Silly Bird

The Aplo Tri- bryd is still ridiculous and still brainless but he is TRYING, and not squawking so much. Working him high, VERY high, is the key. Fire chief Mike Bisbee (who is married to my distant cousin Nina McCabe, and hails from NY) took these good pics the other day.

The New Bird...

is an (A) good big boy Aplo/ (B) little male Gyr {C) BIG... hybrid of unknown gender. We tend to call him "him" but are looking for a genderless trial name until or unless we have "him" DNA tested.

Meanwhile, he's a sweetheart-- look how calm he was putting on jesses (Yeah, I KNOW, two different kinds!)

Annyushka says her undoubted male flies at less than 450 g,which would be typical. Ours is already 22 oz fat and empty-- more than 600 g, heavier than anything since the Gyr hybrids from Nevada that Les killed...

.410

Not the gun this time- the new bird,a female Kestrel. Padre Paul trapped her during a javelina hunt, sportscasting her approach to the trap on his cell- O Brave New World!--and suggested we call her that, likening her delicate beauty to that gun. Like most Kestrels she is pretty unflappable. Three ravens killed my larger, dashing Merlin x Gyr; but the Kestrels in Nestor's tin barn across the street used to pound ravens into the ground and make them WALK, protesting, out of the neighborhood.

If someone can tell me why this blog now shows me photos not as photos but as code, puts all the captions in the wrong place. I've moved them around three times and have not yet gotten them in the right place.

...The Gyrlin, back in the long ago day, and with the legendary Zhel.Sigh...

This bird won't stand on food yet but will bite it, and foot you- hard!

Falconry Goddesses

Ourc regnant falconry goddesses, Helen Maconald and Lauren McGough, do a podcast TOGETHER at the BBC.More please!
https://mobile.twitter.com/HelenJMacdonald/status/909753333317095424?p=v

Full of good sense and unexpected insights-; as Helen says., only Lauren would fly an eagle because it is so SERENE.

Lauren is currently in S Africa chasing drunken  monkeys with  a "little" male Crowned eagle. We hope to see her here soon.

The REAL Eagle Huntress

... with Annyushka, the Merlin Huntress.

Tom Cade

The oldest by a bit of the four Peregrine Fund founders, and the only man among them to be born poor (in the Depression era New Mexico Bootheel), my old  friend Dr Tom Cade is still going strong at nearly ninety, Tim Gallagher caught up to him at the Irish Falconers meet, accompanied by a pair of beautiful Brazilian Aplomado falconers:

 Way to go, Tom! I hope I can be like you when I grow up...

Photo Session

Stefan Wachs came down for another photo shoot, this time of me flying Matt Mitchell's sweet Harris. There will be more...

Chukar Hunting the Old Way

My long- time Canadian hunting correspondent, Alex Sharif, who I met through Valerius Geist, is primarily a sheep hunter and a mountaineer. But when he sent me a few photos from his cousin Afshin in Idaho,I was intrigued. Afshin is a Goshawker, and he hunts Chukar in the kind of country they have always inhabited, in Central Asia, where everything is vertical He put us in touch, and Afshin sent me this exciting portfolio,as well as a couple of short YouTubes that show his young Elhew pointer and the difficulties of hunting that terrain- watch the bird plunge into the abysss.

Zhinoo points

The proud falconer (technicaly of course, "austringer") with Tooran- two hawk's profiles!

Libby's Accident (and the Urban Accipiter Phenomenon)

By now at least half the town knows that Lib fell off a ladder tending to the pigeons in the "trap" on top of the pigeon loft. I use "trap" in quotes, because normally it is a pigeon racer's term for sort of double entrance chamber used in racing pigeon competitions to control access. But in this case we have been trying to catch and remove two first year's "Urban Coopers" who have set up on my loft and, so far this late summer and fall, have killed over twenty pigeons from the flight loft.

A writer to the Magdalena E- Board says the following: "If that's not a joke about the hawk and the pigeon, let me give you the ornithological point of view. Let nature take its course. Hawks are predators and need to kill smaller birds to feed themselves and their offspring. A certain group of hawks called Accipiters prey almost exclusively on other birds. Let them do it. It's nature's way."

I don't know quite where to start. As anyone knows,I am more than familiar with Accips, having flown two subspecies of Goshawks in four states and having seen` them flown in five countries.

But "Nature's Way"? The Urban Accipiter is a brand new, human- influenced phenomenon. In Asia and eastern Europe, as documented ably by England's Conor Jameson in his book Looking for the Goshawk; Gosses, a near- wilderness species in western North America (you can find pairs in The San Mateos near Grassy Lookout, and in the Magdalenas up the canyon from the Water Canyon Peregrine nest in wet years), are now common inhabitants of urban parks, even in Moscow and East Germany. The great Russian wildlife artist Vadim Gorbatov,who has painted quail on Lee Henderson's ranch, done Water Canyon as a backdrop for a children's book on Peregrine reintroduction,

and who drank that"good Mexicanski vodka" (tequila) at the Spur, lives in a Moscow high- rise, and painted his resident Gos catching a hooded crow in front of his apartment for my book,At the Edge of the Wild

We don't know why Goshawks are invading the cities, but we do know something about Coopers. The phenomenon was first noticed in the early 90's in Tucson, when a University of Arizona study of the Coopers hawk there revealed the then-astounding number of 160 pairs within metropolitan Tucson's boundaries. The population then was unhealthy, though large. The hawks were living entirely on urban feral pigeon and the unnaturally large population of white- winged, Aztec,and ground doves which the city, with its water and plantings, attracted. These birds had endemic Trichomonas gallinae, a disease which did not harm the pigeons much but killed the predators. Only the resistant hawks survived, and once the population became resistant, it nearly tripled, to a density unknown in any wild situation. The species received a second winnowing from West Nile disease, which killed as many as 7/8 of the raptors (not just Coops)that got it. The resulting urban populations have doubtless been genetically changed to one with the disease resistant genes. They have also changed their habits-- I'd bet that they don't interbreed with their mountain cousins much. This kind of "voluntary" isolating mechanism is just how Menno Schilthuizen suggested that sympatric speciation, far rarer than allopatric, could take place (in Frogs, Flies, and Dandelions-- he even convinced scary old Ernst Mayr, in his nineties at the time!)

This is all for bio- wonks. Practical point is, there are probably a THOUSAND pairs in the Rio Grande Bosque, nesting in people's backyards and making pests of themselves dive- bombing runners (both my female doctors have been attacked by them in Albuquerque-- luckily even a big western female doesn't weigh more than a male homing pigeon, though their long tails can make them look as big as Goshawks. They are utterly without fear. Even the wilderness ones are bold; I once watched a female in Copper canyon roll a skulking raven twice her size that had been searching for nests three times, like a leopard attacking a bear. These ones are ridiculous; Lib poked the male with a stick and he just SAT there, and as she was doing this, the female cut in and carried off a pigeon! If they were the size of Crowned eagles, we'd all be carrying ten- bore shotguns or howdah pistols. They have also moved uphill (not down I think) to live in Magdalena. Until five years ago or so Coopers lived only in the the mountains, nesting in deciduous trees in the canyon bottoms, and rarely attacked my pigeons (I have been here 36 years). In the last couple of years they have become a problem. This particular young unmated "pair", birds born this spring, learned to hunt on (mostly my) domestic pigeons and the infernal exotic Eurasian Collared doves, which in the last decade have replaced the "natural" southern invasive White wings (up from Texas and Arizona naturally, not coming from the east in an invasive wave). The pair have killed so many of my flying pigeon flock is threatened. As a falconer, I can legally trap raptors, and I see no difficulty in catching them and releasing them in Socorro, where they can eat feral pigeons to their content and not both my highly bred, expensive fliers.

So LIbby was up on a ladder putting water in to the birds in the trap, when the ladder broke and she fell between the halves. (I had been up there the day before and had warned her it was shaky). Luckily our friend Kim, who has been helping us with animals the past couple of weeks, was there, because I was inside working. At the Emergency Room, they found that she had lost two teeth, broken a rib, and needed several stitches on her face. She remains in a good mood with the help of Nurse Ataika, but it turns out we we were lucky to have missed getting our pup last week as it would have been a pretty hairy situation...

"... nature is portrayed poorly whenever harmony is implied." _ Aussie ornithologist Tim Low.

UPDATE on hawks courtesy of Paul Domski: "Brian [Milsap, USFWS biologist] said that if you are standing at a Coop nest, there are 4 others within a 1/2 mile, or something close to that. "

Heinz Meng, 1925 - 2015: RIP

Heinz Meng in the 70s.

Dr Heinz Meng of New Paltz NewYork, a long -time professor of Zoology at the State University there and the man who first bred falcons in captivity in the US (Not in the WORLD as many news reports chauvinistically state; Renz Waller bred several in Germany before the war, and Ronald Stevens and young John Morris actually bred a  Saker- Peregrine hybrid clutch in Ireland in the sixties. But Waller and especially Stevens were gods of falconry, and Stevens had an entire huge estate in Ireland where he often let his  falcons range free, and pioneered training methods and attitudes in his modest little Observations on Modern Falconry that were to change the ways of everybody from Harry McElroy to me.

While Heinz was a modest professesor in a state college who bred Peale's Pergirines in his backyard, making it look so easy that in a very  short time, his friends Tom Cade and Jim Weaver, driven by the DDT crisis and the disappearance of the anatum- race Peregrine from its eastern eyries, cranked up what became the a kind of falconry Manhattan Project in their quonset huts at Cornell. This in turn would lead to the Peregrine Fund being founded by the late Frank Bond, future Republican gubernatorial candidate of New Mexico : Jim Weaver, born in Illinois and now a rancher in eastern New Mexico; Bob Berry, then of Philadelphia's Main Line and now of Wyoming, where he endowed the Berry Center for Biodiversity at U Wy Laramie, run by my friend Carlos Martinez del Rio, and Tom Cade, born dirt poor in there Depression in New Mexico's Bootheel, professor at Cornell and the only poor man among them. For the next (approximately- I would have to look it up) twenty years, hack teams would receive their precious hatch of "Cornell chickens" (a derisory term coined by, I believe, the birding writer Pete Dunne-- write to me, Pete!- and adapted with pride by those of us who worked the hack, including me) and nurse them to maturity, enduring everything from lightning storms to yellowjacket stings to rattlers to tourists to, even, slightly misinformed federal undercover  agents. My partner,  John Tobin, Vietnam vet, grad student, falconer, recently retired Massachusetts Game warden, and I survived all of the above, plus drunken races down the Mount Tom Alpine Slide, in which you would sometimes find trapped copperheads, which could flip into your lap...

All to be told, soon, and in the blog, but not here.What Heinz Meng did was deceptively simple: by his own knowledge and patience, he bred a threatened glamor species, a "charismatic" if not mega- faunal species that had captured the imagination of humans in many cultures for hundreds if not thousands of years. He was a scientist and so recorded his information in reproducible ways.The result was not just one revolution but several (think of the importance, and money, devoted to falcons in Arab cultures, for a hint; think of the blow to the egos of at least some traditional Arabs when they found the larger, braver "male" migrant falcons they were so proud of, that they had never seen nesting on their remote Central and Arctic Asian homes, were FEMALE!)

 Meng's simple brilliant act of husbandry was to give the east back a relatively common Peregrine, if not precisely the one it started with; start entire industries, up to and including  Robo- Falcons; extended to virtually every falconer's bird, including a new one, the Harris's hawk, possibly the most popular hawk in the world today*, and a rediscovered one, the "Alethe", better known as the Aplomado; make modern falconry possible (most European countries, unlike the States, do not allow any wild "take" at all);  employ semi- unemployable types such as me and Helen Macdonald, at least on occasion, and give us stories to tell; and generate a truly amazing amount of myth and counter myth. And it all started in Heinz Meng's garage.

I only met Heinz once. Although most reports of his first successful breeding give the dates as 1971 or 1972, I am for various external reasons sure that the date was 1970, when my friend Mark, a long time falconer who met me that year, and Mike Conca, my oldest friend, who still lives in the hills of western Massachusetts, went to a very off-the-radar "meet" in central New York. Heinz was there with a young and very vocal Peale's falcon (the choice of that difficult sub-species makes his breeding more remarkable). Others present included that old bandit Victor Hardaswick, then a young bandit; then and forever he resembled a rather sinister version of Seinfeld's George. He was to become a celebrated breeder of falcons himself, and then the only breeder of Siberian goshawks in the U.S., but then he was a bandido from Bridgeport, as well as a second generation fighting cock fancier, the son of a great pouter pigeon breeder. His friend Fran Lynch, another bandit, was there, and a biologist who would later have an extremely savage Golden eagle, which nearly caught me, confiscated and sent to Martha's Vineyard, where it would live out its life in the household of Vineyard falconer Gus Ben-David, who is best known for flying Great horned owls (THAT falconer was alleged to have consorted with "escorts" at falconers' conventions, one of whom supposedly answered the phone in a motel with the news that "Bill can't come to the phone right now -- he's tied up.") In addition to the legal birds there, there were the first two "blonde" beach peregrines I'd ever seen up close, who were sitting on blocks on the lawn. Mark said "I'd sure like to have some lawn ornaments like that". Their owners too are long dead, so I'm not worried about repercussions.

Later they were flown successfully at bagged pheasants. They were two weeks out of the trap; that's how tame the Arctic birds are. I coveted them fiercely, and have still never flown one now that they are legal.

Later, Heinz flew his bird, and he would not come down. Victor killed a pigeon and threw it in the air to see if he would return. He didn't. He vanished behind the trees, still calling, and I don't think he ever came back. He might have been taken by a horned owl, an all too common end for birds left out overnight, especially in the days before electronic transmitters. It appalls, and on some level, blackly amuses me, to think that I saw one of the very first clutch of falcons bred in the United States fly away.

Autre temps, autre moeurs. Here's to you, Heinz, for starting a whole new world.

Dr. Meng more recently, with a Peale's

*Leaving ultra- traditonalists like England's Roger Upton to grump that they went very well with pit bulls and tattoos!

Tanuma Photos

I have carried around a 1969 Life magazine (with a photo of Ted Kennedy just post- Chappaqudick on the cover!) because it has a gallery of wonderful images by photographer T Tanuma.Yesterday, hoping to put them in a more secure mode, I photo'd them.These are some of the results.

Indian Vultures

I wrote soberly on the Indian Vulture crisis years ago in the Atlantic.

They continued to decline; nobody gives a damn about serious whiny articles.

Today, my friend Jemima "Mima" Parry Jones, daughter of the grand old falconer Philip Glasier, sent me this YouTube piece of pro- vulture propaganda, and I am envious- it will likely be a lot more effective.

Mima is unusual- I am reminded of the remark, which sounds like one of Osxar Wilde's epigrams, that in friendship , it is best to begin with a little aversion...

We were staying at Jonathan Kingdon's near Oxford when  he decided we MUST se Mima's original  Bird of Prey Center on the west coast of England (on a day trip- I will never get over the scale of England). I was a little dubious - I had heard she did not approve of some things I had written-- but the chance to see all those birds was irresistible.

We  had fun exploring the park- it is where  I first encountered the African Crowned eagle I mentioned below. We also played with an Andean Condor who seemed fascinated with Jonathan's car keys.

But finaly the time came to meet the proprietor. Jonathan ushered me into the office where she sat behind her desk and began "This is Stephen Bodio. He wrote.."

She interrupted him : I KNOW what he fucking wrote. He's the cunt who write 'The English have nothing to teach us but history!' "

She glared at me  for a moment longer, as though to be sure I had heard her properly; then stood to shake my hand with a  dazzling smile. "Glad to meet you! Let's go and see my birds."

I don't think she ever uttered a critical word in my direction again, but I am not sure Jonathan ever got over his shock..

 As for Mima, perhaps the last word should go to Merliner Emeritus, naturalist, poet, and former schoolmaster John Loft. In  his local pub, over good peaty Scotch whisky and steak and kidney pie, on a foggy unseasonably cold  May night, I told him this story. He shook his head and said: "Stephen, if you think SHE has a mouth that could take your hide off, you should have known her father."

Mima, the Duke, and her father many years ago

John Loftt with falcon topiary in his garden; hawking with Tim Galllagher.