Different people have different ideas of what dog makes the perfect hunter’s companion. For some it’s the hyper-active Springer, a dog that just doesn’t let up and leaves no bush unturned. For others it’s the new world Labrador, a true gunner’s dog and a specialist retriever and if given a chance can be a good all-round hunter too. Many breeds that have been excellent hunters, finders and retrievers of game have sadly disappeared or become so rare in the field that they no more get a mention in working dog tales; Poodles come to mind, once thought to be the smartest of all working breeds, and the King Charles Spaniel, a small French breed, probably (and this is only my opinion) used in French falconry as the sparrow-hawkers companion. The reason I believe this is not only was this breed, (like so many so called gundogs) in existence long before the invention of the shotgun, but why else have such a small falconry spaniel in the field unless it was for use with sparrow-hawks or maybe with Hobbies or Merlins. Sussex and Clumber spaniels too have slipped by the way-side in the popularity steaks of the hunters four legged pal. Both these spaniel breeds were bred, I believe, to be purposely slow and ponderous for the simple reason that a man can keep up with them in the field, not just any man, but a man with a goshawk on his fist. If you have ever seen a team of Goshawk and fast spaniel work together you will understand the problems involved in keeping up when the brakes just don’t work!

Anyway, other folk prefer the Pointer or Setter, or English Pointer or Setters as they are know both in Ireland and in the UK, but these dogs are originally of French and Spanish origin and should still be in what has come to be known as the Hunt, Point and Retrieve group of dogs. But these two have been bred as total specialists as breeders have concentrated on only the Point aspect of their skills which is a shame. The Europeans though have what is (in my opinion again) the right idea. Most dogs in this group are what it says on the tin; Hunters, Pointers and Retrievers; from German Shorthaired Pointers to Munsterlanders, beautiful Hungarian Vizlas to ghost-like Weimeraners, the bulky Italian Spinones to the strong and elegant pointing Griffons.

Yes, I purposely left the little guy ‘til last; the small hardworking French Brittany Spaniel, or Brittany as it is called now. (the Spaniel was dropped as it is such a good pointer.)

When I was growing up I had my heart set on two things; a good dog and a good hawk. The hawk, as far as I can remember was going to be the old traditional Goshawk, filler of pots and slayer of all things edible. The dog though was either a Hungarian Vizla or a Brittany. Now as I write this, and after flying different Goshawks and owning a Brittany for twelve good years, I reckon it will be the Brittany all the way for me. Never in my life of owning different types of dogs have I had or seen such an easy-going and hard-working dog to spend time with. As a pointer (and I am no expert) I have had my dog on point for three quarters of an hour on pheasant, while my buddy searched and retrieved his Goshawk and returned for a second flight. After flying different hawks and falcons over the year’s at all different types of quarry, I can honestly put my hand on what’s left of my heart and say that there were many, many days that would have been a total blank if it were not for my old Brittany, he found game in the unlikeliest of places and at the least likeliest of times. He made the good days good and if there were really bad days (thankfully these don’t stick in the memory like the good ones) he was never to blame.

Brittanies are small for a pointing breed and will not cover the heather moors like an elegant Pointer or Setter, but for a dog to throw in the car when you are out with a Harris hawk one day, a Spar the next and a companion for that week away with the falcons, a dog that absolutely suits the Irish falconer or rough-shooter, a dog to lie in the garden and keep out of the way until he is needed, my money is on the Brittany.

As I said earlier, every man has his own choice of canine hunting companion and that’s the way it should be. It leads to a life of variety which is always a good thing. Once the sun shines occasionally and we can head for the fields with a dog at our heels life will never be too bad.

Tom

Ps. above photos are my six week old litter, all little characters and all trouble!

Alice - sparrowhawk

As I am writing this I am also looking out the window at Alice in her aviary, sitting as usual next to her mate in an open fronted pen, surveying as only a queen can, over what she knows to be her territory. She is nine years old this year, and looks out over the scratching chickens and watches the children and dogs play with disinterest. Further along the row of aviaries are other hawks and falcons I have hunted with over the same distant hills and fields, but none of them can claim to own the view as she can.

Alice was taken under licence as a white downy, probably seven or eight days old, from a small mixed conifer wood not far from where I live. In my wisdom her imprinting and training programme was planned out in advance and left no room for failure or mistake. So, after making a complete botch job in trying to imprint my first hawk I was left with a noisy, screaming, and vicious she-devil.

‘Well done Tom, you messed up yet again!’

Her initial training was smooth enough despite her incessant calling to me to produce more food for her. So, I had on my hands a noisy but obedient hawk that came when I called, but after my first few fruitless excursions to the fields I knew I was doing something else wrong. I was a bit nervous to drop her weight any, as she was obedient enough and definitely evil enough towards me. After a couple more days of noisy, fruitless, perfect obedience, I decided something had to be done, if only to prove to myself that she was not some vegetarian double agent that had somehow managed to infiltrate my hunting lifestyle. So I dropped her weight very slightly. I know now how Dr. Frankenstein felt when that bolt of lightning brought life to his corpse; I had just created a monster!
From then on we never looked back, I got a better understanding of weight control and condition, and she literally never looked back towards me but focused on what the dog and I could flush for her to catch. That first summer she thought me just how quickly a sparrowhawk can react. As we walked through fields trying to find small quarry to fly at, butterflies would make my already thumping heart skip yet another beat in anticipation of a flight. On my upheld fist Alice wouldn’t have even flinched a muscle, if she could have thrown her eyes to heaven, believe me she would have. But if a bird got up she was gone. Before I could even make out whether it was a bird or yet another butterfly the dog had disturbed, the chase was already on, so I quickly learned not to hold her jesses and leave the decision making up to the one with the brains in our little outfit.
Our team of three set out to the fields most days. Alice, the beautiful and capable killer, my Brittany, loving every second of finding, pointing and finally flushing stuff for her, and last, and by all means least, me. If I had any grand illusions about being in control, these two quickly burst my bubble, I soon realised I was only the transport and acting high-perch while the important ones got on with the job in hand.
It soon became apparent that pheasants exited her more than nearly any other quarry and in the early days we spent a lot of time in pursuit of them. Speed was not lacking on her part but pheasants are usually far too large for such a small bird to take down on the initial flush. But with the dog only too happy to find the bird again if he could, usually somewhere not too far from where Alice was taking stand, the second or third flush if we could get one usually saw results. Alice has caught quite a few pheasants in her day and the feeling of returning home with a big plump pheasant caught after a long hunt with a 9oz. spar will stay with me forever.

In Alice’s first year I flew her without telemetry and somehow managed not to permanently lose her, but after too many scares and being lucky enough to get her back each time, I vowed never again to take the chance. Many is the time I needed it, sometimes things just happened so fast I wouldn’t have a clue which way she went, and sometimes because she had killed and frozen on her kill as spars do, and there also was a very serious chance of stepping on her in heavy cover. The first day she wore a transmitter on her leg was at a field meet and I remember having concerns that it would get in her way. I needn’t have worried because as usual she didn’t let me down; in front of a crowd of onlookers she caught a swallow on the wing after a memorable chase around a large barn, hopped up to the fist for food and obviously accidentally on her part, released the swallow unharmed, perfect!

Just as a wild sparrowhawk would, Alice has caught quite a range of prey over the years, from her natural quarry of small birds like sparrows to woodpigeons and feral pigeons. At one time I regularly used her to clear feral pigeons from sheep-sheds and barns where they were causing a nuisance. She has caught a few black-headed gulls and in another memorable slip she chose to take a herring gull from a mixed flock of feeding gulls and crows. When I got there it was fair to say they had an equal grip on each other and neither of them were going anywhere in a hurry. I think she only chose this bird, which was easily six times her size, because it was slower in escaping than the others, but it does go to show what spars are made of.

When she was just a couple of months old she entered herself on rooks, after losing her for a while and finding her feeding up on a rook she had caught. So it seems she was a rook hawk, in every sense, and I took to driving around the country roads to maximise my chances of successful slips. The majority of crows were taken before they got a chance to get too far, but now and again the crows would be up and away. Anyone that came out to see my little she-devil, flying in underneath a rook, to take her precious head hold and pull it out of the sky had to agree it was spectacular. Over the years she has taken many, many crows, not just rooks but hooded crow, a carrion crow, jackdaws, and without a doubt her favourite of them all, magpies. It was actually a magpie that cut a tendon on one of her outer toes causing her from then on to keep it permanently folded up. This caused an infection, which took me some time to clear up, but luckily it never noticeably hampered her catching ability. Catching rooks twice her weight on a daily basis took its toll on her plumage, especially her tail and the only supply I had readily to hand to imp with, that was near the right size were rooks tails, as you can imagine there was an endless supply. Wearing a black tail made her one strange raggedy-looking hawk and on more than one occasion people asked was she in disguise to infiltrate enemy lines! But as each season passed thankfully she broke less and less tail feathers.

I fully believe why Alice was in the mind-frame to continually catch large quarry is because from her point of view, and being a full imprint, she was acting as part of a team. She knew that help was never too far behind; that if she just held on for a few moments until I arrived she would have her just reward. Sometimes I would leave her on her kill and would lift her into the car and let her feed up back in her aviary as a special treat.
Most of her flights were after corvids and I usually limited such large quarry to one kill a day, but now and again when I knew she was on form we would take a chance and push things a bit, one particular day stays in my memory. We had just left the house when Alice slipped out the car window and caught a hen pheasant, this was one of the local pheasants so I quickly took it off her unharmed and put in the hawk box to release again later. It was one of those days when everything just seems to go well and she caught a magpie and two rooks in quick succession without too much hardship involved. After such success we were soon homeward bound and that was when a full-grown cock pheasant showed up on the scene. The pheasant was on the road looking for a gap in the hedge to nip through when she hit him, but with such a size difference she couldn’t hold him down and was quickly shook off. The pheasant changed his tactics and tried for a vertical take off to escape, but in a split second she was after him, and as he tried to climb over the high hedge she bound to him again and pulled him back down to the ground. A major struggle took place in the middle of the road and I got there as fast as I could to help her. I sat there with her as she fed up and beamed with pride at my little she-devil. This cock pheasant later weighed in at 2lb, 7oz, so including the hen pheasant, the two rooks and the magpie, she had caught approximately thirteen times her own weight, all in less than an hour!

It sometimes happened that I would run in to assist, only to see she had the situation so much under control that she would drag the struggling rook by the head with one foot, (she only ever caught rooks with a head-hold or not at all) while trying to draw blood from me with the other. She does love me really.
Once she gave a raven a slap, mistaking it for a rook in the long grass, I don’t know who got the bigger fright, the raven or myself, but she knows more about crows than I do and was wise enough not to get stuck in and came straight back. Another day she ended up battling it out and had to be forcefully removed from a full-grown Rhode Island Red that was minding her own business, I don’t think that chicken laid an egg or even came out of the coop for a week, even then only after checking that the skies were clear of avian attackers.

Most falconers have come to falconry through an interest in wildlife, a fascination with seeing flights that the average bird-watcher could go forever without seeing. Alice gave me some of those insights. Slipped after a starling, thinking she might have a good chance catching it in a straight flight, only to see her dip low under a gate, angle herself at full speed through sheep-wire and take a parallel route, having mentally calculated her distance, and flipping back over the ditch exactly were the unsuspecting starling is still feeding. Seeing this type of flight unfold close at hand really is the ultimate in bird watching.

Alice spends her summers moulting out in her aviary and in her third year she started acting peculiar, for some reason around that time we owned a cat, so maybe I can be accused of the same fault. Anyway, this cat, which just happened to be christened Dopey for reasons of his own, spent a lot of time that summer sunning himself and lazily poking his foot into Alice’s pen, and to my amazement she responded likewise, playfully trying to foot him. I left the two of them at it, as there was no harm being done, until I noticed that her tail coverts were huge and she was showing strange behaviour towards this stupid cat, and it finally came to me that she was coming into breeding condition. I quickly built her a shelf and brought in soft conifer sticks and twigs, which she helped me form into something resembling a nest. That year and every following summer she laid eggs and stood happily for artificial insemination if only I had the natural (or unnatural, depending on the reader’s view) substance to inseminate her with. Without delving too deeply into my inadequacies and to cut a long story short, for years we had no success, and all we were left with were the basic ingredients of an omelette. One year she tried her best to rear a sick Harris Hawk chick, which through no fault of Alice’s refused to survive, but it pushed me to provide her with a more stable and permanent relationship, (I know folks, reading “Mills and Boon” has a lot to answer for!).
Last year she produced fertile eggs for the first time, now that she is living with a male of her own species. Not having seen any signs of copulation and through every fault of my own, mostly through just not being prepared, I only managed to hatch one of the two fertile eggs, and rear one chick to four days old before it died. This year however might prove more successful, and who knows, maybe one of these days I will venture forth to the field with an offspring of Alice’s and start a story all over again.

Irish falconers are lucky. We might not have the proper open plains to fly gyrfalcons and eagles, not too many perfect places to fly our own peregrines at crows or game. Rabbits, hares and game birds might be too scarce in too many regions to make hawking with larger birds worthwhile. But the one thing we do have is one of the best and most versatile hawks in the world. A sparrowhawk can be flown successfully in every part of every county of Ireland, every ditch and hedge holds its natural food and what better way to fly a hawk than in its own environment which is, let’s face it, every nook and cranny of the country.

Older and wiser men than me say that each man is allotted one good woman and one good dog in his lifetime, I have had my dog, and my wife tells me not to think too much about the other. But as I look across to her aviary and see Alice contently surveying all that moves within her territory, I wonder if the same applies to hawks. If it does I can honestly say I will be doing well to ever have another hawk that could bring to me as much pleasure, knowledge and good flights as Alice has.

Tommy Byrne 2005

Sparrowhawk

The black cloud is darker today. It’s August and the sun is shining but I can feel the weight of a cloud hanging over me as I take her up in my hands. I know she is gone as I hold her weakened body, her feathers perfect and her eyes once so bright and menacing are fading fast as she looks at me.
I have kept birds all my life, birds of all kinds, from Appenzellars to Zebra finches, but exactly ten years and ten weeks ago I climbed a spruce tree to select a young sparrowhawk, a couple of ounces of fluff and talons that was to give me more pleasure, pain, fun and adventure than all the other birds put together, and here she was dying in my hands. I gave her a broad base anti-biotic knowing it was already too late, as some part of her body was giving up and it could reasonably be put down to old age. I placed her back on her nest ledge already knowing the outcome. I looked in a little while later and she was dead, the musket sitting beside her, doing his high speed laps around the aviary as I went in and lifted her body again.

I really felt miserable, and if someone had walked into my yard today and offered to take the other birds away, the aviaries and freezers, my old weighing scales and my scruffy hawking bag, I think I would gladly have walked away from the lot. Alice was over a decade old it was obvious this day was drawing near, and I know I let it affect me where I should have been stronger. But the thing is, I really liked the old she-devil, and this is probably where I get laughed at, I know for a fact she liked me. Each day she would come down to me, taking her food from my fingers before flying back up to her nest ledge to consume her meal. Often times she would call from her ledge and fly to the front bars for me to caress her plumage.

Owning and working animals in the field can teach you so much. I grew up with terriers, lurchers and ferrets, I spent more time in a ditch than a disco. I have sat up trees late into the night waiting for badgers to emerge from their setts, crawled out of bed at four in the morning to watch fox cubs play until the vixen returns with food. I’ve watched stoats hunting and pygmy shrews fight over disputed territories. I witnessed a wild merlin ring up after a winter lark, each trying to outlast the other as the victor, one for its meal and one for its life. But the very best insights into the world around us were, for me, those days in the field with Alice. To see her hunting techniques in action, not just the Sparrowhawks amazing speed and agility of the straight forward snatch and grab flights, but the indirect pre-planned (this pre-planning took all of a second) flights that took her away from the quarry to make the most of the wind or some hedgerow or building or just about anything that could give her an advantage before the lightning fast and fearless strike.

One flight that sticks in my memory was many years ago when out on the hill behind my house. The dog had flushed and re-flushed a pheasant but Alice had only acquired feathers in the strikes as it was an old strong bird and after the second put-in there was no sign of it as the dog searched the area under where Alice had taken stand in a large beech tree. As I was extricating myself from the undergrowth I heard a blackbird cluck to my left and simultaneously the gentle sound of a hawk bell high up the tree to my right. I looked up to see Alice in a direct glide down to where see had spied the blackbird. This path took her right past my face and just before her wingtip brushed my skin I stared into her eyes, literally stared into her eyes as she came past, visually locked onto her prey. In those seconds she was totally oblivious to me and the rest of the world around her, seeing nothing but her prey and not wavering her stare even as her yellow eyes passed mine with only inches between. It was not until she had chased, snatched and missed her intended prey that I remembered to breathe again.

My hawking dog is old and deaf now; I have to stamp my boot on the ground to get his attention. His time will come too and I know I will miss him about the place just as sure as I know I will start all over again someday with another dog. Only this week I was offered a pup by a well-bred bitch that I like the look of. She belongs to a friend that I would never have even met if it were not for Alice. The smallest thing can change the direction of a life and I can only wonder where it might have led had that nest been empty all those years ago.

I dug a whole between two recently planted apple trees, their first fruit turning red as I break through the dry earth. Her plumage is perfect after her moult, a far cry from her early hunting seasons, catching crows, pheasants and magpies and smashing up her tail in the process. I jokingly referred to her as the Raggety-Hawk in those days as I endlessly imped and re-imped rook feathers to repair her tail. I also remember the first time she encountered sheep-fencing. It was stretched tight across the field ready and waiting to slice her up into a four inch square. I put my hands to my face to block out her obvious doom, but as I looked through my fingers I saw her fold back her wings and slip through to catch her prey, I needn’t have worried even if I had time to. My heart forever after skipped a beat when she performed this neat little trick.

She really was a tough old girl. I unfolded her feet as I laid her down in the earth. These tiny feet had held fast to a herring gulls neck as the gull’s beak had encircled her body. I have seen her turn upside down in full flight trying to snatch at lapwings. I have seen her quickly grasp a swallow in mid-air. She regularly took crows down to earth, crows over twice her weight that took to the skies and thought they were safely away from the little menace.
I unfolded and extended each talon until I came to her damaged right outside toe. I often likened flying a Spar to sea fishing. Fresh water fly-fishing is like flying a falcon at a single prey, selecting your fly to match the seasons insect hatch, intending your lure for only your pre-selected trout or salmon and no other, specialised stuff indeed. When I was younger I spent hours throwing a baited line into the sea not knowing what was to come out, and this is what Sparrow-hawking is to me, you throw in your line, you cast off your Sparrow-hawk and after that you really don’t know what’s going to happen, all hell can break loose and you can forget your specialised pre-planned hunting intentions. I once came home after a day’s crow hawking with three pheasants that needed treatment for shock and a good feed! But Alice did specialise and if she knew more about one prey than any other it was crows, hundreds upon hundreds of rooks fell to her grasp, on the ground or from the air, if she was on form she was nothing short of lethal. Local farmers used to ask me to swing by if it was not too much trouble. She has caught hooded and carrion crows and I have seen her give a raven a slap before wisely turning away. But it was a magpie that cut her tendon. It was my fault and mine alone, as I removed her from yet another magpie to carry on the hunt for more exciting prey. When a Spar hits its victim the adrenalin rush must be enormous as the only thing that exists is the flight, the capture and the killing of that prey, and only as she plucks her quarry can you see the adrenalin subside and some kind of calm return. This day I rushed things and slid her clenched talons off the magpie’s head and along its open beak, and in the process a tendon was severed. It took me three courses of different anti-biotics to kill that infection and left her with a useless toe, but as far as I could make out it never affected her catching ability.

There is a very narrow lane near where I live, with a gate to a grassy field that usually holds a flock of sheep and where I got many a flight over the years. On one particular day I came to this gate and off she went after a magpie, (a quarry she found irresistible). She closed the gap quickly as the magpie sought refuge under the only cover available: a sheep. Now I don’t know about you but some flights I can see and remember every detail in slow motion, and this is one of them. The magpie closed the distance between itself and the sheep but knew it was losing ground. Alice was locked on like a heat-seeking missile and the magpie knew he was in trouble. He let out a final squawk as he looked over his shoulder at his approaching doom. If he hadn’t taken that look and concentrated on where he was going, he might have succeeded in diving under the sheep as he intended Instead, he hit the sheep right in the arse as Alice hit him. It was the combined force of the two birds striking the sheep in such a tender area and the obvious fright causing it to leave the ground all four feet at the same time that made me laugh that day, and causes me to grin every time I pass that particular gate.

Another day, out in the car I passed her to a friend and told him to fly her. We set up a flight at a flock of mixed crows and he rolled the car window down as we approached. His face took on an unusual expression and I asked him was he ok.
“My heart is beating out of my chest” was his reply.
I knew exactly what he meant as I had experienced it so many times. Nine ounces of calm brown feathers sitting relaxed but alert on your fist, and in a split second of her choosing, she turns into nine ounces of muscle, spit and venom, with a mission that lasts only seconds, knowing absolutely anything could happen as soon as she leaves that glove.

I know from the many days out hunting with her, getting her weight and condition just right, that even after all my planning we could still have a blank day or something unforeseeable could go wrong. She was a full imprint it was not uncommon for her to blame me when things didn’t go exactly to plan. Either way it was always exciting, I used to always say that it was these bad days that made the good days so good. But today as I laid her down for the last time and covered her little body with soil I wonder was it the good days that makes these bad days so unbearable.

Why do we do it to ourselves? Should we be hard as stone and just use creatures as tools for our enjoyment? The trouble is I could never do that, if I could I know the bad days would be easier but the good ones would not give me such a high. Seeing a bird I reared and trained, learning to fly, learning to use the air and wind, learning to strike and learning and improving with each miss, this is what does it for me, as I feel I am part of all this. I get pleasure in watching a falcon rouse in the sky. I get pleasure in seeing a hawk that last week could not stand to be near me now bobbing its head in anticipation of my company. Am I a foolish soft Git? Am I being overly sensitive or sentimental about a bird? Most likely I am. But some things touch some folk more than others and after a decade I find it hard not to be affected.

Alice was just a normal Sparrowhawk. They are all beautiful and fearless with an endless capacity to amaze, ounce for ounce, there is no other falconry bird to rival them for bravery and excitement.
I filled back in the earth and rolled back the grass sod, it was as if nothing had been touched.

T Byrne 2006