then looked at me with a rather lost expression on his face. At that moment, we both knew I would go if accepted. We both knew it was an enormous commitment on both our parts. He still calls it the longest five months of his life.

Without his help and understanding, I could not have experienced the adventure of a lifetime that you are about to share. Jack is not only my husband, but also my best friend - the one who knows me thoroughly. He knew upon reading the notice that I would have to go. Perhaps he knows me better than I know myself, actually, as best friends sometimes do.

Regardless, it is to Jack that I owe many things for which I am blessed, not the least of which was the support to engage as a working pupil at Hunting Falcons International in the summer of 1995. He never said anything negative about the prospect; he didn’t try to talk me out of it, although I suppose not doing so was quite difficult for him;

and to this day, he enjoys hearing about and vicariously participating in my adventure.

He continues to support me and accompany me in this passionate lifestyle I’ve chosen, and I thank him for every day we share together in this life.

I’m also thankful to Dr. Nick Fox for offering the opportunity and electing to try a 38-year-old junior falconer as a student helper. The crew that labored during that summer was a varied crowd, from each of whom I learned, and with several of whom I continue to keep in touch.

I appreciate Kale Kevan’s internet discussions of themes important to the philosophy, survival, and perpetuation of the sport of falconry specifically, and hunting sports generally; and for her permission to use her written words that say things so much better than my own.

Thanks to Jane Rafal for her professional editing and re-write suggestions.

Finally, thanks go to Craig Nicol for his cover design; Craig is my brother in falconry, partner in education, and true friend, not to mention a fine artist of our natural world and sport; and to Lance and Jill Morrow, falconers and bird banders extraordinaire, who took the cover photo, a wild prairie falcon, and have allowed me to use it here.

Disclaimer: While this is a work of nonfiction, it represents events and conversations perceived from my perspective only. As I did not wander around for five months with an audio recorder in the on position, the actual words attributed to people herein are reconstructions - conversations scribbled with detail at the time into a carefully-documented and lengthy set of journals I kept during these events, to be sure. But the actual words recorded here are reconstructions from memory. I tried to make them faithful to the intent and purpose of the events depicted, yet I apologize for any misrepresentations of actual conversations held in 1995.

All errors or omissions, misinterpretations or misperceptions are mine alone. None of these contents are intended to reflect in any way negatively upon the people included herein, and I apologize for any instances in which my personal perceptions might have been different from another’s; and for depictions of the events that occurred in 1995 that are perceived to be erroneous from another’s point of view.

Omnis ars naturae imitatio est.

(All art is but imitation of nature.)

Seneca, Epistle to Lucilius

Preface

For much of my young life I was raised in a semi-suburban setting. There were fields and streams in our area, and a quick drive would land my brothers, mother, and me in some acreage where we took horseback riding lessons in the English style. so my upbringing could be termed neither urban nor suburban, in the strictest sense of the latter term: postage-stamp-sized yards, concrete sidewalks and strip malls. Yet I wasn’t raised in the rural traditions, either.

I was in about the sixth grade - around 12 years old - when my family managed to get out of this hybrid life into the true countryside. At the time, the move was to an area/lifestyle that I refer to as horse-rural, which is a different kettle of fish from what I have, very much later in my life, discovered to be agricultural-rural-that environment in which a majority of residents earn their livings through farming; in which young males skip school on the first day of rifle-hunting season each year in November, to go into the woods and shoot their first deer of the season.

In horse-rural, we had enough acreage on the outskirts of town to have some horses, and we owned a horse trailer and a four-wheel-drive vehicle for getting around the mostly posh pastures of the equine-country in middle Virginia. This was in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, before 4WD was the standard it is today. To my way of thinking, hunting was what we did on the rare occasions in the fall and winter when we trailered our horses to an estate and joined as guests in a fox hunt. This ritualized horseback romp through the chill countryside was exciting, communal, raucous, dangerous, and thrilling. Other than the adrenaline and cold weather aspects, my experience of hunting was quite different from the solitary vigil in a duck or deer blind; or the wander through the woods in search of turkey or bear - the kind of hunting with which traditional sport hunters are most familiar.

I call this chronicle the making of a hunter. The transformation of my psyche and outlook from that of a rather sentimental, Disney-movie perspective (all the while I was riding to the hounds, I prayed earnestly to Mother Nature to help the fox elude the hounds so that I would not have to see any carnage) to a more traditional hunting mindset is a phase-shift that still surprises me. And the conflicts between my gut and my head still wrestle issues - To what degree is using beagles to hunt rabbits different from tracking bears with hounds? Why are leg-hold traps any worse or better than netting fish? Is the hawk that catches a squirrel operating on the same level as a domestic cat that catches a finch? How can/should we measure animal suffering? - these questions and more continue to drive within me a thorough contemplation of the placement of mankind into the natural setting of the Earth. Indeed, how is hunting wild game using a trained raptor (the definition of falconry) any worse or better than hunting wild game using a 20-gauge shotgun? Is the human animal a predator or a protector?

In my transformation to a hunter and falconer, I have developed a deep appreciation for the natural systems upon which life as we know it depends. I see the crucial contest between predator and prey nearly daily-a privilege, I’ve come to realize, that is one to which too few of us modern humans are privy. Our society has experienced (and continues to experience) an alienation from nature that is neither good for the wild nor good for us, I feel. After much thought coupled with, only just now, a growing direct experience of these enormous questions, I’ve come to realize that human kind is but one additional animal in an ecosystem we share with many other organisms. Our role is perhaps to find ways to co-habit-not necessarily to protect at all costs, because some of our past choices for protection have either had minimal impact or disastrous effect: we aren’t perfect, after all, nor all-knowing.

I’ve come to the conclusion that we must find ways to co-habit with our fellow animals and plants; insects and arthropods; fish and fungus; taking the time to preserve to our greatest ability not only ecosystems upon which they are dependent, but also those on which we are dependent. After all, we live in this habitat, too, and have needs just like our animal brethren. Among those needs is that for protein to eat. What could possibly be more healthful and free-range than the consumption of hunted game?

I was a newly-licensed falconer at the time described by this memoir. Like a lump of wet clay or a blank page of paper, I was open to being molded and formed and created by the philosophies and attitudes of those with whom I came into contact. I’ve had several years since that time to think about what I learned there, how the experience has formed my thinking, and to find ways to share the process with others. Naturally, the best part about writing this down for me has been the re-living of the experience itself, which by itself would be a rather drab tale for you, I’m afraid. So I hope that there is enough inside the actual chronicle and later reflections on this process of making a hunter for you to glean some ideas that you find interesting.

At the least, my wish is that you embark on a series of thought processes similar to my own, so that you can more critically evaluate much of what our current popular culture feeds us over the airwaves, satellite connections, and media blitzes associated with corporate America - a world quite different from what I find walking with the hawk through our back woodlot.

Chapter I

I first met Black Velvet while recovering from jet-and train-lag; after a sleepless 24-hours that included a seven-hour flight from my home in Virginia to England, topped off with a four-hour series of train changes to Wales, UK. Black Velvet and her brother, Black Magic, were young falcon hybrids stomping about on the window sill they used as a nest ledge off the main room, up in the second-floor flat where the staff took morning and afternoon tea breaks and meals. In a kitchen off this common room, I fixed most of my meals every day, so I ended up spending a lot of time with Velvet and Magic, who shared one black gyrfalcon (Falco rusticolus) parent, and one saker falcon (Falco cherrug) parent.

I also spent a lot of time with their loose down and feather dandruff, the bits of protective shaft that sloughed off as their feathers grew (called fledging out). After an initial chilly wet front moved through that June, we enjoyed warm weather. With the windows wide open, the down and dandruff scooted and swirled across the wooden floor, flew onto the kitchen counters, and hid beneath the sofa, the tables, and the odd sock or sweater shed and forgotten by the lads - the primarily male humanoid contingent also using this space.

Being only one of two females chosen for this student-level position that summer, and also being that relatively rare quantity - a female falconer - I had to get used to sticking out like a broken tail feather that summer. On top of that, I was easily the oldest working pupil ever to labor the course of a summer at Dr. Nick Fox’s falcon breeding and training facility near Carmarthen, Wales.

Velvet and Magic were just two of the hybrid falcons bred and hatched in 1995 and by the time I’d gotten there in late May the breeding season was long over, although there were a few eggs left to incubate and hatch. I’d barely gotten my brain to wrap around which of the staff members’ names belonged to which faces when, during the first week in June, we began the long involved process of hacking out many of the young fledglings hatched that spring.

While I was licensed to practice falconry in the United States, in 1995 I had been a falconer for only three years. I’d handled a total of three raptors in my entire life - each of them male red-tailed hawks (Buteoo jamaicensis).

I’d come late to the sport of hunting. I’d never sat quietly at dawn,

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Some hatchlings were fostered to pairs of proven parent falcons, and were transferred gently in small nests

awaiting the light to rise enough to see a wary game animal, then sighting down a long, steel barrel to attempt a safe and clean shot. Having been raised in rural Virginia, however, I had certainly handled hunting firearms in my past. And being a naturally outdoorsy woman - okay, okay - a tomboy, then; growing up a tomboy meant that I’d spent quite a lot of my time outdoors, observing birds and bugs, playing scientist with my brothers in the nearby creek bed or rocky outcropping. Once, with no clear idea about cooking or eating crayfish, but knowing this was done in the world, my younger brother and I caught a mud bug from the creek in which the horses stood to cool off each summer, made a small fire, cooked the little creature then decided - wrongly, it turned out - which part to consume.

In a more productive vein, we also spent many hours chronicling and trying to predict the weather using barometers, our written journals, and by watching the sky. In addition, I had always been athletic, participating in sports that kept me outside a lot, and was raised competing on nearly equal footing with both elder and younger brothers, developing into a rebel with a very wide competitive streak.

But I’d never gun-hunted. One of the first times I’d ever shot a shotgun I was about sixteen. The local starlings were making such a constant nerve-jangling racket in our trees on the lawn that my stepfather suggested I just shoot into the lot and scare them away. Being pests, the starlings were not protected by law, so taking a pot-shot at them seemed like a good idea at the time.

Unfortunately, the only bird that fell to earth was a red-winged blackbird, and I was heartsick (not to mention the fact that my actions had resulted in an unlawful act). All I could think of was the time in the third grade when I’d put together a simple model of a red-winged blackbird as a school project. From that point forward, I’d learned my songbirds - at least the more populous ones - and the red-winged blackbird had always been my favorite. I don’t think I’ve shot a shotgun since that time, and I’ve never shot any rifle without being certain exactly what my target was.

The point is that I wasn’t raised in a hunting family. In addition, I had always fancied myself at least marginally anti-hunting - at least to the extent that I was not at all impressed with the trophy hunting mentality. I tended to lump those I labeled hunters into the redneck, shoot-a-groundhog-from-the-road, or the hang-a-head-on-the-wall category, although I knew there were some gun hunters who were responsible sportsmen. It simply wasn’t my world.

I had a lot to learn about hunting on top of learning about falconry. I found it somewhat challenging to go through a process of re-defining myself and my outlook on many types of outdoor sports and their participants. Looking back on the process, it was like being squeezed through a narrow tube and coming out shaped differently at the end, like extruding ground-up meat, fat, and herbs into a casing to make sausage: what you begin with bears no resemblance to that which you have at the end.

But the first step was to learn all I could about the sport of falconry itself (you will find a glossary of falconry terms at the back of this chronicle). As a learning falconer, I’d discovered that male raptors, being about 1/3 smaller than females, are called tiercels. The females are traditionally called falcons, but this gets somewhat confusing as that’s the common parlance for the species as well. Sometimes, falconers call the females hens, but not often, as that raises images of the lowly chicken in many minds, and is believed to sully the noble image of the falcon. This was a whole new world for me, with a whole new language to learn.

From the time of my little red-winged blackbird model onward, birds became a major interest in my life. The more I learned about birds, the more it was the raptors (owls, eagles, hawks, accipiters, and falcons) that captured my closest attention. I watched hawks and owls at every opportunity, and like many, many youngsters who eventually became falconers, I read a story called My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George. In the book, a boy takes a peregrine falcon as his hunting tool of choice (and also to be his companion) as he survives alone on the bounty of the land in the wilds of upstate New York. Despite my long-term interest in falcons and falconry, I’d waited until I was 35 to take up the sport. When I went to Wales to spend the summer of 1995 learning all I could about this tradition-studded art, I was 38.

My hosts were kind enough to let me take it easy my first day in Wales, a condition I didn’t enjoy again for weeks. I slept reasonablywell that first night - although not quite long enough. My room was sandwiched between aviaries and fronted by a small work room. I had imprint peregrines (Falco peregrinus) on the west side and a breeding pair of red kites (Milvus milvus) on the east. Dawn comes early at that latitude, and like diurnal birds everywhere, the raptors were up with the sun. And they were right darned rowdy about the process, too.

My first falcon-related job that summer was to cut leather identification bewits, or ankle-straps, for the juvenile birds that would be hacked. Being a complete neophyte, I wrote in my journal, I began right about lunch time (1:00) and stopped at 6:30 with 22 of the 30 total made. These are bell and telephone number bewits for those birds they will put to hack in the next day or two. I’m not exactly sure what’s involved with this ‘tame hacking’ process, but hope to discover it shortly.

I did my bewit-cutting right in the flat’s common room, so I had a lot of time to spend with The Blacks as I began to think of them. Velvet and Magic were the first imprinted birds I’d ever had occasion to get to know. In many senses, The Blacks and I grew up together that summer, each from our distinct point of view, discovering the unique relationship that can develop between humans and imprint falcons.

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Black Velvet.

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Black Magic.

Although I was handy at equipment-making, having made most of my own falconry gear at home, it seemed as if my entire summer tenure would be over before I would at last cut that 30th ankle strap. Of course, I was anxious enough to please that I wanted the results of my efforts to impress my new associates. This was the first task assigned to me by Nick Fox, my boss, so I took special care to both listen carefully and execute his instructions to the best of my ability.

Nick was younger - about 45 or 48 - than I’d expected after speaking to him on the phone during the application process, and after knowing a small bit of his extensive history and reputation as one of the world’s foremost raptor biologists. Nick had longish blond-going-gray hair and a light blond/red beard that helped his round face appear rather gnome-like. His very proper Oxford accent competed with his somewhat rumpled and rounded appearance, affording a glimpse of the stereotypical Eccentric British Professor we might see on a BBCprogram in the US: baggy, moth-eaten sweater (called a jumper there); baggy, wrinkled corduroys; muddy Wellies. It was later in the summer when I saw him actually dressed nicely - the first time was on our inaugural mounted hunting expedition, where we all dressed in very proper British Foxhunt attire - and he did clean up good as we say in the mountains.

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Nick with Eclipse, his first captive-bred, full-blooded white gyfalcoon.

Here is a pattern you can use, he said on that first day, so you get them all about the same size. We want them small enough to be relatively unobtrusive to the bird, yet large enough to hold our phonenumber and the name of the bird on the smooth face of the leather. After you’ve cut them, Martyn can find you a stencil and a list of all the names of the birds, and you will use indelible ink to write the information on each, then we’ll cover the face with lacquer for permanence.

I nodded, gazing at the tools, equipment, and leather stock strewn across the table top. I believe he’d assigned this task to me for one primary reason: I was the only American close to hand at the time, and American falconers have a long history of having to make their own equipment. At that time (things have changed in the marketplace since the mid-’90s) if you couldn’t make your falconry stuff, you had to do without.

Got it?

Sure, I said with more confidence than I felt. I’d only made three sets of anklets in my falconry career - one for each foot of each bird I’d handled, thus a total of six leather anklets for receiving jesses, and my system was different from what I was instructed to do here.

With that, Nick was off and I didn’t see him again for a week.

That reputation placing Nick among the top raptor biologists in the world was one of the primary attractions to my applying for the position. But it also meant he was involved in numerous scientific studies involving raptors from lanner falcons (Falcoo biarmicus) to red kites; from prey species habitat reconstruction and conservation to raptor re-introductions in their native lands. These involvements required him to travel extensively to places such as the United Arab Emirates, Spain, and Germany.

With no one peering over my shoulder, and as my confidence rose with the repetitive nature of the job, I found myself taking time to simply watch The Blacks. In early June, they were about two weeks old. Their feathers were still growing in and fragile (and itchy), and their feet were weak. They stomped around on their nest ledge in short flurries of activity, then they’d lie down on their breasts for a while to rest. Whenever one of the lads would approach, the birds would squeak and gently nibble a proffered digit. When they were fed, they’d scream loudly and grab the quail meat with their beaks and drag it away from sibling threats.

The lads, in turn, would handle the birds’ food and stroke their backs, heads, breasts, feet - whatever - getting up-close-and-personal with them. Also they would chup or e-chup at them, vocalizing in a way similar to wild parent falcons reassuring their young.

My first real bird-handling experience was getting Black Velvet to take her medicine.

Velvet rattled when she breathed. And when she ate, she’d be forced to stop and cough through the congestion in her air passages. The local avian veterinarian surmised that she might have a soft-tissue infection, and he prescribed a daily injection and an oral antibiotic. The puzzle for her caretakers was how to administer the antibiotic so it would be delivered to the site of the infection.

Chris Eastham, one of the permanent staff who hailed from Leeds, often abandoned his office/computer work to handle the birds, especially when one wanted doctoring. Chris and Nick brainstormed the problem, with Velvet sitting hooded on the back of the sheet-draped couch.

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Chris Eastham took primary responsibility for training Black Magic during the summer of1995.

What if we use a towel draped over her head, as you do when using a vaporizer if you have a cold? suggested Chris, illustrating the procedure with an imaginary drape above Velvet’s head.

Then all the medicine will be drawn up by the towel rather than the bird, countered Nick. But if you use a sheet of plastic, like food wrap, the same way - that might work.

That would take too many hands to hold it out from her head, Chris demonstrated the problem. What if we use stiff plastic, like a milk jug cut up?

Nick’s face brightened as he stared at Velvet and considered the suggestion. Should work, he said, and exited the room, certain that Chris could manage.

So Chris rigged up a vapor channel that would fit over Velvet’s hooded head. The top of the milk jug (where the cap screwed on) served as the delivery end for the water-based antibiotic that was sprayed, a la atomizer, into the larger section of the cut-away jug, with the hope that Velvet would breathe some of the misty medicine swirling about her head.

The operation, performed three times daily, always took two people. This wasn’t because Velvet was a difficult patient. It simply took two hands to manage the vapor channel and two hands to do the spraying - an extremely thumb-intensive workout. Because I was there in the common room so much those first weeks, Chris asked me to help.

Velvet was a good patient, to put up with our efforts to turn her into a fish three times a day. Whether it was the congestion, the antibiotic, or just her personality, the voice she used to halfheartedly protest our attentions was a soft, sweet, musical note - not the shrill, piercing scream I later heard from other imprints we trained that summer.

The medicine smelled sicky-sweet and the warning label suggested we avoid getting it on our hands, which proved to be an impossible task for the one who held the vapor channel. The hood Velvet wore got sticky and stinky and completely ruined, and became, for Velvet, the symbol of her discomfort at our hands. Forever after, when she’d see a hood that resembled the brown, creased mess we’d used during this time, she’d scream anxiously and dance away.

Although she remembered that time as unpleasant, I reflect on it as the beginning of my assimilation into the routine of falcon care and training, which was my primary purpose for signing on as a student helper. Velvet taught me quite a lot about birds that summer. In addition, through her, I began to know my fellow workers better.

Chris, for instance, was a tall 24-year-old with a quiet voice, endless patience, and large but gentle hands. His longish brown hair was often being whipped out of his wire-rim-spectacled field of vision by a quick flick of his head or hand. Chris was excellent at dealing with difficult birds, both imprinted and parent-raised, and he, of us all, dealt most with the sick or injured birds. I remember one young bird that was chamber raised, or raised in an aviary by its parents (or foster parents), rather than imprinted. It had to be cast, or hooded and held bodily, for the procedure of applying the bewits and transmitter to its legs prior to being set out to hack. Evidently, the bird had a genetically weak link between its hips and backbone. While cast, this weak link broke, and the poor bird lost the use of its legs.

Before we knew the dire nature of