Lying to your Bird

Today my room-mate and I took Nina out for a hunt. The place I chose was in town, but part of a large marsh area that runs down the middle of La Crosse. We worked a really thick field that had lots of tall, over-the-head grass. I was quite surprised as I thought we should have bumped a whole lot more bunnies than we did. However, we did give Nina several flights, and she got some good flying in. Some of the flights were quite pretty . . . as she would move out over the field we were working, then fold her wings and do a wing-over, and dive into the grass. She furred one bunny, and I'm sure was pretty close on a couple of others, but the grass was so very thick.

Sometimes, if she is not "moving up" as we say, moving from tree to tree to keep us nearby and underneath her, I have been known to tell a fib. It is interesting to notice that she has learned to associate the game call a falconer gives when they flush game to the action of flushing that game. We yell out "ho ho ho ho", or some such derivation of it when we see a bunny. Most of the time, I am telling the truth. If she is some fair distance though, I will sometimes call out, and act like I have flushed something, just to get her to move up. It almost always works! If I could have a conversation with her, I would say, "Oh, well, I did see a bunny, but you were just soooo far away you were not able to take advantage of it. So sorry for you that YOU did not see it!" :-P

Today I did this, and was rewarded with a very pretty sight. I told Liz I was going to lie to the bird, and I gave out a false game cry. Nina moved herself from where she was and flew out over the field, closer to us. She then began spiraling around, looking, looking, her head turning this way and that. I had said I'd seen a bunny . . . she was looking for it. It was very pretty to see her leisurely soar here at this low level.

I was asked previously why I would want to release such a wonderful game hawk, which I plan to do at the end of this season. She gave today a pretty good example. When we snag them out of the sky, and out of their migration, we remove from them the ability to do that which they are engineered to do . . . soar! I cannot know if they derive pleasure from the activity, and I would not want to be too anthropomorphic. However, soaring is part of their nature, and I want to return Nina to her inheritance. Just as the three other hawks that also flew over the field today, albeit very much higher, screaming their defiance of our intruding upon their territory, I have just been borrowing Nina from the wild, and plan to return her in spring.

We had nothing for the bag today, but we had a nice walk, all three of us getting some pretty good exercise.