ADVENTURES WITH BIRDS OF PREY 



By Frank and John Craighead 



With Illustrations from Photographs by the Authors 



FALCONRY — taming, training, and 

 flying the most spirited and coura- 

 geous birds alive! It seemed almost 

 supernatural to us, a feat accomplished in 

 ages long past but surely impossible for 

 modern boys. 



Then one day, in an old National Geo- 

 graphic Magazine, we came across an 

 article on falconry by that great artist- 

 naturalist, Fuertes* Soon afterwards, we 

 saw a trained hawk owned by a resident of 

 our home city, Washington, D. C. So fal- 

 conry wasn't impossible after all! We 

 decided we would give it a try. 



With The Geographic as a starter, we 

 began reading up on falconry, and with 

 the coming of spring, the time for getting 

 hawks, we had a fair theoretical knowledge 

 of the subject. 



FIERCE cooper's HAWK IS HARDEST TO 

 TRAIN 



Judging from descriptions of European 

 hawks, our American Cooper's hawk would 

 be the best bird for hunting in the mixed 

 woods and open country of the eastern 

 United States. The books, however, failed 

 to mention the fact that, of all the birds 

 used in falconry, the short-winged hawks, 

 such as the Cooper's, are by far the hardest 

 to train (pages 110 and 112). 



Unknowing and consequently undis- 

 mayed, we were starting at the age of 14 

 on the most difficult task of falconry, train- 

 ing the fiercest of the short- winged hawks. 



Up along the Potomac River, not far 

 from Washington, we finally found what 

 we sought — a pair of Cooper's hawks, hunt- 

 ing. These birds are about the size of 

 a crow, with short wings and long tail. 

 They are not falcons, and they differ de- 

 cidedly from those long-winged, high-flying 

 birds. Instead of depending upon endur- 

 ance and speed of flight, they hunt low 

 through the bushes, catching their prey by 

 a stealthy approach and sudden, lightning- 

 like dash. These tactics are effective, and 

 the birds are highly efficient hunters. 



On the rare occasions when they fly up 

 above the trees, they flap three or four 



* See "Falconry, the Sport of Kings," by Louis 

 Agassiz Fuertes, in The National Geographic 

 Magazine, December, 1920. 



times and then glide. This they were doing 

 when we sighted them. 



At once we began to look around for pos- 

 sible nesting sites. There were several old 

 crows' nests in the vicinity, clearly visible 

 through the leafless branches of early 

 spring. With a pair of telephone line- 

 man's spurs which had been given to us, 

 we began climbing the various likely-look- 

 ing trees and peering into the nests. 



This, we found, was an ambitious pro- 

 gram, as climbing with spurs is hard, tiring 

 work until you get the knack of it. The 

 novice hugs the trunk so hard he is worn 

 out before he gets up twenty feet; he feels 

 that the spurs will not hold. Confidence 

 comes with experience. 



At last, after clambering up four or five 

 tall, straight trunks, we found four pale 

 bluish eggs with very faint brown splotches 

 lying in an abandoned crow's nest high in 

 a pin oak tree, overlooking the wooded 

 valley. We let them alone, of course, and 

 climbed down. The parent birds now were 

 nowhere in sight. 



During our trips to the nest on sub- 

 sequent week ends, the old birds never 

 showed themselves. Unlike some other 

 kinds of hawks and falcons, which circle 

 around, bawl you out loudly, or even dive 

 at your head, the Cooper's hawk will not 

 often visit its nest if a human being is near 

 it. If it is on the eggs or feeding its young, 

 it sneaks off, unnoticed, before you can get 

 close. 



BABY HAWKS GET A NEW HOME 



For some four weeks we watched and 

 waited until the young birds were about 

 ready to leave the nest. In fact, when we 

 climbed up and peeked at them, they flut- 

 tered out of it and down to the ground. 



Carefully picking up all four, we put 

 them in a basket and carried them home. 

 Cooper's hawks are not noisy birds, and, 

 although they showed plenty of footwork, 

 they made no loud disturbance. Young 

 duck hawks would have been raising the 

 roof. 



Two of the birds we gave to some other 

 boys who had been going out to the nest 

 with us. The two females we kept. Among 

 hawks the female is "deadlier than the 



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