Waterloo Region Record

‘Falconry is about a connection’

Sport highlights the vital link between humans and environment

LEAH GERBER

BRANTFORD — The goshawk’s eyes are crayon orange, as warm and familiar as the surface of Mars. Her beak and talons are curved and dark, while the feathers down her breast form an intricate black and white lace. Her charcoal wings lie neatly folded behind her.

She’s perched on Nathan Hyland’s leather glove. Two excited dogs frolic around Hyland’s feet, but the goshawk is still. Cool. She is not cute.

Hyland, his goshawk Gracie, and his two dogs Inga and Haily, are in a parking lot in an industrial corner of Brantford on a Sunday morning.

These four hunt as a team. Hyland and Gracie find a good vantage point, while the two dogs work to make the prey take flight — an activity called flushing. In this case, they are trying to flush rabbits out of huge piles of pallets behind an empty lot.

Gracie’s head swivels and her eyes watch keenly. She knows exactly what is happening, and she is ready.

When a rabbit panics and darts out of the pile, Hyland shouts, “Ho! Ho!” while Gracie shoots into the sky, dives and misses. The rabbit gets away.

“At this time of year, there are no dumb rabbits left,” says Dion Thomson, a falconer of over 30 years. He watches Hyland from a few metres away. “These things have learned to outrun everything that’s after them.”

By the end of the morning, Hyland, Gracie, and his dogs have hunted through thickets, behind factories and a subdivision, through empty lots, past an abandoned house and somebody’s camp set up in a thicket, and taken a few rabbits too. Back in the parking lot, the dogs are wagging and romping as though they could hunt nonstop for the rest of their lives and never grow tired. Gracie is still and content.

Falconry was first regulated in Ontario in 1998. At that time, falconers could only use captive-bred birds.

Since 2012, licensed falconers have been allowed to take birds of prey from the wild through a lottery system. Each year 25 licences to take birds were offered up, and between 52 and 66 falconers applied.

Last month, Ontario decided to expand the number of wild raptors that can be live captured by licensed falconers as hunting companions.

The decision to allow a wild-take of native non-threatened species for every licensed falconer, including apprentices, is “met with utter relief, joy, appreciation, and gratitude” by Ontario’s falconry community, writes Maya Basdeo, a provincial director at large for the Ontario Federation of Anglers and Hunters.

Now according to the province’s listing, licensed falconers can take one wild bird of prey per year from a list including great horned owls, bald eagles, merlins, and redtailed hawks among others. Goshawks remain a species with a quota. Five goshawks each year are allowed to be taken by lottery.

The decision is the result of 40 years of advocacy from the falconry community, says Basdeo. Much of it has been led by herself and Martin Geleynse, past president of the Ontario Hawking Club and current vicepresident of the North American Falconry Association.

Geleynse, who works as a software engineer in Waterloo,

says he has practised falconry for about 40 years. He was a founding member of the Ontario Hawking Club, in 1984. Then, as now, one of the main purposes of the club was to work with government and other organizations to promote a legal

“They need that passion because nothing about falconry is easy.” MARTIN GELEYNSE FALCONER

environment in which “the traditions of falconry can flourish.”

Geleynse says the club has been working toward the province’s decision to allow a wildtake for every licensed falconer since it was established.

This has involved meetings with multiple levels of government, partnering with the Ontario Federation of Fishers and Hunters, establishing hunting seasons, conducting field research to scientifically establish reliable population counts for raptor species and developing guidelines and best practices.

Much of the work falconers have done in order to be legally allowed to take raptors from the wild is to demonstrate this will not negatively impact the bird populations.

David Bird, a now-retired professor of ornithology from McGill and past-president of the Raptor Research Foundation, says survival rates for young birds of prey vary depending on species, but overall a conservative estimate is a 50 per cent survival rate. A 1995 study from the University of Arizona found that in nests that had nestlings harvested, the siblings left behind had higher survival rates.

Falconers say wild birds are better suited to the conditions of their environment. As well, they can be released back into to the wild once a falconer is finished hunting with them, which Geleynse says is the traditional way of practicing falconry.

Wild caught birds also have natural skills that are difficult to teach. For example, Maureen McGeean hunts squirrels with her wild-caught red-tailed hawk Zea. In a forest, Zea looks for squirrels down below, but also up in the trees above — a skill falconers believe she most likely learned while hunting in the wild during her first year, and difficult to teach to captivebred birds.

Falconers are not allowed to breed or sell raptors or take atrisk species. There are other rules they must follow, including only taking raptors or nestlings at specific times of year, immediately banding the birds when captured, and maintaining records.

Geleynse estimates that out of the approximate 200 falconers in Ontario, maybe 30 will participate each year.

Geleynse thinks one reason more falconers do not take wild birds is because — besides the time commitment and resources needed to take care of them — capturing a live bird is very difficult. It involves studying the species intensely to understand their preferred area for nesting, hunting habits, migration routes, and developing an ability to distinguish juveniles from adults, male from female, a first year (passage) bird, from an older (haggard) bird.

Once a bird is found, a falconer will try to trap the bird with a bal chatri, which is a trap full of nooses and some sort of bait. Falconers are only allowed to trap passage birds — this means a bird in its first year travelling in its first migration.

“Falconers are very passionate,” says Geleynse. “They need that passion because nothing about falconry is easy.”

Geleynse is standing in a parking lot next to a Starbucks. In his bulky hunting jacket, thick canvas pants and big boots, he looks out of place. He says when this parking lot was still a field it was a good spot for grouse. Now he goes to Saskatchewan to hunt grouse.

Bird says this story is experienced by falconers the world over. Hunters watch their hunting spots get cut down and bulldozed, and then end up hunting in the leftover marginal land between industrial parks and tiny slivers of woodlot.

Geleynse says most falconers feel they are ardent environmentalists. When a plaza, parking lot, subdivision or industrial park is built on a field or woodlot where they hunt, they feel the loss personally.

“For me, falconry is all about connection,” says McGeean. “It’s connection with my bird, with the prey. Without land, there is no prey.”

Falconers are also well-known conservationists. When the peregrine falcon was endangered, falconers and their techniques were relied upon in the United States and Canada.

“Falconers played an inestimable role in the peregrine falcon reintroduction, using their knowledge of falcon behaviour and centuries-old techniques of how to care for raptors in captivity,” writes Tim Gallagher, former editor of the Cornell ornithology lab’s quarterly magazine Living Bird, and also a lifelong falconer.

When the Audubon Society named its top 100 environmentalists who shaped the environmental movement, four falconers were on the list including Tom Cade and Heinz Meng, famous falconers who were leaders in saving the peregrine falcon and the pioneers of captive breeding.

Their work helped bring peregrine falcons back from the brink, and their techniques were used for other raptor species projects as well, including one, “remarkably successful bald eagle reintroduction in New York state, which brought the eagles’ population from one breeding pair in 1976 to more than 300 pairs in the most recent survey,” writes Gallagher.

In Canada, Richard Fyfe is credited as the country’s pioneer in saving the peregrine falcon through captive breeding, he too was a falconer.

Geleynse says other projects falconers are involved in include pushing to change power pole design to prevent raptor electrocution, rehabilitating and releasing injured raptors, and population counts.

In Waterloo Region, Geleynse and other falconers are leading a program to learn more about Goshawk numbers. Goshawks are notoriously shy and hard to locate birds. The province currently does not have very much information on them, says Geleynse. He says the goal is to build a useful data set for understanding and managing the goshawk.

“Falconry is a way that connects us very dramatically not only with nature and working ecosystems, but also with our past: a time when we depended on those ecosystems a lot more than we do today. You know, my biggest fear for the next 100 years is that people lose that connection completely,” Geleynse says.

“We don’t need to hunt anymore. We don’t need to fish anymore. Anything we can watch, we can watch on the internet. We don’t actually have to go and feel that adrenalin rush anymore. And we don’t really care so much if it gets covered over in pavement or plowed up or whatever. You want to know what’s driving environmental destruction today? That,” he says.

“People, voters, don’t really care that much. If they were all out there everyday hunting and fishing and bird watching and doing all these other things, they would care a lot more. So for me, falconry is an important part of that mosaic of people that are attached to the environment. You lose those people, you lose the environment.”

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2021-05-10T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-05-10T07:00:00.0000000Z

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