In duck hawking, one for two isn’t bad, but for Larry Barnes, a falconer from Wiscasset, his hunt on Jan. 8 was a rough one.
He huddled over the tailgate of his pick-up truck, preparing his bags and readying his birds before the hunt, and said, “Today we might see the best of falconry and the worst of falconry.”
Unfortunately, his seasoned instincts were on the money that morning.
Barnes uses trained falcons to hunts ducks in the salt marshes near Popham Beach in Phippsburg. He’s been practicing falconry for more than 10 years, but even for a seasoned falconer, there are a lot of things that can go wrong.
He has two birds, a peregrine falcon and a gyrfalcon. Barnes never names his birds.
“You can’t be anthropomorphic about this,” he said. “They’re not people and they’re not pets. They’re hunting tools.”
“That’s what really gets the heart pumping,” Barnes said. “The stoop: a falcon coming down from the heavens and just smoking a duck.”
Barnes’s peregrine is only a year old, and he’s still training it to fly higher and cover more ground. When he released it, the bird circled up a few hundred feet and soared in wide circles out over Atkins Bay.
When Barnes set out into the marsh, he had spotted a few ducks in an irrigation ditch with a lot ground between them and the bay.
Typically, a falcon is released, and it takes position over the falconer’s head. It circles and follows the falconer until he flushes a duck, and then the falcon dives and takes it. The falconer then has a few seconds to get to the downed bird and switch the duck for another bird as a reward for the falcon.
The plan that day was to circle out around the ducks and flush them back away from the bay, giving the peregrine more time to choose a target and dive before the ducks reached open water.
The ducks spooked before Barnes could get around them, but the peregrine was in position and took a good-sized black duck hen.
Barnes ran to the bird and swapped the duck for a quail he had in his bag. After the peregrine had eaten and the duck was stored safely away, he put the hood back on the peregrine and put it back on the roost he built in the back of his truck.
When the birds are in the back of the truck, they wear hoods – small leather cups that cover their eyes and secure under their beaks with leather drawstrings. The hoods keep the birds calm during transportation.
Barnes has worked hard for that luck; it’s not easy to become a falconer.
“We really not interested in promoting falconry,” Barnes said. “It’s a limited resource because we’re using protected birds.”
According to Barnes, falconry is the most heavily regulated form of hunting in the country. A falconer needs both state and federal permits to own their birds. There’s a two-year apprenticeship program that every potential falconer has to go through to become a licensed hunter.
Maine laws are even tougher. An apprentice has to capture their own red-tailed hawk, train it and take 10 head of game with it before he gets his general status. There are only 16 practicing falconers in Maine, Barnes said.
“We don’t make it easy to get into because we’re trying to keep a high level of falconry in this state,” Barnes said.
Biologists inspect every falconer’s facilities to make sure the birds are being well cared for. After that, it takes hundreds of hours with each bird and about 10 hours of scouting for each hour of hunting.
“People who are successful build their lives around falconry,” Barnes said. “It’s not a hobby, it’s a lifestyle. Anything short of that isn’t fair to the birds.”
Most people don’t have time for the daily upkeep on these birds. On top of the hours of training, scouting and hunting, Barnes weighs his birds every morning and records the air temperature and barometric pressure. When a storm is coming, the birds’ metabolisms speed up and they feed more.
All of these measurements are to ensure that he can keep the birds at their ideal hunting weight. Like prizefighters in training, the birds have a weight range in which they are at their best.
Barnes keeps the birds in top physical condition, but has to make sure that they’re always a little hungry or they won’t be as aggressive in the field. During hunting season, a successful bird can’t be used two days in a row, because the bird they’re given as a reward is enough to keep them content for a day or two.
“This is my problem child,” Barnes said. “Every bird is an individual, and he’s just been difficult.”
The gyrfalcon is an arctic bird that’s popular for falconry. They’re used to hunt everything from ducks in salt marshes the way Barnes uses them, to small species of antelope in the deserts in the Middle East.
In the Middle East, a falcon is a status symbol, and a pure white or black gyrfalcon sells for up to $15,000, Barnes said.
In the U.S., falcons sell for between $1000 and $5000, in part because sales to the Middle East subsidize the breeders and allow them to sell cheaper to local falconers.
Barnes has a silver gyrfalcon – a mix of black and white. He bought it last year after an eagle killed his red-tailed hawk on Morse Mountain.
He’s lost several birds over the years. One died when it hit a duck too hard while hunting and broke its neck.
“That bird died in my hands,” Barnes said.
Others have been killed by eagles and wild hawks. His red-tailed hawk flew away during a hunt and crossed a tidal river near Morse Mountain. By the time Barnes could get to where it was, an eagle had killed it.
All his birds are equipped with tracking chips attached to the feathers on their backs. Barnes has a radar gun he uses to find them when they stray too far away.
When he set out with the gyrfalcon, Barnes had seen a few ducks in a ditch on the near side of a small island. When he got into position to release the falcon, two ducks from a bay behind him flew overhead.
He took the hood off the gyrfalcon and released it, hoping to make a quick kill on one of the ducks.
The falcon circled up, but didn’t strike the ducks. Then the wide arc of its flight collapsed and it flew straight – out towards Morse Mountain.
Barnes took off running. As he chased the bird, he took out the lure – a leather bag covered in black duck feathers used to call the birds back in.
About every 30 yards, Barnes stopped. He whistled and swung the lure, hoping to catch the gyrfalcon’s attention and draw it back in. When the bird had just gotten out of sight, Barnes moved to the middle of the marsh and reached into his bag.
He pulled out a live pigeon on a tether: a live lure.
Barnes swung the pigeon slowly and it flapped around at the end of the leather cord. Barnes raises two broods of pigeons. One is a brood of homing pigeons used for training, and one is a brood of generic pigeons he keeps with him for emergencies like this one.
Up until this point, Barnes was talkative. While the radar gun was out, Barnes said almost nothing, only occasionally muttering under his breath about signal strength and eagles.
Barnes followed the radar out to the edge of the tidal river that separates the marsh from Morse Mountain. By holding the radar gun horizontally or vertically, he can tell whether the bird is on the ground or in the air.
The signal appeared to have stopped moving, and it looked like the bird was on the ground on the backside of a small island just across the river.
He whistled and swung both the lure and the live lure, but there was no sign of the gyrfalcon. After a few minutes, he started back towards the truck. He would drive to Morse Mountain and hike over it, but he wasn’t hopeful that the bird was still alive.
“I saw an eagle follow him over there, and if he’s on the ground, that’s really not a good sign,” Barnes said.
At the peak, the signal suddenly picked up and started moving. He moved to a clearing and whistled. He took out the lure and the gyrfalcon shot out of the distance and landed in a tree a few yards away.
He was able to call the falcon back in and get the hood on it.
When the bird was back in the truck, Barnes headed for home.
“It just goes to show that you never know what’s going to happen,” he said. “You’re working with wild animals, but they’re not stupid. They know they’re on Easy Street with me, so they don’t really want to leave.”
The relationship between man and falcon is an old one. It’s a symbiotic relationship between two hunters that sparked from a mutual understanding.
“When man rode out of the Stone Age on a horse, he had a falcon on his wrist and dog at his side,” Barnes said.
From what Barnes has read, early man noticed that falcons would naturally follow hunting parties – both human and otherwise – and wait for them to flush birds and small game. This probably led to the first attempts to train them.
For Barnes, the history of falconry is also a personal one.
The first English book on falconry is called “The Book of St. Albans,” written in 1487 by Dame Juliana Berners. Her name is sometimes written as Bernes or Barnes. Larry Barnes is a descendant of Berners.
“When people ask, I like to tell them that I’m just carrying on a 500-year family tradition,” Barnes said.
Days when the birds don’t cooperate and days when he spends hours out in the cold on a marsh and comes home empty handed are part of the game for a falconer like Barnes, but breaking tradition any time soon is definitely not on his radar.
