Sorry about the lapse in time between posts. The amount reading has escalated from day 1. I am busily trying to catch up, since I was informed of my acceptance only two weeks before classes started. Other students had an entire summer to read up on their area of study, whereas I began to read during the confusion of moving to a new country in one week, and during the hectic atmosphere of transitioning to a new life. I am ever learning, and despite how I feel sometimes I know that I am on track to meet the general deadlines of a master’s student as well as produce a cogent thesis.
One of my classmates has picked up falconry over the past few years and, hearing how I’ve worked with birds of prey, invited me out to participate in a hunt. While she is from Ontario and just moved into the area for a master’s program, she had made contacts with local falconers. Late Saturday afternoon we made our way to the home of Dr. Lynn Oliphant, a retired professor of wildlife anatomy and renowned falconer. Lynn, with a few other guys, practically pioneered the methods for peregrine recovery in Saskatchewan and even worked with the University of Minnesota, sharing their methods for falcon recovery in the Midwest U.S. Lynn also lives with his wife in a beautiful straw bale house and started an eco-community about an hour south of Saskatoon. In short, he’s a pretty cool dude. Lastly, Lynn has three gorgeous Munsterlanders, which are a little known German hunting breed known for their intelligence and obedience. We drove looking for good ponds to fly the birds around. A good pond was defined as having not too many reeds and being smallish. You want to minimize the opportunity for the ducks to hide, thus maximizing the chance that they will go airborne. If the pond is big then the ducks can quickly fly or swim to other parts of the pond. If there are too many reeds, they can simply hide. If the pond is just right, the dogs can flush them out into the sky.
Lynn brought along two inexperienced peregrines; a male juvenile and a female. He flew the male first. He let go of the jesses and the falcon opened its wings, flapped them into the wind and took off. The falcon rode the wind higher and higher until it could comfortably soar and watch the ground. We got closer to the pond and Lynn yelled, “Flush!” The dogs took off and surrounded the pond, barking. Water splattered as duck wings battered the water. The ducks rose off of the pond in frenzied confusion and the falcon darted out of the sky. In an instant it singled out a duck and closed the gap. At the last second, the duck pivoted in the air and dipped under the falcons talons. The duck made a quick turn and plummeted, crashing back into the water where the falcon abandoned pursuit. It was a failed attempt. Lynn said it was experiences like those that teach the falcons how to hunt with him and the dogs. He said that the falcon was out of position, that he had let himself drift too far and that when the ducks flew the distance was further than it should have been had the falcon been keen to the position of the dogs. Lynn said the falcons quickly learn the significance of the dogs and to watch for their movements towards the ponds.
The female fared slightly better. She made contact with her quarry but failed to injure it enough to drop it out of the sky. The duck made it back to the water where the dogs swam it down. Lynn tossed a wing of a bird to the female falcon that he had ripped with his bare hands earlier, which reminded me that it wasn’t that weird when I didn’t use gloves to rip of little bits of quail for training Horus, the peregrine at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. Also, we made some friends who had us over for a dinner party on Friday. Two of their friends showed up with an appetizer of mini buckwheat pancakes topped with salmon and crème fraiche. Oh, and you had to eat it while taking a shot of vodka. It was in the recipe, they claimed. We came to a consensus that the vodka should not be in the recipe. Then we made jokes about Canadians chucking beavers. Many different kinds of wildlife.
