The Austringer

I got the following notice from the Michigan Hawking Club:

Attention Michigan Falconer

Last Wed April 23rd the Senate Natural Resources and Environment Affairs Committee passed Senate Bill 1085. This bill will allow a continued take of Wild Raptors for Falconry use. It Ends the Sunset and puts the rules and regulations concerning wild take in the hands of the DNR and Natural Resources Commission. Please write your Senator and Representative and tell them you want them to support this Bill. Do it Now!!! Follow it up with a phone call to their office in Lansing. Please….. the fate of a wild take is now up to YOU!!

Michigan Hawking Club

I’m not nearly as enthusiastic for the bang punctuation, but the message is spot on.

Find contact information for your Michigan State Senator

This is the info for my senator.

	Senator Information
State Senate District:	23
Senator:	Whitmer, Gretchen
Address:	415 Farnum Building
Office Phone:	(517)373-1734
Office Fax:	(517)373-5397
E-mail:	SenGWhitmer@senate.michigan.gov
Website:	http://www.senate.michigan.gov/whitmer/

Find contact information for your Michigan State Representative

My representative is one or the other of the following. I’ll get it down to one tomorrow.

067	Byrum	Barb	D	S 1086 HOB	517-373-0587	barbbyrum@house.mi.gov
069	Meadows	Mark	D	S 1088 HOB	517-373-1786	markmeadows@house.mi.gov

Falconers hawk bill to let them continue capturing raptors - Capital News Service - MLive.com

It looks like a bill aimed at dropping a 2009 sunset on a falconry law is getting general support. Getting rid of the sunset provision means that falconers in Michigan can continue to trap birds from the wild under provisions of the law. This is especially important for apprentices, who are barred from using captive-bred birds during their apprenticeship here in Michigan.

In general, statements from Audubon Society representative Thomas Funke were supportive of the bill and falconers. Perhaps the following was not intentional on Funke’s part:

Funke agreed, “Today, falconers are committed to the conservation of their species.”

The use of the qualifier “today” sends the wrong message. Falconers were in the forefront of organizing conservation efforts for falcon populations pushed to the brink of extinction by indiscriminate pesticide use, and continue to be conservation-minded. I’m a bit sensitive on such usage coming from other conservation groups who should be allies, for there is a history there of short-changing falconers on the credit for the recovery of raptor populations, even though falconers contributed their time, money, effort, and often their own birds to captive breeding programs right from the start of the problem being noticed.

CBS Sports reports that Tripp Isenhour is being charged with killing a red-shouldered hawk on a golf course. Apparently, the hawk was making noise while Isenhour was trying to perform for a video production. It took shot after shot for a while, but Isenhour finally managed to bean the hawk in the head with a golf ball. Neither Isenhour nor any of his production crew figured out that this was a bad idea before he actually managed to fatally injure the hawk.

According to court documents, Isenhour got upset when a red-shouldered hawk began making noise, forcing another take. He began hitting balls at the bird, then 300 yards away, but gave up. Isenhour started again when the hawk moved within about 75 yards, Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission officer Brian Baine indicated in a report.

Isenhour allegedly said, “I’ll get him now,” and aimed for the hawk.

“About the sixth ball came very near the bird’s head, and (Isenhour) was very excited that it was so close,” Baine wrote.

A few shots later, witnesses said he hit the hawk. The bird, protected as a migratory species, fell to the ground bleeding from both nostrils.

Back in 2006, there was the Orlando golf course that called in the USDA to kill a red-shouldered hawk. Is there something about golf that turns people’s brains off? [Looking back, that golf course was the "Villas of Grand Cypress"; this one is called "Grand Cypress". Does anyone know if this is actually the same facility? -- WRE]

Update: The story expands to unveil another seamy aspect of human behavior, this time in the form of parasitic attention-seeking. Unable to interest people in the core issue of severing all ties between humans and domesticated species, animal rights groups desperately latch onto just about any incident that might be somewhat more broadly respectable and milk it. Poser-group “Humane Society of the United States”, whose name even was chosen to illicitly borrow credibility from the far older animal welfare groups that actually ran pet shelters and did good work in countering cruelty to animals, has jumped on the Isenhour incident with all the unseemly haste of a junkie going for a dropped wallet. Why the San Francisco Chronicle chose an enabling role by putting that non-news action in their lead sentence on the story remains a mystery.

An animal rights group wants the PGA Tour to take action against player Tripp Isenhour, facing charges for hitting a hawk with a golf shot because it was making noise as he videotaped a TV show.

I wouldn’t mind if the PGA Tour wanted to add on some penalties to obvious idiocy on the part of high-profile people in golf. But that’s what makes this such a juicy target for parasitism, since that is likely to be a generally approved-of action.

The PBS Nature series looks at the intersection between falconry and science with Raptor Force. The episode airs this evening, 8 PM ET.

Hat tip to Karen Spivey.

I hope to have some comments later when the program airs.

Update: They had a lot of nice photography on the show, though I think that they borrowed some film from the NatGeo “Wolves of the Air” program, or at least it was strongly reminiscent of scenes from that program when they showed Harris hawks in the desert. There were some problems here and there in statements, such as saying that Harris hawk “stacking” behavior has something to do with the top bird having a better vantage due to the few additional inches of height, and not saying anything about the work done that teased out the dominance hierarchies that underlie “stacking”. The other clinker I recall clearly was saying that the near-silent flight of owls was perhaps due to not interfering with the owl’s own hearing in flight, when a fairly obvious alternative explanation would be that they don’t wish to have the prey hear them coming. Or, rather, that noisy owls likely would less often surprise prey items than more silent-flying conspecifics.

I thought the technology tie-ins were fairly weak elements of the show. While military aircraft video certainly makes for guy-gripping TV, there really wasn’t much depth at all in explaining how raptor biology actually was part of some technology transfer to aviation. The whole bit about development of a raptor backpack-cam could have been condensed down to “our tech guys did a great job getting us this video”, rather than sucking up precious program time showing us a guy soldering circuits in his basement. I’ve been that sort of guy before, but even I recognize that that is not what makes for informative television.

All-in-all a better hour of television than most, but it could have been even better than it was without much more effort.

Pleasanton Weekly : Hosterman can keep her hawk

I lived from late 2003 to early 2007 in Concord, California. The news story above concerns Pleasanton, a community near Concord. It seems to me to be much todo about nothing.

At basis, it concerns an apprentice falconer who simply wants to have an outside mews in her backyard. This, apparently, was not specifically mentioned in Pleasanton’s municipal regulations, though there are rules permitting the keeping of chickens and other “fowl”.

Now, this likely would never have attracted attention from anyone, but the apprentice falconer also happens to be the current mayor of Pleasanton, Jennifer Hosterman. That brought on various attempts by her political opponents to make things as difficult as possible for Hosterman. This latest report notes that Hosterman was given a temporary permit for her mews.

Some of the commentary reported comes straight out of clueless idiocy, such as the opponent who said of hawks at every opportunity that they were “trained to kill” and that the community would be at risk of Hosterman’s hawk attacking humans and pets. First off, no one needs to “train” a raptor to kill; that’s part of their inherited behavior. Raptors get trained to associate the falconer and good things happening, primarily the availability of food, and to hunt in particular ways. What they are likely to attack, though, primarily comes from untrained instinct. Birds taken from the wild, as it seems Hosterman’s hawk is, generally are quite reticent when it comes to people other than their falconer and unfamiliar animals, like domestic dogs and cats. (A domestic rabbit, though, would be very likely to trigger a response from a hungry hawk.) One suspects here that idiocy in pursuit of political ambition is simply par for the course.

Diane and I have made neighborhood or community regulations a deciding factor in places that we have lived to avoid situations such as Hosterman is facing. We purchased a home in the Sea Isle subdivision of Galveston, Texas in preference to another subdivision precisely because of vagueness in the neighborhood association rules in the other subdivision. In general, there do need to be some limitations on things people can do when packed in like sardines in subdivisions, but there should also be a recognition that those things that do not infringe on the peace of their neighbors or their property values are also not the business of their neighbors.

A friend of mine put her hawk in the weathering yard at the January, 2007 California Hawking Club meet. At the end of the meet, she put her bird in its traveling box, put box and bird in her vehicle, then went back to collect her ring perch. She discovered that someone else had collected it and disappeared in the meantime. She made sure that the meet organizers knew about the theft at the time.

Perches are bits of hardware that cost between $50 and $300, depending on the design and workmanship. The ring perch she had is nearer the upper end of that scale. A similar unit is available through NorthWoods.

The actual perch is in this photo, on the right:

Well, she is back at the California Hawking Club meet this year, and when she went out to the weathering area, she was surprised to see that her perch was there. Apparently, the falconer with the perch now had purchased it off of eBay, and is chagrined to have bought stolen goods. The CHC is working towards identifying the thief and turning him in. They also have offered to buy her a replacement perch, so things are working out.

She says her hawk also caught a jackrabbit today, with an assist on keeping it from her Jack Russell Terrier.

Joy as stolen bird of prey found in bush

A nice uplifting article about a goshawk who was in a vehicle when the vehicle was stolen. The thief apparently dumped the goshawk out of its travel box. The falconer put out a request for information in the local newspaper with a reward, and while there were a lot of responses, one of them turned out to actually bring falconer and goshawk back together. The big issue was that the goshawk had its jesses tied together to a glove, and so any snag could immobilize the goshawk and prevent it from hunting for food. That put a time limit on how long the bird could survive after the theft if not found.

I recall a kestrel I had that made an escape with a yard-long leash on. Though I didn’t recover the kestrel, I’m pretty certain it was fine, since it knew how to divest itself of its leash and jesses in minutes on its own. As various people have noted since, when working with animals, it pays if the trainer is somewhat more intelligent than the animal; some of the raptors I’ve encountered apparently tip the scales in the other direction.

Here’s a blog post recounting an encounter between a hawk (species unspecified), a chihuahua, and its owner. The owner managed to get the hawk to let go of the dog, though the dog sustained some severe injuries. The comments also bring out some anti-hawk sentiment.

A little natural history for you folks: it’s winter now. Hawks, such as the red-tailed hawk, have high juvenile mortality. Estimates run upwards of 80% of all first-year birds will not survive to next spring. So, you have a bunch of starving hawks out there, often living near humans, since we have co-opted so much of their range (see “habitat loss”). Red-tailed hawks are buteos; these birds prey on small mammals. People with toy dogs shouldn’t be too surprised when a starving hawk decides that it is worth a try to get a small mammal under less than ideal circumstances. That includes getting close to people.

The hawk that failed to make a meal out of the chihuahua? Odds are that it is dead by now, if not solely from starvation, perhaps also from injuries sustained during the dog owner’s counter-attack. For the commenter saying that he “hates hawks”, this is probably a comforting thought that so many of them are dying as we speak. The chihuahua, at 2 pounds, 5 ounces, most likely outweighed the hawk attacking it, especially if it was already malnourished.

I guess what I’d like to communicate is that we still live in a world with wildlife. If you have a small mammal as a pet, part of your responsibility is to realize that starvation makes both people and wildlife desperate. A little forethought concerning when and where one lets a toy dog outside is just something you need to invest. Close supervision of your companion outside through the winter months is the strongest deterrent you have to communicate to a raptor that it should spend its time looking for different prey.

Blackwood’s Linden Farli CD, RN, JH, OA, OAJ, TF1, ONYX, UTP3, TDI

Born July 2nd, 1993
Died December 10th, 2007

Farli was our first dog, a Vizsla (or Hungarian pointer). Our female Harris’ hawk, Rusty, really enjoyed chasing, and sometimes catching, upland birds. It is hard for a human to effectively work a field to flush upland birds. It was time to look for a hunting companion for Rusty. Diane auditioned several breeds of dogs with Rusty, and determined that Rusty was only going to work over a pointing dog. We talked about different breeds of pointer, and got down to Brittanys and Vizslas. I voted for less hair, though if Diane really had wanted a Brittany, I think we’d have gotten one.

Farli was originally set to go to someone else. Breeders of Vizslas at the time often had buyers for particular breedings well in advance. But the vet who docked the tails on the litter got things mixed up: he was supposed to dock about 1/3rd of the tail, and he docked closer to 2/3rds. The original buyers backed out, and since we had no intention of showing our dog in conformation, we got her instead.

Farli turned out to be an exceptionally gifted hunting dog. Her nose was acute, and she had a tremendous drive to retrieve game. Once, at a Shoot to Retrieve trial, I was the shooter for Farli. They had put out pen-raised quail. I took a shot at a flushing quail, missed, and since the quail had veered off in the direction of others at the buildings, did not take any subsequent shot. Diane released Farli after the shot, so she was off. As I stood there, the judge said, “Call safety”. I responded that I had already set the safety on the gun. What I didn’t know was that in StR, calling “Safety” would allow a dog to receive a default retrieve score for that particular instance. So the judge and I had an Abbott and Costello routine going for a couple of minutes, at the end of which Farli came trotting up to Diane — with the quail in her mouth. The judge gave her a 100% score and remarked that he wished that he had a dog like that.

Farli got into dog sports. Diane took her to a Vizsla “fun day” that featured a flyball demonstration. Farli got all excited about that, so Diane took her to the start line after the demonstration was over, and Farli took off, jumped over the hurdles going to the box, tripped the box, and then chased the tennis ball and ran around with it. Flyball was her favorite, and her lifetime point total is the third highest in NAFA flyball for a Vizsla.

Farli had a brief modeling career, too. A friend of ours served as an agent, and Farli appeared on pet product packaging, advertisements, annual reports, and appeared in a pharmaceutical infomercial. This was when she was between 6 and 9 years old.

Farli’s arthritis and hip dysplasia became an issue in later life. We had to restrict her diet, since carrying extra pounds would have made the arthritis pain that much worse. We went through a series of different pain medicines and regimens looking for something that would relieve her pain, without much success in these last months. This ongoing, chronic pain was a major issue when we were considering what to do in her final days. Last year, she added a senior dog vestibular disorder to her list of problems. Since then, Farli went around with a permanent rightward head tilt and inherent wobbliness on her feet.

Farli went into kidney failure. We noticed that she wasn’t eating well, which had never been a problem with her. We got blood work done, taking a fasting blood value last Thursday, and got the news midday on Friday. This put us in a bind, since treatment would mean intravenous fluids, which we could not do at home. Diane wasn’t willing to leave Farli in a place where she would be caged overnight without anyone in attendance, so we arranged to provide subcutaneous fluid treatment over the weekend. This would simply be a maintenance, not a therapy, so we took her back to the vet Monday morning for another look. Diane was able to call from in between teaching classes and speak with the vet. While the vet wasn’t willing to talk plainly about possible prognosis, our sense was that treatment might or might not work, and depending upon the cause of the kidney failure, she might live anywhere from days to a few more months. Given Farli’s continuing chronic pain, we felt that putting her down was the right thing to do now. Since Farli had protested even the short car ride to and from the vet clinic, we got a vet service that made house calls to come out to provide euthanasia for Farli.

Diane took a bit of a nap with Farli that last afternoon, and late in the day, we let Farli chase and retrieve a chukar, something that she did with a last glimmer of vitality, though it left her quite tired afterward. The vet arrived about an hour and a half later. Farli died around 6:35 Monday night, as comfortable as we could make her on the couch, with Diane and I petting her.

It’s hard to say whether Ritka, our younger dog, gets what has transpired. She came out with us Tuesday morning when we buried Farli. If Rusty notices at all, it will likely be in wondering why the dog hunting with us isn’t as talented a hunter. But for Diane and I, it is a wrench to let go, and I expect that Farli will live long in our memory.

These photos are from an outing on October 28th, when we headed down to the Dansville area to check out some public hunting land there. Michigan has a fairly extensive system of privately-owned, but publicly accessible land in addition to state-owned parks and wildlife areas.

The first place we tried had a large field of soybeans left standing. We arrived early, and everything was covered in frost when we got there. While we didn’t scare up any rabbits, the hawks and Ritka worked the field well.

Sometimes things happen to fall into place. I was tracking Rusty flying over the field, and she happened to cross such that the moon showed up in the photo.

Here Shelby is heading to perch on a glove.

Shelby and Ritka checking out a part of the field.

And here is Ritka bounding through the frosted soybeans well before breakfast.

All the photos were taken with a Nikon D2Xs and Nikkor VR 70-200mm f/2.8 lens, ISO 800, and cropped, resampled, and contrast adjusted in Corel Photo-Paint.

I’m hoping that things are getting back into a groove where I can put up pictures of raptors on a weekly basis again.

Our birds are getting out some now. The leaves are turning color and falling here. The temperature is falling, too. I’ve been told that “road construction” season will soon be over, giving way to “winter” here in Michigan.

The lighting wasn’t great; we started our walk close to dusk. But Rusty followed us well and paid attention to the dogs, who didn’t find anything for her on this trip.

Nikon D2Xs, Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8, ISO 800.

In 2003, we went out for a walk with Rusty, Beater, and Biter at Tierra Santa near San Diego.

Fuji S2 Pro, Nikkor G 70-300mm lens.

Here’s a falcon on a block perch in the weathering yard at the 2001 California Hawking Club meet in Bakersfield.

Canon Pro 90 IS camera used here. This was one of the second generation super-zoom compact digital cameras, featuring image stabilization and 2.6 megapixels. Contrast touched up in Corel PhotoPaint.

Shelby comes to the glove. Notice that his feet have not quite made contact. Also, you can see from the photo that he has very long legs. It is hard to appreciate just how long a reach a Harris’s hawk has from looking at it perched somewhere. Another thing you can see is that Shelby is in the midst of molting, especially in looking at the feathers of his left wing, where there are some gaps where the old feathers have dropped out, but the new feathers have not yet grown in.

Nikon D2Xs, Tamron 17-50mm f/2.8 lens.

Over on “Men’s News Daily”, the “Nobody’s Opinion” column goes on and on interminably about how falconry is practiced by the rich and “environmental nut” control freaks. It takes a while to find what has set off this guy, but eventually he gets around to it:

Bobby Kennedy I was reading today…absolutely loves this sport. Bobby, who was taught by his father, partakes in this historical “field sport” so much, even teaching it to his children, that Bobby would think nothing of saying, “Do you want to see if we can bump some bunnies before sunset?”

Ah, yes, there’s a motivator: the visceral hate of various right-wing commentators for anything related to the Kennedys. I’m sure that “driving” itself would also come in for its share of abuse if only a minority of Americans, and Teddy Kennedy, practiced it.

Rich falconers… pretty rare in my experience. I certainly don’t qualify on that score. Fly anywhere to hunt? You’ve gotta be kidding. Most of the vehicles seen at falconry meets bespeak very limited budgets and frugality. I know exactly one falconer who flies her own Cessna various places, and even she isn’t more than “comfortably well off” in my opinion.

Control freaks? Some are, some aren’t. I haven’t noticed a disproportionate number of those taking to falconry. Diane and I don’t even hunt our birds from the glove. When we are in the field, Rusty and Shelby are interacting with the dogs in their own way and at their own pace. If you want as much control as possible when hunting, you don’t do falconry, you get a shotgun. Especially since control freaks tend not to understand operant conditioning and using only positive reinforcement; those who don’t tend to be watching their birds fly off, never to be seen by them again.

Environmental nuts? I think it best if we don’t wreck the environment, sure, but pretty much any falconry meet I’ve been to has its share of vehicles sporting Bush/Cheney bumper stickers, too.

Eating prey items? We’ve eaten various upland birds that Rusty has caught, and a couple of rabbits, but most of what Rusty catches goes in the freezer for Rusty to eat over the molt. The word for this blog, “austringer”, comes from the distinction of class made between noble “falconers” who flew longwing birds, and common “austringers” who were only permitted to fly shortwing hawks, especially the goshawk, in order to take meat for the table. The goshawk’s appellation was “the cook’s bird” during the middle ages.

Bumping bunnies before sunset? Dusk and dawn are the times when rabbits generally get active and hawks can see them, so that at least makes some sense, if one is speaking within the limits of the established rabbit hunting season. Also, “hunting” is not “catching”; most of the flights Rusty or Shelby make to game end up with the prey item getting away. Also, we didn’t “train” either Rusty or Shelby to kill prey. They learned all they needed to know on that score from their parents in the wild.

But here’s a fact: The environmentalist Bobby tells us that 80% of raptors die during their first year trying to master the art of killing game, but that doesn’t stop him from trying to train the other 20%.

Add innumeracy and/or simple ignorance to the ranter’s other traits. Falconers in the USA are prohibited from taking haggard birds, that is, birds in their adult plumage who are on the far side of that first-year mortality bump. The trapping season for passage birds precedes that big bump in first-year mortality, so the odds are that about 4 out of 5 passage falconry birds would not have survived, and the odds that anyone has one that might have been part of “the other 20%” are themselves 1 in 5 if we assume a uniform trapping distribution. One could argue that trapping itself is skewed toward catching birds that early on are having some difficulties, which would make it even less likely that a falconer is taking part of the population that would do fine anyway. This is why apprentices thus far trap passage birds: if something goes wrong, there is a smaller likelihood that they have had an impact on the wild population. An apprentice bird typically gets a good diet and veterinary care to eliminate parasites, so if they return to the wild later, they actually may be in better shape than if they had spent their whole time trying to get through that first winter on their own.

The ranter finishes up with,

So, what do you think?

I think that if you want to say Bobby Kennedy is somebody that you don’t like and that you wouldn’t want to do the things he does, say that. Falconry isn’t an exclusionary club that we control who does it. For those of us who aren’t rich, control freaks, or absolutely “nutty” on environmental issues, but who still like to give our birds the opportunity to fly at some bunnies before bedtime, I think that you owe us an apology.

Harris’s hawks are the only raptors known to hunt cooperatively. Falconers have only started taking advantage of this in the past few decades. The fact that early reports of groups of these hawks shared kills was originally taken as meaning that they were behaviorally like vultures. The actual situation turned out to be much more interesting. Here’s a picture of our three birds at the end of 2002, Rusty with the two males we had trapped about five weeks earlier.

Fuji S2 Pro, Nikkor G 70-300mm.

Back in 2002, Diane’s apprentice Andrea was getting her passage tiercel red-tailed hawk, Lavan, trained. Part of that involved free-flying Lavan to bagged game. These are two pictures from one of those outings.

Fuji S2 Pro, Nikkor G 70-300mm lens.

Here’s a picture from the end of the year in 2002. We had Rusty out in the field with the two new hawks, Beater and Biter, who we had trapped in mid-November.

Fuji S2 Pro, Nikkor G 70-300mm lens, probably ISO 800.

Here’s a picture from my birthday back in 2003. A tiercel red-tailed hawk follows Andrea higher into the hills. Tiercel is falconry jargon for male raptors. Since most raptor species have a gender-based dimorphism with the females being larger, falconers have noted the difference and applied it. In some cases, the differences between genders extend to behavior, such as prey choice. For Harris’s hawks, the males are somewhat more agile flyers and can be faster than the hens, so some falconers have used them for hunting prey birds like quail.

Photo details: Fuji S2 Pro camera, Nikkor G 70-300mm lens.

I apologize for the skipped week last week. My main workstation finally stopped functioning around last Thursday. It was based on an ECS K7S5A motherboard, which was a pretty hot performer back in 2001. Right now I’m using our video/graphics workstation to get stuff done, but I hate to clutter up this machine with office suites, stats packages, and compilers.

(more…)

This week, the picture shows Rusty on her way to try to catch something she has spotted. The way she flies is noticeably different when she thinks she is chasing something from when she is just heading to a new perch.

Nikon D2Xs, Nikkor AFS VR 70-200mm f/2.8, ISO 800.