Romancing the Bird

“Put your hand behind her feet,” Craig instructed as I went to pick up Peewee, a peregrine-prairie falcon hybrid. She was walking around the ground in his yard. Peewee was still small, with feathers coming in like the tips of paintbrushes. “Like this,” Craig said. He put his hand down behind her legs, and she stepped back onto his wrist.

Craig’s “Like this” was part of the apprentices’ formula, the nonverbal learning that comes through doing. “An ignoramus may learn something about other kinds of hunting in a short time,” wrote Frederick II in his thirteenth-century book De Arte Venandi cum Avibus (The Art of Hunting with Birds), “but without an experienced teacher and frequent exercise of the art, properly directed, no one, noble or ignoble, can hope to gain in a short time an expert or even an ordinary knowledge of falconry.” Craig was such an experienced teacher. A licensed master falconer, a licensed raptor propagator, and former president of the Virginia Falconers’ Association, Craig has been flying birds since 1992. He trained two apprentices and nearly lost an eye when a male red-tailed hawk, in defense of the nest, footed him in the face and tore a tear duct.

Craig had invited me to interact with Peewee as part of the process called “manning” the bird. The goal is to get the animal accustomed to the sights and sounds of human contact. Curious and fearless, Peewee hopped around on the sofa with the dogs, a guest (me), and a television providing background noise. Later stages will “make” (train) the bird—to the hood, to the lure, to the fist. Food provides motivation at every stage, whether it’s establishing a relationship with the bird, getting her to fly and hunt, or calling her back.

The Bayeux Tapestry shows Normans boarding their boats, bird on wrists. Originating in Asia and then spreading to the Middle East and Europe, falconry flourished with the Norman Conquest in 1066; it continued as a form of the hunt through the European Middle Ages and Renaissance, declining in Europe with the rise of gunpowder. In the early days of the United States, the sport failed to attract a strong following, perhaps because it was considered too aristocratic, but it has undergone a new efflorescence in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

With no need for fresh kill to stock the larder, today’s falconers come from all walks of life: ecologists, professors, mailmen, farmers, Cub Scouts, retirees, hippies, soccer moms, and professional women. Groups like the North American Falconers Association regularly host field meets and gatherings. At the Virginia Falconers’ Association meet held in the Shenandoah National Park, modern meets twelfth century in a gray-haired woman in a lawn chair, book in lap, raising her eyes at intervals to study the hawk leashed to a block perch, which is shaped like an inverted pyramid, its pointed stake support driven into the lawn. A white Arctic gyrfalcon poised on a bow perch covered with AstroTurf seemed a marble statue but for a large tub of water at his feet. While these enthusiasts are employing methods thousands of years old, new technology offers better materials. Modern falconers, like their medieval counterparts, weather their birds on perches set outdoors, but now the perches use stainless steel components. Better than cord or cloth, AstroTurf’s ability to hinder bacterial growth and relieve pressure on the bird’s sensitive feet make it a preferred surfacing material. Leashes, jesses, anklets, and hoods remain standard gear, but now the hood’s eye covers can be cut from kangaroo skin, or the leash made from nylon. For at least one millennium, bells, fixed on the bird’s feet or tail, sang to the falconer through the woods; contemporary falconers now use telemetry for tracking the bird over long distances. Perhaps the most significant difference between the medieval and contemporary practices of falconry is that modern falconers have an investment in breeding not only to sustain their sport but also to maintain endangered raptor populations that have been environmentally threatened.

In the olden days of medieval...