My old Brittany died yesterday. He was over thirteen years old and had gone totally blind and deaf. Now he is gone to the great hunting ground in the sky to hunt all the rabbits and pheasants he wants – which doesn’t really make sense, because more…

 I lost my good female Harris Hawk “Martha” the other evening. It was five o’clock and the rabbits were just starting to pop their little heads out into the evening sunshine to feed. Just like I had done a hundred times before, I unloaded herself from the jeep, quietly closed over the door and snuck over the brow of a certain little hill to let her see the rabbits feeding below. The hill dropped steeply down to a laneway and there was a thick old hawthorn hedge bordering the grassy field where rabbits were plentiful. As soon as we peered over the hill a half-grown bunny high-tailed in across the lane toward cover and off she went in pursuit.

It was a typical downward glide flight. A couple of strong flaps to get herself in motion, then she set her wings and glided steadily on a direct course for her target. Not the most exciting of flights but it can be very effective, as from the rabbit’s point of view there is very little moving to catch its eye, and then it’s nearly too late as the hawk is upon it and the rabbit must act extremely fast if it wants to survive, and this is exactly what happened in this case. The rabbit ran, she tried her best, but she missed and I saw her standing on the ditch by the lane under a large sycamore tree.

And this is where things went wrong. more…

There are two types of falconers in this world; those that love Harris Hawks, and those that don’t.

If everyone loved the same things, if everyone agreed on everything and thought the same the world would be a less colourful and interesting place, so this surely can only be a good thing.

Since the first Harris Hawks were introduced into the falconry circle just a few decades ago more…

The other day I was out with my two year old female Harris Hawk. While waiting for the rain to stop I sat in the jeep listening to the radio before the usual ceremony of putting on my wellies and jacket. The landscape was quite undulating with a steep drop off to the left, and as Joe Duffy’s phone lines opened and the callers complained about whatever was on the agenda that day, I noticed a raven and a hooded-crow more…

“Lamping!”
“You don’t do that, do you?’’

I once sat at a table with some well known British falconers, purists from ‘Ye Olde Scool of Fauconrie’- you know the type, when I happened to mention that my female Redtail was catching rabbits both day and night. I couldn’t believe the reaction it got, ‘It’s unnatural’, ‘hawks shouldn’t fly at night’, ‘that’s not cricket’. Luckily for me nobody was armed, the fact we had just finished a conversation about another traditional past time; adultery, didn’t seem to bother them at all. more…

‘Hello, my name is …………, I want to get into falconry and I was half thinking of getting a …….

(in this space put anything from a bat falcon to a lammergeyer), but, the only birds available seem to be redtails and harris’s. Are these good beginners birds?’ more…