Falconry Displays

Just to remind the reader that I will not be doing anything displays this year 2025 – I am still on medical leave.

As I have said that while receiving treatment I started to write a book on falconry which has now been published. It is called ‘Falconry – aspects of care of the trained falcon and hawk’ and though I have tried to write it in an informal style with a lot of photographs it is largely a technical work. I am hoping it will be a useful resource for falconers. As I have also said in an earlier news blog I am not a writer but I now admire others who are. Writing a book is one thing getting it ‘out there’ is another – authors must suffer a great deal. But I guess if ‘writing’ is your calling then it is worth it – thankfully falconry was my calling and I think the results for this activity for me are rather more tangible  than writing.

We are having a cold snap at the moment and ‘Jarvis’ the lanneret that I trained for the book is back in the loft for a few days. He is now a second year bird and still vulnerable to wing tip oedema from the cold. From the end of year 2 thankfully the risk of this condition is greatly reduced. Anyway in the loft he is comfortable and well protected and does not need any artificial heating. I have spoken about this before and the weathering loft is a central theme to my book.

Another section in my book is the section called ‘Use of telemetry and lost birds’. I remember when I was a schoolboy in the 1970s that a lost a Sparrowhawk between Christmas and New year.  Of course it was human error. I flew the bird in too high a condition in poor weather. It was windy, cold and there was snow on the ground. The hawk inevitably went off self hunting. I searched high and low but there was no sign of the hawk and after a couple of weeks of searching I gave the bird up as lost.

Sometime later I got a call from the Falconry Centre saying a bird of prey with a bell on had been spotted on Leckhampton Hill (Cheltenham) – a few miles away – and it had been calling. It sounded like it could be my bird – but after a thorough search I could not find any trace of the bird.

At Easter I had a further call from the Falconry Centre saying that a hawk had been seen over at Cheltenham Race Course and would go over an investigate. The Race Course is just a bit further along the Cotswold escarpment than Leckhampton Hill. By this time my Sparrowhawk was something of a memory and coincidentally Phillip Glasier was going loan me his changeable hawk eagle ‘Brimstone’ to fly at home. I had been busy enlarging my weathering to accommodate him.

As it turned out the bird at the race course was my lost Sparrowhawk. It was living and hunting in a typically lightly wooded scrubby area adjacent to the main race course.  Amazingly I managed to call the hawk or ‘Meg’ down to the lure on a creance – but she was too nervous to allow me to approach beyond a certain point. The next time I found her  she was on a starling and was feeding on the ground. Again I could get close but not close enough to attempt to pick her up and she eventually took off with it.

Thereafter I followed her around for a couple of days. One afternoon she disappeared on a thermal – I thought that was it she was gone – only to be back in the scrubby area again the following day. To cut a long story short just before dusk she flew off to roost and if by miracle I found her roosting low in a tree.

The people who lived in the area that had been keeping me informed of sightings lent me a ladder and boot polish to blacken my face and I climbed up. I got hold of a hanging jess and lifted her off the branch. The strangest thing was that it was still dusk – not quite dark – and when I looked at her on the branch she was glass eyed staring into space – completely switched off. It reminded me of J A Baker in his book ‘The Peregrine’ on the final page when he pursued the peregrine down to the coast – before it migrated north – to find it roosting low on a thicket bush.  The bird had that other worldly gaze like my Sparrowhawk. He said he knew the bird would not move now and climbed over a wall and stood before it.

Anyway I was pleased to have my hawk back and the changeable hawk eagle ‘Brimstone’ stayed at the Falconry Centre. But the risk of losing a hawk is part and parcel of falconry. There is always something miraculous about getting a bird back even with the help of modern telemetry.

I will sign off with a picture of Duke. A great falcon – even he had a week out after disappearing into the distance chasing a woodpigeon. An occupational hazard when flying falcons!