Features: June 2009

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Falconer Bill Deckert with his male gyrfalcon-saker falcon hybrid.

Male gyrfalcon-peregrine falcon hybrid circles over a field in Long Island, New York.

Male gyrfalcon-peregrine falcon hybrid eats a “tidbit”—in this case part of a quail—as a reward for a successful flight.

Male gyrfalcon-saker falcon hybrid eats a tidbit, guarding (“mantling”) it by spreading his wings and tail.

Rebecca Kessler

Kit-chup! Kit-chup! Kit-chup! Kit-chup! Kit-chup! Tom Cullen calls, approaching his aviary. The sun warms a March afternoon; raptor breeding season has just begun. Stray feathers and dry leaves litter the entryway to the wood-frame building. A dusty, acrid odor of guano tinges the air.

Kit-chup! Kit-chup! Kit-chup! Kit-chup! Zephyr, a male Barbary falcon (Falco pelegrinoides), responds from inside an adjacent room. Cullen keeps up his end of the high-pitched conversation as he grabs a broad hat off a peg and pops it on his head. It’s a hat like few others: black rubber, with a tubular brim, a ripply dome, and a tuft of shag carpet on top. He enters the chamber and approaches Zephyr, who is calling from a shoulder-high shelf covered with pea gravel to mimic a nesting area. Kit-chup! Kit-chup! Kit-chup! Kit-chup! Cullen offers more assurance that he’s ready to mate. With a rush of wings, the falcon flaps over and lands on Cullen’s hat. After repositioning himself a few times, Zephyr lifts his wings, extends his tail, and flies off to his shelf, all in a matter of seconds. “Good boy!”

Exiting the chamber, Cullen doffs the hat and collects a few drops of semen from the brim with a pipette, transferring them into a small plastic vial. Down the hall lives a female Barbary that, like Zephyr, is imprinted on, or sexually oriented toward, Cullen, and so won’t mate naturally. Later on, Cullen will put similar moves on her, sans hat. She’ll turn up her tail feathers for him, exposing the opening to her reproductive tract. He’ll insert a loaded pipette and complete the two birds’ union. Such is the work of a raptor breeder—the ultimate go-between.

A falconer for forty-plus years, Cullen has been breeding raptors since the 1970s. He has nearly six dozen adult exotic birds of prey at his home in rural Goshen, New York. Last year he raised fifty-six baby falcons—Barbaries, lanners, luggers, sakers—mostly for sale to other falconers. And this year is shaping up to be a good one, too. (Some of his other work with birds has gotten him into trouble in the past. Most recently, he served four months in federal prison for illegally importing black sparrowhawks in 2000, a charge he disputes.) Cullen’s operation represents a fairly new development in the ancient sport of falconry. The past four decades have seen advances in captive breeding, tracking technology, and veterinary care, as well as the advent of an extravagant form of falconry practiced in the Middle East. Those developments have changed the sport substantially—and sometimes controversially.

Falconry originated at least 4,000 years ago, probably in Central Asia, and has been practiced for millennia throughout Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe. Initially a means of hunting, the practice was adopted by aristocrats as a leisure activity. In the United States, the sport took hold in the 1930s. Today there are 4,200 licensed falconers nationwide. In essence, falconry is a hunting partnership between a person and a bird of prey, and it is that cooperative relationship with a wild animal that falconers cherish. The thrill comes as much from the chasing as from the catching. Peregrine falcons, for instance, hunt their mostly avian prey from staggering heights. Their aerial maneuvers and high-speed dive-bombing attack, and the audible crack when they collide with their target in midair, are candy to a falconer’s sweet tooth.

Falconers use several species of falcon, hawk, and less commonly, buzzard, eagle, and owl. Traditionally, falconers trap young wild birds in summer; mold their hunting and train them to return when called; hunt with them in the fall and winter; and then free them in the spring. Increasingly, however, the birds are bred in facilities like Cullen’s, either naturally or by artificial insemination. Whether wild caught or captive bred, birds may be kept for years. The quarry is usually a game bird or a small mammal, but a big eagle can take down a small deer, even a wolf. A morsel of meat is the bird’s reward. Male gyrfalcon-peregrine falcon hybrid eats a “tidbit”—in this case part of a quail—as a reward for a successful flight.

The sport is demanding: each bird needs hours of training, care, and exercise, plus hundreds of dollars’ worth of housing, gear, and daily meat. Subject to federal and state law, it’s also one of the most heavily regulated sports. It requires a permit, testing, abundant paperwork, a two-year apprenticeship, and, to achieve the rank of master falconer, five more years of experience. State inspectors make home visits to scrutinize raptors’ housing and care. The blood sport inspires passionate dedication. Four centuries ago, England’s King James I described falconry as “an extreme stirrer up of the passions.” Today, Peter Capainolo, a falconer and an ornithologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, explains that “marriages and relationships end over these bloody things. It’s an all-absorbing thing.”

The captive breeding of raptors emerged from a crisis. By the late 1960s, raptor populations across the U.S. had collapsed as a result of exposure to the pesticide DDT, which causes females to lay thin-shelled, easily crushable eggs. Peregrine falcons (F. peregrinus) vanished from the East Coast. Alarmed, falconers and biologists jumped in to help. In 1970 Tom J. Cade, a falconer and biologist (now emeritus) at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, New York, established the Peregrine Fund, which has since relocated to Boise, Idaho. The group pioneered artificial-insemination techniques and figured out how to breed raptors in quantity, largely using parent birds donated by falconers. DDT was banned in 1972, and two years later the Peregrine Fund began releasing captive-bred birds into the wild. Thanks in no small measure to falconers, among others, peregrines and other wild raptors have now staged a remarkable comeback.