Four Falconry Fundamentals

I am not a falconer, but I've always appreciated Matt Mullenix's writing, and this slim volume is the distilled essence of quite a lot of experience and knowledge in the field of falconry.

Matt's not the guy to give you grand stories that involve impossible birds launched off Mongolian hillsides in a snow storm.  If you want a romantic travelogue there are other places for that.

Matt is detailing the framework within which successful falconry operates, and he centers it on four fundamentals: Prey Base, Husbandry, Recall, and Slip Management.

The Prey Base chapter is illuminating, if for no other reason that Matt always keeps it real.  

Through hunting we discover that wilderness exists not just on distant, windswept plains but well within the spheres of human habitation: We find that starlings are as wild in their way as sage grouse, and as worthy of pursuit.

  

Yes!

Matt lives in the real world, not a Renaissance Fair phantasy. Matt's Louisiana hawking is more likely to involve squirrels and swamp rabbits, cotton rats and Sora rails than mallards and pheasants.  No apologies given and absolutely none needed.

Rule One, Matt explains, is to learn the prey base you actually have in your area, and select a hawk or falcon appropriate for that type of work.  And yes, the prey type and abundance is (mostly) more important than the hawk.    

Rule Two is that you're going to need more game and more land than you can imagine.  

Matt details the prey numbers needed for successful hawking, but the same pressures and problems plague us in the world of working terriers.  How many fox are there on any farm?  How many raccoons?  How many groundhogs?  

The world may seem infinite when you start off, but I can tell you that after 20 years of digging on the dogs, I have bled more than a few farms white.  I repair the dens that I dig, and sometimes I find old pipes are reoccupied, but not too often.  After you've taken 200 groundhogs, two fox, and five raccoons off a farm, you may find the pickings there slim to nonexistent even three or four years later. A word to the wise is sufficient.

Matt is my kind of guy for a host of reasons, not the least of which is his contempt for artifice and macho posturing. Bagged game is never to be counted as quarry.  Hunt wild or don't hunt at all.  

As for using hawks or falcons to hunt big game, forget it. Your job is to work within the natural boundaries of the bird, not to encourage it to tackle quarry above its pay grade which could damage feathers or rip talons.

Predators are pragmatists.  Their potential for exceptional feats accepted, hawks are neither pugilistic nor especially ambitious by nature.  Like other predators, they typically avoid doing battle with their prey or chasing very difficult quarries, day after day.

And, of course, what is true for the hawk is as true for the fox, possum, or raccoon.  

You know what fox live off of?  Not sheep -- mice!  If you are a predator, you hunt down the food chain because a ripped toe or a cracked beak or tooth may be fatal in the absence of veterinarians and bagged food falling out of the sky.

There are a few other parallels between hawking and terrier work.  

We are, after all, three species in the field -- two species cooperating to bag a third.  

With every slip can come disaster. 

We both rely, to some small degree, on radio telemetry to reduce risk.  

There is, of course, another aspect; we are both practicing medieval arts in a way largely unchanged for 400 years.

Modern materials and mechanical innovations have improved at the level of fine detail, but hawks are still jessed and perched and placed in mews in ways Genghis Khan would recognize.

Bingo.

I enjoy any book that gives me a new way of looking at things, and this book certainly does that.  

Without giving away too much, the chapter on slip management made me look at old fields in a new way.  Are there enough birds here?  Is cover too close?  If a rabbit was bushed out of that overgrown ditch, would it reach thick cover before a hawk could nail it?  What could be done to improve a hawk's odds?  It's a new way of thinking that, Matt argues, is the essence of successful hawking.   

Bottom line: Four Falconry Fundamentals is not going to give you the granular details of falconry.  For that, you are going to need to apprentice with a master falconer and get licensed -- a process not an event.  That said, I find that often in the presenting of the details and the equipment of a thing, the core structure of the craft is lost. This is the book that will help rotate young and old falconer alike back to that important center.  

What is truly important?  

It turns out, it's less about the breed of bird you fly or what you fly it against, as it is the sum of the prey base -- and that you get out there in the field again and again with a sharp bird and old boots.  

The same thing can be said for terrier work:  black, white, red, or grizzle, the color and breeding of the dog hardly matters, nor does the quarry you are after.  

For hawk and dog alike the only question is: "Does it catch anything?"  

Order Four Falconry Fundamentals here.