Accipitrarius Sordidatus

Both hawks are molting.

I tried to fly Smash one more time after I got back from the canyonlands.  His weight was still on the high side and I got impatient.  I paid the price.

I spent almost an hour in a greenbriar thicket conning him out of a tree.  On the way back to the truck, he dropped a primary.

That was two weeks ago.  After 8 months of hawking, I thought we were all ready for a break.

Last night I took one of my daughters out for a driving lesson.  We drove on the road next to my favorite field.  I couldn’t help wondering what might be moving out there in the grass.

We are heading out to the Caprock Canyonlands Saturday morning. It’s my annual week or so retreat from technology and hygiene. I need to go see how the prairie falcons are doing.

I’ve made the trip many times, never alone, but never more than five of us. It’s supposed to snow there the day before we get there and will likely be bumping up to 100 before we return.

We will hike for hours or sit in the sand of a little used wash, watching the wind erode the canyon walls. We may find old bones and break one or two of our own. We’ll spit sand out of our coffee and pick prickly pear spines from places on our arms and legs we thought were protected.

Despite a barren and inhospitable first impression, it is a warm land with life re-emerging after winter. I have pages of triple- columned lists of plants, grasses, bugs, reptiles, birds, and animals we’ve seen or heard or just found traces of over the years.

It’s a trip back in time.

The canyon as we know it was formed in the triassic period, after the continents separated and the great salt sea drained away. For over 10,000 years, man has lived in these canyons. Some left only the barest trace, others left a turbulent history well known to us today.

Over time I have learned that my family is part of that recent history and it is good to reconnect with them in the simplest manner of just being there.

It is a good place and I am more than ready to go.

We got a break on Sunday.  A rabbit hiding under a small cedar atop the ridge at our usual hunting field did not.

The wind finally laid a bit and we got out for a while at mid-afternoon.  I really didn’t expect much, birds are scarce now and in this spot, the rabbits are very wise to the ways of all the local predators.

These aren’t your soft, plump city bunnies, full of fat and comfortable from feasting on ornamentals, wary only to the occasional dog or great horned owl.  The rabbits here, when they come out at all during the day, are on full alert.  In this field alone there are bobcats, coyotes, foxes, dogs, great horneds, red-tails, harrier hawks, American kestrels, and a couple of Harris’ hawks that cruise the acres shark-like, taking anything and every thing they can.

Animals lower in the food chain do not move very far from safety.    The stakes are high.  What looks like an empty, unused field needing industry to claim part or all of it, is full of life and death at each moment.

The new owners of the adjacent property cleared all cedars, grass, and underbrush, making the land look like a park.  They brought in cattle and big bales of hay to complete the scene.  I’m a poacher there now.  Nothing to worry about, though, I don’t hunt patented steak.

At first it bothered me.  These fields had gone fallow and all the native grasses and other forbes were returning.  Aside from the highly invasive cedars, we beginning to see a little of what this area may have looked like before it was over-farmed.

The conservationist in me was horrified.  Righteous indignation seized hold and I was outraged that, once again, nature was losing to profit and alien sensibilities.  Bermuda grass was planted, switchgrass was  plowed under.  Nature’s work was undone.

Then I realized that all the rabbit habitat on that side was gone and now the little critters only had my field to for retreat.

So, I got over it. Quickly.

Besides, in the long run, the picturesque cattle park will one day give way to a new high school, manufacturing buildings, or something else vitally important to what we do as people.  Nothing is going to completely escape our footprint as long as we’re here to find a spot to build something on.

In the meantime, I now have a field with rabbits.

And Smash is very agreeable to the current situation.

The cottontail I mentioned earlier planned his escape well.  He resolutely held his position under a cedar less than two feet tall as we did all the correct rabbit hunting things.  By all rights, a city bunny would have flushed well before he did.  He let us all stand still and talk.  He let us get close and stop next to him in sparse cover.  He made no move to give away his position.

After we all had passed, he bolted in the opposite direction from the hawk, giving himself at least a 10 yard head start.

What he did not realize is that Smash is at a point where he is strong and focused.  He is flying hard and fast with no intention of missing or letting go.  He is a Harris’ hawk at his peak.

The rabbit ran all of five yards before Smash had covered the distance and latched on to him.  The strength of a young buck in his prime carried them another five yards.

Then it was over.

Less than a few seconds had passed, but no time at all registered with me.  I felt him kick the pole back as he took off and then I was on my knees making in.

Smash is having much too good of a season to even think of stopping now.

This is the time of year where I usually hang it up for the season.  Our March winds blow hard and almost daily.  Add to that the dozens of family activities, and I usually find myself with fewer opportunities to get out.  It becomes almost impossible to find enough hours in the day to react quickly enough when the infrequent hole in the wind appears.

It might be different this time around.   Daylight savings time begins tomorrow.  We’ll have an extra hour to watch and prepare for a sudden drop in wind near sunset.

So, this year I haven’t stopped.  Well, not completely.  As I said previously, Charlie is taking a break.  He has to get ready to start flying again in mid-summer when the birds come to snatch the ripening grapes and berries at the local farms and vineyards.

I have given Smash a bit more than a week’s rest.   I started taking his weight up right after his big day a couple of weeks ago.  We hunted once last Sunday, but it was obvious he was not as interested.  Tomorrow he will be back in the killing zone.

And, if the forecast holds, the wind will co-operate, too.

I guess that’s a roundabout way to say that I’m not calling an end to the season any time soon.

Last Sunday was one of those rare days that could have ended at any point and it would have been a good enough one.

Spring has come and green is showing everywhere.  The greenbriar vines are thickening and the blackberry vines are getting a deeper red.  Places we could get into for a deeper chase are starting close off behind walls of thorns.

The huntable birds are still curiously absent, usually having been back several weeks ago.  No matter because Smash’s attention is fully focused on fur right now.

Charlie is fed up and molting, unconcerned with field and its activity.  He’s waiting for his turn to start again in a few months.

I don’t remember exactly how the day began, probably it was annoying in some way.  The dishwasher is broken, so there is always a pile of dishes.  Work is changing back to its old ways of giving me way too much to do.  I’m sure however it got going, it started earlier than I wanted and later than I needed.

Then it changed.

Dee Ann came downstairs after having read a few chapters of In Season, Matt Mullenix’s excellent journal of a season of falconry and, for those living close to a falconer, a source of great insight as to why we are are what we are.  After years and especially the last few months of living with my almost unending frustrations, Matt’s words hit home with her.

In his book, Matt admitted, after his many years in falconry, that he has given up trying to explain why he goes through the rituals, pains, and, when fortune is uncharacteristically benevolent, elations that are our sport.  My own explanation has been reduced to, “I can’t not do it.”

In just a few of his words, she changed from “Why do you do this to yourself?” to “Now I understand.”

That made the the day good enough.

In the early afternoon, my new pre-apprentice, Redcoat aka He-Who-Travels-On-Thin-Ice-In-The-Comments-Section, came by for a Sunday hunt south of here.  On our way down Preston Road, there were an uncountable number of red-tails pairing up, chasing off interlopers, and setting home territory for this year’s brood.  By the looks of it, we will have an unusually large number of them and many other species of raptors this year.  I haven’t seen it like this in many years.  The drive alone was worth the day.

We met up with an old friend, Jay, who was flying his gyr-peregrine hybrid while also taking a young man on his first hunt.  I used to have the hybrid and never had any success with it at all.  In fact none of its many previous owners have ever been able to get to go up over 50 and pay any attention to matter at hand.

Jay is a true Master falconer, not the time-in-grade master falconer like most of us.  I gave him Cowboy after his own peregrine was killed last year by a red-tail.  I figured he’s the only one who could ever make this falcon work.  I wasn’t wrong, yet still I never expected what I saw.

Cowboy went up to about 500-600 feet over a pond and turned the fastest stoop I’ve ever seen on a pigeon.  The pigeon never made more than a hundred yards.  I would have never believed it if I hadn’t seen it.  No ducks for him this year, but I am positive that won’t be the case next season.  Good enough.

After that we all went spec hunting with Smash.  Jay knew of an isolated spot in the flood plain in his neighborhood.  It has a major road on one side with a school, school district office and a nursery bordering the other three.  It’s not very big, maybe 10 acres or so, with a lot of water and brush in it.  He always suspected there might be a rabbit or two hiding out in there.

Smash caught the first one in less than a minute out of the truck.  90 minutes later my game bag was full.  He caught four large ones, averaging over 3 lbs each.  There were at least more 20 flushes he either never saw or happened out of his range.  He could, and would, have caught more, but I had no room left to carry them and I was worn out.  Next time I’ll wear my larger vest.

At 11:00 pm Sunday night I finished butchering the last of the rabbits and the latest squirrel kill from the dog.  The most tender rabbit cuts went into a bowl of milk for Monday night’s Rabbit Sauce Piquante.

One last draw on a good, cold beer and Sunday was over.

It was good enough

It would be easier at this point to list the parts that don’t hurt.

The wind has switched around to the east and it’s gusting over 40 and starting to spit rain.  They say it’s supposed to rain for the next two days.  That would be good; we’re literally burning up.  It’s that time of year.  No rain in months and big winds combine to make for hard hawking and hundreds of fires.

Fortunately I have a couple of cold beers and some leftover crawfish etouffee in the refrigerator,  a big bottle of Advil in the cabinet, and the smell of fresh butchered rabbit on my hands.

I went hawking today down in a very urban area with friends, old and new.  It’s a field that was supposed to be spectacular, with rabbits everywhere.  I have heard that story so many times before and it’s always the same;maybe you end up with a flush or two, but at best, lots of rats.

This time it was true.   Amazingly so.

At one point I was watching five rabbits run with one sitting in front of me, looking at me knowingly as if to say, “Your hawk isn’t going to hunt a damned thing with that dog in the field.”

He was right, of course.  Since I’m much, much smarter than a lowly little cottontail, it took me only about an hour and a half and probably thirty ignored slips to come to the same conclusion.

Jay’s dog is a good one, she worked hard and pushed a lot of rabbits.  She’s had many good years flushing for hawks and today was her first time in years.  Even though the hawk didn’t handle it well with her in the field, I’m sure she’ll sleep well tonight, dreaming of the scent.

New field, new dog, new member of the party and Smash was having none of it.  He ripped the side of my face, flew up to a perch, and waited for things to be more to his liking.  It did not matter how many rabbits ran under him, he was not going to chase.

Once the dog was in the truck he came down to the carry pole and the hunt began.

Of course we had already flushed the easy ones.  The remaining rabbits were sneaking away, using every trick in their trade.  They’d put in tight at our feet, invisible and still until we passed, bolting when hawk and hunters weren’t looking.

Eventually, one rabbit made a miscalculation.   Maybe she bolted a little early or headed in a slightly wrong angle.  Whatever it was, Smash grabbed her quickly and although she dragged him through brush and dense cover, he had her and never let go.

I was the only one who saw it.   I turned and fired my very old and ashamedly large self off after Smash and his prize.  Throttled up and at full speed, I covered a full two or three feet before discovering that my feet were completely trapped in brush.

At the instant when both gravity and I noticed my entrapment, gravity took the predictable route and behaved excruciatingly according to theory.

Nature, having just ignored my plans of hawk and dog, made up for her slight by planting my face in all she had to offer at that moment.  What she had to offer right then was uneven, pointed, and not very tasty.

At least my friends were there for me.

Knowing I might be seriously hurt, or even worse, completely disabled, since after all, who knows what might happen to a someone like me who takes such a horrific fall, they unconcernedly ran on after hawk and rabbit.

As my vision cleared, I noticed rabbit fur inches from my face and tried to call out and share what I saw, but I had no breath to do so.  Slowly realizing that I may not be as dead as I felt, I struggled to my feet and eventually caught up with all of them to end the chase.

Not a word of concern for my well-being was spoken.

I would do the same for them without hesitation.

At least there are no pictures.

I’ve been neglecting writing lately.  Too many things to get done in a day.

The hawks are doing well for what I’ve been asking of them.  We’re still looking for rabbits in Grayson County.  There aren’t many and what few there are, we’ve chased them all at least once.   Smash had a great flight today at one.  All of 17.5 feet before the cottontail peeled him off his butt in the debris of the old high school.  Rabbit flushes don’t happen often and when they do, they’re over fast.

Last Sunday, Dee Ann and I took Smash out on a spec hunting expedition west of here.  It seemed like a very good spot until the four-wheelers showed up.  Smash was high in weight and not very interested in hunting, and the noise and activity put an immediate end to the hunt.  At least the kids had the decency to shut their toys down when they saw us coming out of the field with a bating hawk.

The real story lies in the things we saw.

As we drove to and from the hunting site, we saw the usual kestrels, red-tails, and black and turkey vultures.  We also were lucky enough to see a merlin, maybe even two.  Harrier hawks are in our area in good numbers this year and we saw one cruising low over a field on our way home.

The real story was when we started heading north out of Sherman.  As we passed by the Olive Garden on the east side of the highway, we saw two raptors  on the ground in the grass between the highway and the restaurant.  With only a quick glance out of the corner of our eyes, we thought they were red-tails, but it didn’t seem right.  Two hawks on the ground at the same time next to each other.  Not right.

Doing what people like us do, I hit the exit immediately to go around again.  Working through parking lots, we got on the frontage road and drove past the hawks again.  This time we went by more slowly and as we noticed that not only were they not red-tails, we saw they had brown streaky brown breasts and ruby red eyes.

It was a pair of Cooper’s hawks in full courtship display.  Right in front of Olive Garden with traffic flying by on the highway next to them.

They could have cared less.

We cared a lot.

It was an amazing sight.

A few years ago, I got an 18 month old German shorthair pointer named Strut.  I always intended to try and train him to be a hawking dog.  I got a little bit of equipment, a book, read a few websites, and never did anything with him.  Strut’s been a ball chasing yard dog ever since.

Until tonight.

We’ve hunted the last three days and the weather ahead looks good enough to keep going through the weekend.  There has been a great deal more rabbit activity, but as always, it’s close cover work.  These hawks have to adjust to the fact that they’re not going to ever see an open field dash.

Smash got burned three times last night by the very difficult to catch airport rabbits.  Smash hesitates a little too long and the bunnies put in easily. Charlie goes after them from much too far away.  The boys will learn, but it’s frustrating work all the way around.

After last night’s hunt, it became clear that the dog had become an absolute necessity.

So, tonight after I put Smash in the truck to go out, I brought Strut in and looked at my wife and said, “Come on, it’ll be fun!”

She knows what that means and piled into the truck with the rest of us.

I had no idea what would happen, but I figured at the worst case I can always get Smash back and the dog knows where the truck is.  Having my wife along would help the authorities piece together any investigation that might be necessary.

It turned out fine.

Strut didn’t really know what he was looking for and, at times,  wouldn’t listen worth a damn, but he was sincere and tried real hard.  I only had to call him away from the hawk on the ground twice before he caught on.

Smash got used to him after about a half hour.  He bolted on his first catch after Strut came running over to him, but once we got all that settled, he wasn’t the least bit concerned while on his other kills.

There was one point where Smash was on the ground searching for a rat that got away.  Strut was close to him, nose in the air sniffing.  I was on the other side of Smash, watching him and the dog.  If you drew a circle around us, it would have been less than three feet in diameter.  Suddenly, about a half foot from Smash and a foot from Strut, a rabbit dashed for cover.  None of us saw it there in the grass and I was the only one to see it take off.

Tonight I learned that I have to figure out how to get this dog to listen, respond better, stay in a bit closer, and understand what game we’re out there for.  Judging by how quickly he picked up what he learned today, it may not be that hard.

Strut had the time of his life today.

So did I.

My wife thoroughly enjoyed it all, too.

And Smash got a bunch of birds.  As he does.

We had a very fine Christmas this year, which we all needed.

Busy-ness completely took over many weeks ago.  Activities that normally wrap up at the first of November continued well beyond – our high school football team made the playoffs, my youngest daughter’s soccer team made the state championships, and another daughter made it into the state band competitions.  My oldest daugher came to visit with my grandson for a few weeks.

Old neighbors passed from our lives forever and a surprise December tornado came through town late one Tuesday night.  Seasonal ailments came and went.

Holiday planning, parades, concerts, parties, shopping, cooking, and relations were dealt with in double-time.  Plans changed and changed again.  Rush and hurry replaced routine and everything got in place at last possible minute.

Christmas Day came quietly and easily.  Nothing was left undone but to enjoy family, food, and a happily peaceful day.  It could not have been better.

And now, the feasts have been laid and dishes are cleaned and put away; wine bottles are empty, and only a small taste of whiskey remains for a quiet moment, perhaps later tonight.

The wind is high today, pulling warm Gulf air through ahead of a front due to arrive Saturday night.  The hawks are perched out, talking loudly, patience at an end.  The dogs are restless for more than kennel and yard.

So am I.

The intended definition of time is that it is part of a measuring system used to organize events into a sequence, create a sense of order and specify duration between events, and enable comparisons between durations and intervals.

Somewhere along the way, duration of time became the basis of assigning and judging value.  People traded based on how long a duration of valuable services were given and received.   The concept came with both rewards and abuses.  Tales of doctors who take up your valuable time by making you wait excessively to see them and lawyers who bill for seemingly impossible numbers of hours for services are commonplace enough to make your ears glaze over with each telling.

Then came the Age of Information.  Time and duration intervals previously known only to exist in the scientific crowd suddenly entered everyone’s daily language – milliseconds, nanoseconds, megaherz, megamillions powerball, and more.

Durations are now shorter and shorter and people get involved in more and more things to fill each interval.  A family’s schedule is full and overlapping,  an endless and on-going attempt to orchestrate impossibility.  Any successfully completed event  is met with smug self-acknowledgement of how well we can multitask.

People understand a negligible amount of what lays behind technology and science, but they sure do love the vocabulary.  Multitasking!  Women do it better than men!  Men can’t do it at all!  Only men can do this job because it requires multitasking!!  I can do it and you can do it, too, if you you read my blog, buy my book, watch my infomercial!

As with most things, if folks truly understood what it meant, the word would never be used again in common conversation.

Instead, the concept has been assimilated and redefined for mass consumption, and with it appears that  the very nature of time itself is changed.

Nowhere is this any more apparent as it is in the world of Major Technology Consulting Sevices.  We have not only organically leveraged our synergies and extended our core competencies with value-driven values derived from our best shore approaches to continuously improve upon customer satisfaction experience through extension of the wait periods of the dreaded doctor’s visit and hours billed at numbers that lawyers do not (yet) know the names for,  we have changed the very perception of time itself.

Terms like second, minute, hour no longer are part of a system of measurement, created to bring order between events.  They are now physical objects in space that have all the attendant properties such as mass, shape, velocity, and so on, unrelated to one another.  The only carry-over from the out-dated way of viewing time is its limitlessness.

I didn’t go very far in math and went too far for my ability in physics.  My ability to understand marketing is nil and that is what causes me the most difficulty understanding these new concepts.  What I have gleaned from it all so far is that these newly acquired physical properties can be defined thusly: a minute is a polygon with n-sides, where n is my current task load in a specified interval, which is made up of a whole lot of little intervals that are just like it, combining into bigger intervals with even more stuff just like all the others.  n-1 is the maximum real number of tasks I can accomplish during any one of those interval thingies, but is of no consequence.  Furthermore, the value of n increases exponentially over, er, time.

The most obvious flaw with that concept is that if I should ever reach a state of having nothing to do in any interval, it would then become an object with a negative number of sides and many new books, blogs, social sciences, and hyperventilating consultancies would have to brought in to quickly explain The New Multitasking.

The folks I work with would never let that stop them, though.  We’d just have to modify the billing system.  Won’t take long at all.

Every now and then in the last few weeks, I have managed to assign one of those n-1′s to hawking and slipped out.  Nothing big happening, but leaves are gone and it’s looking better out there.

The hawks are doing well, even though Charlie clearly is not our President-elect.  He did finish a close second to the Republican guy in our middle school’s 6th grade.  He probably would have won if we started campaigning sooner.

Unfortunately, we ran out of time before we could really put any effort into it.