Hunting From The Heavens Ancient Art Of Falconry Still Soars

While exercising my dog at the edge of the city limits recently, I had a commoner’s rare ringside seat for the sport of kings.

Radar, my Brittany, had locked on point, a signal of adventure ahead. I walked past the pup, his nose quivering with scent, knowing that I could be headed for excitement ranging from a rooster pheasant to a skunk. Seconds later, a covey of quail sprayed from a brush pile as though a skeet trap had gone berserk.

Then the serious action began.

A blueish blur streaked in from the nearby ponderosa pines, zeroed in on a hapless quail, banked in and out of several tight turns in pursuit and disappeared under a burst of feathers that drifted slowly to the ground.

Radar and I had unwittingly served up dinner for a goshawk that had been waiting for the right opportunity. My heart raced for half an hour.

“That’s what it’s like to go hawkin’,” said Doug Pineo. “That’s why some people become falconers.”

Pineo, a state ecologist in Spokane, is one of 170 licensed falconers in Washington. In a sport with roots dating back 4,000 years, falconers hunt with hawks. But closer observation reveals that falconry isn’t just hunting. It’s art.

Shakespeare’s works contain more than 300 human behavior references that come from falconry. “Hood-winking” and “pulling the wool over your eyes” refer to the hood slipped over a hawk’s head to keep it calm and in the dark on the falconer’s arm before the hunt.

“Beating around the bush” refers to the falconer’s job of flushing game for the hawk. Falconers, by federal law, are required to complete a two-year apprenticeship in which they study the birds, the prey, the history, as well as build the pens, perches and accumulate the required paraphernalia.

After meeting these requirements, they still probably wouldn’t stay in the sport more than a few years if it weren’t for some innate birdiness in their brains.

“Few people these days are ready for the commitment it takes to care for a hawk,” Pineo said. He should know. Pineo earned his first hawk - a kestrel - at the age of 15. The kestrel is considered an entrylevel hawk. The single-engine prop plane of falconry. Only master falconers qualify to fly the rocketing gyrfalcons or peregrines.

“At that time, hawks were still vermin,” he said. “People hated them because they killed chickens, ducks and game birds.”

As a teenager, Pineo joined a small number of hawk enthusiasts in the Peregrine Fund, a group dedicated to reviving a species on the brink of extinction. They boosted the falcon through environmental watch-dogging and captive breeding.

“I’m 45, and the peregrine has just been recommended for delisting as an endangered species,” he said. “That’s about what it takes to bring a species back - a generation.”

As peregrines refill their native niches in North America, private breeding programs have been able to provide more birds for falconers.

“The sport survived by the barest of threads in the 19th century, passed along one person to another in a period when it was difficult to fly a bird without somebody shooting it,” Pineo said. “Now you could probably say it’s beginning to flourish again.”

Last year, Pineo introduced me to Winston, an 8-year-old peregrine falcon which demonstrated numerous falconry axioms during an afternoon hunt.

Most important, perhaps, is that falcons are not infallible. Winston clobbered, but did not kill a Hungarian partridge that day. He graciously accepted the consolation feast of a pen-raised quail breast from Pineo’s hand.

Food is a key in the relationship. Birds can’t be swatted on the rump with a newspaper or snapped to attention with a choke collar.

Pineo weighs Winston before each flight to assure he’s at the ideal flying weight. Half an ounce either way can be crucial. Too light, a falcon may be weak and ineffective. Too heavy, the falcon may be awkward. Worse, it could be content.

“One doesn’t want to get too sentimental about why a falcon comes back to your wrist,” Pineo said. “We like to keep them slightly hungry when we go hunting.”

To the uninitiated, falconry can be confusing, considering that a falcon is a hawk, but a hawk isn’t necessarily a falcon. Common families of hawks involved in American falconry include:

Buteos - The soaring hawks. Large, eagle-like birds, including the red-tailed hawk. Feed primarily on ground quarry such as mice, rabbits, squirrels. Rarely eat birds.

Accipiters - More secretive birds of prey, including goshawk and Cooper’s hawk. Small-headed with abnormally long tails. Adept at flying through woods. Feed almost entirely on birds.

Falcons - Magnificent fliers of open spaces, including peregrines and gyrfalcons. Can stoop (dive) to speeds of about 200 mph. Feed primarily on birds, with exception of kestrel, which is small enough to concentrate on mice and even insects.

Goshawks hunt from the fist. Falcons are launched to hunt from the air.

A goshawk has short, rounded wings enabling the bird to make tight turns among trees. It flies fast over a short distance, striking quickly, or giving up.

A peregrine falcon is geared for open terrain, with long tapered wings designed for longer flights and steep fast stoops from an altitude advantage.

A falconer cringes when prey leads a peregrine toward trees. “It’s not a good mix,” Pineo said.

The afternoon wore long on our legs in a more recent foray with Winston and his ground crew, Vic, the English Setter. Indeed, the dog work itself is worth the walk in this sport of air-to-ground teamwork.

We slogged with pounds of mud clinging to our boots as the setter combed the hillsides fruitlessly searching for partridge in the voluptuous Palouse hills.

With less than an hour of daylight, Vic finally narrowed his search and stuck a point at the crest of a knob half a mile away. We walked at a near jog for eight minutes to within 100 yards of Vic, who held staunch.

Pineo removed Winston’s hood and let him sense the surroundings. The peregrine shook his feathers, stretched his wings and sprang into a 30 mph wind.

He swooped back and forth, gaining altitude. Pineo moved in to flush the birds, but nothing got up. He dreaded the thought of a false point, but Vic relocated and froze like stone. The huns were there, but too wary of the falcon to fly.

Finally, the partridge burst into the air. Hunters have often marveled at how a hun with a brisk tailwind can be out of gun range in a blink.

But after a few powerful wing beats, Winston took the advantage of wind, altitude and gravity, folded into a teardrop and overtook a terrified hun like a missile. We’re talking about knee-shaking velocity. The air hissed through Winston’s pinion feathers like wind in a mountain storm.

Feathers exploded in the distance. “Oh, my heart’s pounding,” Pineo said. “You’d think after 30 years I’d get used to this.”

We found Winston hunkered on the ground with his wings folded over his catch.

The flight is the experience, Pineo said. “It’s a chance to watch what happens every day in the wild.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color photo

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: SPORT OF KINGS In the 13th century, when European hunters were beginning to use dogs and firearms, falconry still was considered the only hunting sport for “men of quality.” During the 17th century reign of Aleksey Mikhaylovich, the Russian czar kept 3,000 birds in his falconry. To feed these birds of prey, his servants had to keep 100,000 doves on hand, and even then, mutton or beef had to be used to satisfy the falconry’s nutrition needs.