Falconary: Talons will out
Caroline Rees experiences the soaring appeal of falconry
On a hunting trip through picturesque woodland near Clovelly in north Devon, falconer Jonathan Marshall catches his newest Harris hawk in a tree and inspects its beak.
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| Falconer Jonathan Marshall holds a red kite |
“Yup, squirrel,” he says, flicking bloody tufts of grey fur from the bird’s breast. While Marshall’s other hawks have stuck to the script and been fed from the glove, this one has scoffed its catch in private.
As well as headlining displays at country fairs, Marshall hosts “falconry experience” days out for 300 people a year. His most exotic group comprised Michael Jackson, Uri Geller and David Blaine, but today’s five customers work in education and engineering. “There’s an amazing market for it among people who want to get off the treadmill for a bit,” Marshall says.
What appeals are the interaction with lethally efficient wild creatures and the romantic evocation of the Middle Ages. The morning session involves a woodland ramble with Harris hawks
The novice handlers entice the birds to their gauntlets with chopped-up lamb’s heart, bells rattling on the birds’ jesses [leg straps] as they skim our heads in search of lunch. Marshall will scoop up any extra pheasants and rabbits they catch for later feeds.
Although the birds are trained, they are still wild, he says. Anything can happen. On one memorable day at a show, a hawk knocked off a man’s toupee with its jesses as it swooped over the audience. “The wig got blown along and you could see the bird think: ‘Bloody hell, squirrel!’,” Marshall recounts. “It started to pull the hair out until it realised there was no meat on it and dropped it like a pan-scrub. That was pretty embarrassing.”
Marshall, 39, has been training birds of prey since childhood. His “obsession” began when he saw a golden eagle in the road while on a family holiday in the Lake District. “Its wings were out and it had a glare in its eye. It was like seeing a dragon. I remember the flap as it launched into the air. It was as if someone had opened a door to another world.”
He immersed himself in books, pestered falconers for advice and secured jobs at Windsor Safari Park and the Hawk Conservancy before setting up a bird of prey centre at the Milky Way visitor attraction in north Devon. He went freelance seven years ago.
After lunch, the highlight of the “experience” day is flying the falcons. Peregrines, the fastest animals on earth, can reach 125mph. “They get into a streamlined shape and utilise gravity,” says Marshall. Their numbers have recovered to 1,400 breeding pairs in the UK since being devastated by the overuse of pesticides in the 1960s. Marshall is keen to get the conservation message across and he takes the birds into local schools to wow the children.
Instead of calling the falcon to hand, the idea is to tempt the bird by swinging a lure (with dead chick attached) by your side, then hide it behind your back just as the bird arrives. It’s a tricky art to master. Nico, Marshall’s star bird, soars on the lift above the trees before shooting in like a jet, then doubling back to shave past the handler’s back. After three or four passes, the lure is thrown into the air as a reward.
The falcons are only pigeon-sized and sit contentedly hooded on people’s arms awaiting their turn, occasionally mewing rather pathetically. Samson the golden eagle, however, is huge, with a wingspan of two metres and yellow talons the size of human fingers. The wind direction is wrong to fly him over the cliffs today as it would take him out to sea, but Marshall gives his slightly apprehensive “eagle experience” client a taste of the bird’s awesome power, calling him to the man’s hand. Its grip is so strong, it takes Marshall several moments to release his own thumb. With the right lift, the eagle can fly 20 miles without flapping, he says.
Samson came to him as a skeletal, parasite-ridden three-year-old that had been stolen from a zoo and kept in a wardrobe. “He was quite aggressive and mixed up. It took about eight months to get him right.” Marshall’s way with birds is to be completely calm with them for gradually lengthening periods. “You have to be consistent so they trust you.” To get Samson used to his new home, he’d sit quietly with him and watch television. “He’s bomb-proof now. Everyone assumes I’ve hand-reared him.”
Marshall keeps 60 birds for breeding and 12 for flying. Training takes anything from two weeks to six months, depending on the aptitude of the bird. To get them to fly well, he says, you have to let them have their wings. And they sometimes take advantage. One falcon took up residence in Barnstaple town centre for several months, devouring pigeons in front of shoppers. “He chased one into the library and killed it in the non-fiction section,” says Marshall.
With at least 1,000 professional falconers competing for our leisure time in the UK, Marshall has developed a unique selling point, which will be seen in a future television series on Animal Planet: he actually flies with the birds, having learned to hang-glide and sky-dive.
At shows, he has a crowd-gasping routine where a falcon is released from 1,000ft and goes into a 150kmph vertical stoop, or dive. And clients can take “experience” trips in a microlight aicraft, following the eagle in flight.
“I wanted to do stuff that no one else was doing,” Marshall says. “I bred a peregrine called Finley and took him up in a pouch. Once he started to fly, it was natural for him to follow me. I put a little perch on the side and fed him from it. It sounds corny, but you get to know the birds on a spiritual level, sharing the same thermal with them. The romance, the freedom – it’s brilliant.”
For more information on Jonathan Marshall, see www.experiencefalconry.co.uk.
(news source: telegraph.co.uk)
Falconry displays this autumn
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