To mark World Falconry Day on Nov. 16, two falconers-in-training, Steve Warburton, a detective with Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office, and Rachael Greer, a biologist and veterinary assistant in Camp Verde, brought two rescued adolescent red-tailed hawks to the hills off Bill Grey Road outside of Cottonwood to let the raptors stretch out their wings and, hopefully, get one step closer to being released back into the wild.
The couple, both of Camp Verde, were supervised by their falconry sponsor, Michele Losee, a master falconer and raptor ecologist who heads Northern Arizona’s International Raptor & Falconry Center.
World Falconry Day, an initiative of the International Association of Falconers, is held on the date that UNESCO recognized falconry, the art of using birds of prey to assist humans in hunting, as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2016.
The day came, serendipitously, at a time when Warburton and Greer’s inexperienced red-tails were ready to practice chasing rabbits in the wild — and what better occasion to fly the hawks?
The millennia-old tradition of falconry is regulated in Arizona by the Arizona Game & Fish Department. Prospective falconers like Warburton and Greer must undergo a two-year apprenticeship with a sponsor, pass an exam and pass inspections of their home raptor roost — called a muse in the parlance of falconry — before they are eligible for a Sport Falconry License from Arizona Game & Fish.
Traditionally, falconry is associated with hunting, but Losee also uses it as a way to teach rescued birds to hunt for themselves in the wild.
To learn falconry — and do a good deed for the local ecosystem — Greer and Warburton adopted rescued nestling red-tailed hawks, Cerberus and Echo, this summer. The couple set up a muse in their backyard and began the process of training the hawks to work with humans.
Warburton is no stranger to animal training: He loves dog training and has served as a handler and trainer for the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office — including a dog named Haddie trained to sniff out fentanyl.
But Warburton said training raptors is different from training dogs; the raptors are less motivated by emotional bonds.
“The things that make a dog happy and a bird happy are completely different,” he said. “It’s more of a ‘you scratch my back, I’ll scratch your back’ relationship [with the raptors].”
Still, there are similarities. When Warburton tried to coax a huge ferruginous hawk named Quinn — who doesn’t like men — onto his hand, he took off his hat and hung his head non-threateningly. Eventually, the hawk flapped from Losee’s to Warburton’s hand.
“Most of the communication in training anything is non-verbal,” Warburton explained afterward.
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After readying all her gear at a pullout several miles from State Route 89A, Greer looked like a medieval squire with her hawk, Cerberus, perched on her leather-gloved hand. Cerberus is only six months old, but the hawk still looked huge and formidable, darting an intense gaze in all directions as the falconers prepared to start.
The strategy of the day’s exercises was simple: With Cerberus perched on either Greer’s hand or a perch attached to a pole, giving the bird an expansive view of the landscape, Greer, Warburton and Losee walked in a line across the hills. If a rabbit was roused by their advance, everybody started yelling “ho-ho-ho,” which is supposed to signal to the hawk to look for the rabbit — if it hasn’t already spotted it. Seeing the rabbit, the hawk should begin a chase.
“They have that natural instinct to chase, just like your dog at home,” Greer said.
Several times a rabbit was spotted, but Cerberus, who had only been flying for about six weeks, often ended a chase by awkwardly crash-landing into a juniper a way off, the rabbit long-gone down a hole.
Though the rescued red-tails look on the outside like well-honed hunters, Losee said that Cerberus and Echo were still learning basic skills, like landing in trees properly, and developing the muscles needed to swoop down on prey.
It’s amusing to see the hawk doing the fish-out-of-water routine, but for Greer and Warburton there appears to be just a touch of heartache with each failure, since Cerberus’ life will eventually depend on these skills.
“If they’re in the wild, they don’t get to come home and get fed,” Warburton said.
Though the rabbits were consistently eluding Cerberus, the hawk seemed to fly a little bit longer, getting a little bit closer to the cottontails as the morning progressed. On a last chase, the ho-ho-hos of the falconers reached a fevered pitch before Cerberus disappeared behind the crest of a low hill.
The group ran to catch up with Cerberus and came upon the hawk hopelessly tangled up, spread eagle, in a small mesquite bush. But in one of its talons, it clutched a rabbit.
“You’re going to see a change in that bird now,” Losee declared as an evidently excited Cerbeus, squawking with anticipation, was treated to a reward for its effort. “He’s got the ego to go with his looks now.”
“Now he knows he can do it,” Warburton seconded.
Greer and Warburton plan to release Cerbeus next spring. It’s not a long time away, but Warburton is confident their birds will continue progressing.
“They’ll be a whole lot more skilled and ready for life” by then, he said.
