Where we go, when we go out

Thoughts from late 2023

When we go out with our hawks, we go out to the tiny woodlot behind the bus garage. We go out to the stand of black walnuts that grows between cul-de-sacs. We go out to the state forest, on the old forgotten back road that runs up into a farmer’s field with a long chain hanging across the path. We go out to the liminal spaces that the are ignore, forgotten, and decidedly not “forever wild.” We go out because we hope to find something wild and friend it, work with it, tame it even. We go out to touch a wilderness that most of our domesticated species has utterly lost its relationship too.

The woodlot behind Denny’s, owned by no one, but shown on a map as town property, and therefore owned by everyone is only a half-acre. But it is loaded with squirrels that are fat from neighboring bird feeders. We flush them one by one from their nests, hollering ‘ho ho ho’ loud enough that anyone could hear us, but the passing traffic drowns us out. We falconers might as well be as invisible as the wild animals we’re working with to the rest of humanity. When our hawk crashes a nest, gray squirrels explode out the bottom like a furry firework, scrambling for cover in the neighboring trees. The juvenile hawks hesitate when this happens, unsure what to do with such an embarrassment of targets. The adults pick a target and fly it down ruthlessly, scraping it off the side of an oak tree and spiraling to the ground with it. Sometimes when we get to it, the hawk has already killed the squirrel, driving a talon through its eye. Sometimes the squirrel is alive, but pinned, and we dispatch it swiftly. Sometimes it is a bad grab, and the squirrel is fighting, flailing, biting, teeth tearing and slicing through the hawk’s legs. Or toes. Or ankles.

When we go out to squirrel hawk, we go out into the woods. We go out to a place we wouldn’t call wild, but it is perhaps the only “wild” our hawks have ever known. We go where the red-tails naturally are – the only spaces people have left trees. Sometimes a park, sometimes a neighbor’s back yard, sometimes – more and more rarely – designated park where law has decided we won’t fuck around with nature here… any more. For now. When we look for rabbits we go to the telephone poles along railroad right of ways, mowed brush beneath high tension lines, old thorny forgotten hedgerows where farm fences used to be and now lie rotting beneath a tangle of rose and hawthorn, hiding rabbits and rocks alike. 

The hawks are hurt when we go out, not every time, but it happens. For the hawk to live, other animals must die. Those animals do not go willingly. A red tail lacks the digestive equipment to be a vegan, but rodents will work; squirrels, mice, voles, chipmunks, rabbits, ideally. But in a pinch, road killed deer, poisoned rats, and other animals discarded by humans to the edges of our space are consumed. Sometimes, juvenile hawks in their haste to eat – eat anything – will punch above their weight class and grab a raccoon, or a mink, or a muskrat, or another hawk, and real bloodbath will ensue. At these times, you are lucky to come home with a hawk at all. This is nature. This is what happens when we go out. A red tail can die of this eating.

Sometimes we are hurt too. Thorns tear into us as we spring through them to get to our hawks when they are down on a kill. Hornets’ nests fall from trees as we shake vines and we are stung, we step on old nails stomping on trash piles the iron tattooing the bottoms of our feet like a tribal marking.  Sometimes the hawks themselves foot us, driving their talons into our hands, arms, knees, legs, back or faces. This is always our fault. We have always done something wrong when the wild creature on our glove turns on us, even for an instant. This is not making excuses – even with a hawk we go out into the field with every day, we never really tame a predator, merely bargain with it.

When we go out we go out alone, mostly. We go out into the woods, with our hawk on the glove, and try to be alone. Bystanders ask questions. Bystanders have dogs. Bystanders believe they understand that “that is a wild animal and you shouldn’t be allowed to touch it” or “it’s unethical to use hawks like that.” Bystanders are ridiculous. They believe that “wildness” is somehow preserved in the woodlot behind the Denny’s, that the hawk we’re touching is somehow being denied it’s freedom from eating the rats poisoned by the pest control company that services the restaurant. Their stances are frequently based in ignorance of the fact that there is no wild left anywhere.

When we go out, we see that “the wild” is an illusion, a story we tell ourselves to sleep at night. A story which belies the fact that humans have utterly changed every aspect of nature. Even to accuse a red tail hawk of being a wild animal is borderline ridiculous. They are not domestic. They are not tame. But “wildness” is a bare thread, unraveling from a tapestry for some time now, understood by few, held close by millions. Wildness is a mist; hold it tighter and find it vanishes and where you thought it was, there is nothing. The red tail and its genetic ilk are ubiquitous on every continent precisely because they have adapted to living in close proximity to us. They have adapted to us, long before any falconer asks them to come down to a glove. All that is required is for us to remove their fear of us, incentivize them to stay close, and they are suddenly a companion.

Sometimes, rarely, we go out to a place that feels that it remembers the wilderness. It is not wilderness, but a memory of it. A state forest quiet with never logged pine trees, heavy with moss, groaning with the weight of the wind. A craggy ravine that has always been “between two farms” and never been worth anything to a developer, where we could break an ankle and never be found. Rarely we will be in a snow-filled forest, wading through 3 feet of powder, wishing for snowshoes, when we stop and realize that we haven’t seen another human being in hours; it has just been us, the hawk, and the world, existing in a kind of singular mind which has no words and no conscious thought. We think maybe this is what wild was like, but in the instant of having that thought, we end that untamed moment of existence and we are conscious again of being human, of the bills piling up, of the wet shoes we are in, of the hungry hawk eyeing us quizzically from her perch, wondering why we have not yet finished our hunt.

When we go out to trap hawks, we do so with bal chatri and cage traps, bow traps and casting jackets. We go out with lure animals who are carried like sacred passengers, kept alive to trap hawk after hawk, and ultimately kept in elaborate cages in our kitchens, entries, barns, garages, living rooms. Year after year, our gerbils, society finches, and feeder mice set up shop in our homes, living the high life. And in exchange, once a year or so, we hurl them inside a BC trap out the window of a moving car, serving them up directly beneath a perched juvenile red tail. We trap juveniles on feeder roads of the expressway, we find them with wings broken by trucks, with beaks sheared off by impact with cars. We find them dead, killed by impact with traffic, dead of West Nile, HPAI, or simply starved. Rarely, we find one in perfect feather, with big feet. We keep these for a season or two, the survivors, those who have already demonstrated an ability to not be killed by our constant bustling around, by our carelessness and commercialization of the wilderness. 

We go out to trap hawks that are injured, to help out rehabilitators, using the same gear we use for falconry – it’s all one secret language spoken among wild animal people. Sometimes these hawks are in pole barns. Sometimes inside a Home Depot. Once there is a Cooper’s Hawk in a sub-basement boiler room who had flown all the way down a ventilation shaft after a sparrow and become stuck in the 30 foot ceilings filled with duct work. She comes down to us because she is hungry, and our society finch in a bal chatri looks better than starving. She comes down from the shadows of the boiler room, slamming the bal chatri with a speed and precision that suggest she has taken many, many small birds this way. The nooses confound her feet, her beak opens in a silent reproach as we approach and hood her, check her over, and take her back outside via the freight elevator. She is free, and a live, and wings away with us as though we have caused the offense.

When we go out like this, the hawks feel no gratitude. Whether we put them into a mews and fly them on game for a few years, or we release them from a suburban death trap 60 feet below ground, they are terrified anyway. They are remarkably resilient though, and regardless of when or how they are released back outdoors, they are quick to fly away.

When we go out we are stopped not just by the general public, but by EnCon officers. By park rangers. By the police. We have to present paperwork, licenses, demonstrate that we are where we belong, that we have permission to be here, that our hunts are legal, and that our hawks are appropriately banded or accounted for. When we go out, we are rarely left alone by the trapping of humanity, even when we try to avoid it completely. There is no escaping from the prying eyes of neighbors and well-intentioned busybodies. They are harmless, but they underscore that no matter where we are outside, we are not in the wild. The wild we are out here, looking for, isn’t here in a neighbors back yard where we retrieve an errant hawk and her prey from a frozen flower bed, waving to the children inside the living room before vanishing back into the bushes of the suburban outback. Falconers are more like foxes than hawks, endeavoring to be near people but not seen by people.

When we are asked why we are a falconer we say “I read My SIde of the Mountain” or “It was always something I wanted to do” or if we’re snarky that day, something like “If you have to ask, you don’t understand.” You may as well ask water why it is wet, or why the wind blows from the east on any day. We are falconers, because we are falconers. Most of us can point to the day we knew it – generally a day in the distant past. A day when, as a prepubescent youth we looked up at a hawk on the wing and said yes, that, and gave ourselves over to it. To by something other than a falconer is to delete ourselves.

When we go out, we go with companions. Sometimes, these companions are not hawks. Sometimes they are people who are like hawks, or who like hawks, or both. They are carefully selected from among the tiny number of us who understand each other. In the Venn Diagram of falconers, there are maybe 2 or 3 that intersect with us. These intersections will be on a truly profound, “species recognition” level of understanding. If we are lucky, we meet one or two of those over our entire careers as falconers. Indeed, we may seem to have a bias here, only having been falconers for a bit under a decade, but then we meet grizzled old falconers with one good buddy that they see each year at a field meet, but whom they spent two decades tramping around the woods with, growing to understand each other’s hawks in the woods. So when we go out to the woods, there remains a little thread of society tying us back – these companions – but really we select them because their crazy matches ours. Because their obsession with health or art or spiritual practice in nature or headcount of game matches the level of fervor we feel for our own falconry. And when we go to the woods with these people, our hawks begin to generalize that this group of humans is safe, is a source of food, will help when they punch above the hawk’s weight class. The hawks come to trust, just enough, to remain close when we ask for it.

And when after a time, we have gone out to the woods with one hawk, we release it. We say we are returning it to the wild. If we stopped to think, we would realize that this is impossible. The Wild does not exist. Has not existed, for many generations. We are American. We fetishize “freedom” as an ultimate end to itself. We suppose raptors to possess a need for freedom, but what they mostly possess is a need to eat. This need is what ties them to us. So when we release them back to a wild that does not exist, in a sense, we are releasing them into nothing. We are casting them back out into the conceptual void, “the wild”, and watching them vanish, one wingbeat at a time, into the liminal space between the areas humans have carved out for themselves. We tell ourselves it is alright. We tell ourselves it is for the best. We tell ourselves “wild things should be wild” or “they will get a change to breed and make huge hawks now.” We are only guessing, supposing, mythologizing.

Then, sometime later, that old yearning rises up from somewhere inside us, that wordless part of us that made us falconers, and we go out again.