Her feathered nape puffed up, eyes wild with the exhilaration of her kill—the redtail hawk sat there in a carpet of leaves, talons gripped into squirrel meat. Dangerously close to her open hooked beak, her handler tried to distract her attention from her catch by covering the carcass with a brown hand towel hoping to get her to loosen her hold. But she wasn’t having any of it.
Just moments before, this bird was feeling the updrafts and irritation at her lack of catch. See, you’ve got to fly a hawk hungry because they won’t take a kill with a full belly. But if you don’t keep at least a little satisfaction in her gizzard, there’s nothing stopping her from taking to the wild again. The urgency from below to try and draw her attention back to the forest floor increased as a pack of hunters shook saplings and thwacked trees with rubberized ax handles hoping to stir up a squirrel into giving the hawk a slip.
It worked. A flash of grey and a chorus of ho, HO, hos from the handlers called the hawk into chase. What followed was a gruesome ballet as the squirrel scabbled and flung itself from tree-top to tree-top before slipping from a branch. The hawk intercepted the squirrel and landed with it on the forest floor where she sat unrelenting and eye-to-eye with her handler. He finally cut into the squirrel’s gut and gave the hawk a bloody reward. She released her hold, giving up the rest of the body to the huntsman’s gamebag.
That was the first time I ever saw this thousands-of-years old conversation between hawk and handler unfold. And that redtail caught more than that squirrel that day: my attention, affection, and obsession were hooked as well.
Fast forward to the next hunting season and I’m with my buddy Jody down at his hunting club in south-west Alabama. We’ve made friends with hawker Anthony Cross, handler to the Harris Hawk Zinn and hunting beagles Rockcreek Roscoe P and Reba—both of the Black Creek bloodline out of Tennessee. The night before our hunt, I’m snuggled up next to Jody’s Blue Lacy by firelight in the hunting lodge listening to Anthony talk shop about falconry. The way he goes on about the sport is spellbinding. His southern accents laces through Latin terms and techniques thousands of years old and blends with a newer lexicon that sounds more comfortable and country.
He tells me in his calm manner about trapping and taking a hawk from the wild and how the mortality rate for wild redtails in their first year is 80%. He talks about how falconers taking wild-born hawks captive for a year teaches the hawks to hunt and actually benefits wild populations. Falconry is as much about conservation as it is about the sport of the hunt, and there’s a lot of state and federal regulation involved to keep everything on the up and up. If you’re not licensed or Native American, it’s illegal for anyone to have so much as a hawk feather.
Come morning, we take to the fields of the hunting camp. And whereas before we were squirrel hawking, this time we were dirt hawking which is taking any sort of ground prey: rabbit, rat, chipmunk, etc. The fact that we’ve brought the beagles along doesn’t change what we call it as there doesn’t seem to be a name for hunting with hawk and dog at the same time. Anthony takes Zinn out of her box and sets her on the scales. A hawker learns a bird’s hunting weight through trial and error, but once it’s known, the scales can guide you. Another way of gauging if a bird is near their weight is by stroking a finger down their sternum and judging how much meat they have on their breast. Too thick and they won’t hunt. Too lean and you risk behavior problems.
Passing over mounds of carrion picked-clean hog skeletons from where hunters have dumped the carcasses, we work our way out into a partially flooded field rimmed in hardwood and brush. Mid-February means most of the leaves had dropped off the branches making it both easier to keep an eye on the bird and the bird to keep an eye on the dogs. Though for us humans, the only thing that kept us keyed into the dogs’ location is a dot on the telemetry screen and the rustling of dried tallgrass.
Roscoe wants to work today, but Reba seems uninterested, so she stays in the box, content in her safe space. Roscoe has about the longest floppiest ears I’ve ever seen on a beagle and certainly the shortest legs. “Tell-tale sign of a true rabbit dog—is their ears scratched up?” Anthony says of picking out a good rabbit dog. “First thing someone in rabbit dogs does is check their ears. A good one will have scratched up ears from running through the bush.” But the fact that his ears flop doesn’t roster with Roscoe, he’s got his nose to the ground snuffling around.
Anthony tosses Zinn into the air where she takes to the top of a skeletal oak, her bell jingling. Hawks, like all predatory birds, have a soundless flight. The bell attached to her anklet key handlers in to her movements. It’s very easy to lose track of a bird that’s not in flight. The majority of the hunt is spent with the bird tracing from one perch to the next reinforcing the idea that hawks really are lazy hunters. But there’s a fine line between lazy and efficient. This way she’s conserving energy and utilizing the camouflage of the treetops. It’s much easier to track an airborne hawk which also alerts prey to their presence.
The whole hunt plays out in one multi-layered conversation. Roscoe is tagged with a radio collar that show his GPS location on a rudimentary read-out screen on Anthony’s handheld. He explains every aspect of the hunt to me as it unfolds. The dog follows his nose, the bird follows the dog, and we follow the bird. Much of this is all about timing. The dog will kick up a slip—a moment of prey-chase for the bird—and will pursue. But the bird is faster than the dog. We’ve got to arrive to the bird as quick as possible when she takes her catch to make sure the prey is dispatched as humanely as possible and so the dog and hawk don’t tussle. It’s also important to make sure the hawk doesn’t eat her fill because then she’ll be done for the day. She’ll get a reward so she doesn’t feel robbed, but her catch will be withheld from her and added to her food stores for later.
And right about then, little Roscoe lets out with a rolling, deep-throated bay. Anthony snaps up the handheld. “Sounds like he’s got a rabbit, and rabbits run a loop,” Anthony explains. “And you know the kind you’ve got by the size of the loop. Cotton-tails and cane cutters run a small loop, and swamp rabbits run a large one. But either way, you’re going to wind up right back where you started so there’s no sense in running all over the place.” A jangle of bells and Zinn lifts from her perch and glides to a nearby tree, her attention zeroed in on Roscoe’s ruckus. We move when she moves: keeping parallel with her position but one step ahead in the dog’s direction.
The hunt moves us just short of a full-on run through head-high thorny brush, over piles of logged tree scraps, and to the swampy flooded portion of the field. The mass of water proves a challenge for both us and Roscoe. He throws himself into the soupy mixture but has to double back several times to keep with the swamp rabbit’s scent. We wait patiently as he finds and loses the trail a dozen times with fits and starts of howls. Until, finally, the silence becomes more and more common.
Anthony recalls them both. He whistles to his hawk, but he talks to his dog. And even though we’ve lost this slip, Anthony glows with the thrill of the chase. “There’s nothing more beautiful than watching an animal doing what it was created to do,” he says all smiles. We return to the truck—both critters following in our wake—where Roscoe gets a treat. Anthony hands a thick leather glove to me and slips a thawed quail chick into my fist with the instruction to “Stick your arm out and show her what you’ve got.” I do, and Zinn sails down in the span of a heartbeat and alights on my wrist. She’s lighter than I imagined, about the same as a loaf of bread. As she dispatches her snack, Anthony attaches her jesses and works them through my fingers. In the next moment, she locks eyes with me. She’s close enough I can see the individual hair-like feathers on her beak. A pang in my gut whispers to me that she’s close enough and powerful enough to have a go at my eyeballs if she so chooses. But she doesn’t. And something in her gaze reminds me why falconry is the oldest sport, the sport of kings, and why I’ll never be able to get away from it.
