Falconry seldom seen yet popular sport in area and across the world

By RYAN LANCASTER

Staff Reporter

Gary Starr stands in a field near Medical Lake, weaving a piece of quail leg into the center of what looks like a leather donut.

He finishes, wipes his glove on a camouflaged pant leg and dangles the lure from a taught kite line, letting it drift up 500 feet into the afternoon sky.

As the kite rises Starr recounts a brief history of his love affair with falconry. It started at age 10 with a television re-run of the 1958 film “The Vikings,” when a young peasant releases a raptor to attack and blind Viking leader Kirk Douglass in one eye. “Of course that's kind of dumb, but when I was a little boy and I saw that Goshawk on Tony Curtis' hand I was totally captivated,” Starr says. “That a hunting bird could be trained. Once that got into me I was finished.”

In his freshman year at college Starr chose Genghis Kahn as the subject for his first research paper, and he still recalls the thrill of discovering that the legendary warrior kept thousands of falconers in his court. “I thought, ‘I bet I know what that is.' I stayed at the library for three days,” he said.

Then, in the fall of 1962, Starr got his first real taste of falconry when a neighbor showed him a Red-tailed hawk he had winged while hunting pheasant. “He wanted to stuff it and I said ‘I'll give you all the pheasant in my freezer for that bird alive,'” Starr says. After a trip to the vet, some study and plenty of practice Starr had trained his first raptor and fallen headlong into a sport nearly as ancient as the birds themselves.

The practice of hunting wild game with a trained raptor originated around 2,500 or 6,000 B.C. in either China or ancient Persia, depending on the archeological account, and it has since carried over to nearly every country on earth. In the U.S., Washington has more active falconers per capita than any other state except California – about 250 at last count. Due to an abundance of wide open spaces the West Plains in particular has a good number of falconers, according to Starr.

“A large falcon will just eat up the sky,” he says. “A well balanced, comfortable, at ease falcon loves to fly.”

He opens the back of his truck and extends a custom-made perch that seats two hooded birds, one a bit larger than the other at just under two feet. This is Cookie, a three-year-old female Gyrfalcon/Barbary Falcon hybrid that Starr lifts from the perch onto his gloved arm. She's killed three ducks and about three dozen pheasants in her time, and after months of inactivity she seems eager to get her strength back for another hunting season.

Starr walks a short distance out into the field, takes off the bird's hood and says a few low words before holding his arm aloft. Cookie cocks her head a few times before taking flight into the wind, using the breeze to help lift her toward the lure.

“The biggest thing is for her to get to the ring without stopping her wing beating,” Starr says as he watches Cookie ascend. “If she does that she's ready for another flight after a rest.” And in less than a minute she's there, grasping the prize firmly while Starr slowly brings the kite down for a second go.

At the moment Starr owns 49 raptors although just three hunt, including Cookie and her brother Gabriel, who waits in the truck for his own practice run. The remaining birds are bred and sold throughout the year to supplement Starr's pastime, which isn't cheap. Most falconers make things like shelters and perches themselves but must purchase vaccines, food and telemetry equipment for finding lost birds.

Then there are the licenses and inspections that come with what's commonly referred to as the most regulated sport in the world. It's a federal offense to possess a native raptor species without the proper permits, which are accessible only after an extensive testing regimen. It takes at least two years to become an apprentice falconer, at least five more to rise into the rarified ranks of master falconer.

Steve Seibert, who lives in Yakima, is the Eastern Washington outreach coordinator with the Washington Falconers' Association, a regional education and advocacy group. When Seibert gets calls from someone interested in falconry he'll introduce them to the legal side before letting them choose whether to move forward.

“There is a lot of red tape, but you're dealing with an animal that is both state and federally protected,” he said. “It's necessary to protect the resource; we can't have just anybody who reads an article go out and trap a bird for experimentation.”

Those who want it have to show dedication, Seibert said, and many do. “People typically don't get interested because they read or hear about falconry, they see it take place,” he said. “It's more of a lifestyle than a sport, and it's varied enough in scope that pretty much any person can find a place in it.”

Of his two sons, Starr said one doesn't care for falconry and the other can't live without it. “The one that can't live without it also has two boys, one of whom would die if his dad went hawking and didn't take him,” he said.

Falconers make up the largest group of people working with birds of prey, but Seibert said others rehabilitate injured raptors with the intent of releasing them back into the wild or, like Starr, breed raptors for profit. Others are contracted to perform bird abatement with trained raptors, which Seibert said have been found to be effective at driving problem birds away from airports and certain high-end agricultural crops.

But for falconers like Seibert and Starr, the thrill is in the hunt – and the division of the spoils. When his Harris Hawk catches a pheasant, for example, Seibert said he'll usually feed the head and neck to the bird in the field and take the rest home for the stew pot – minus the part he wasn't going to eat anyway.

“Some people think this is a glorified form of bird watching, but we get to be a close part of what goes on,” Seibert said. “Every day these animals are out in the wild pursuing and catching prey, and we get to be a part of it.”

For more information on falconry, visit http://www.wafalconers.org.

Ryan Lancaster can be reached at [email protected].