Vermont School Teaches Students Rudiments of a Once-Royal Sport

Primal instinct, an empty stomach and a flap of wings send the Harris hawk swooping across the meadow to pounce.

In another life, a hapless rabbit or squirrel would be prey for the dark brown bird. Today, it’s a scrap of beef held in Mary Byrne’s gloved fist.

The bird lands gracefully on Byrne’s glove and rips at the meat.

The hawk is hungry. Byrne is ecstatic.

“There is no feeling in the world like that,” she says, smiling broadly.

By day, Byrne runs a television consulting business in New York City and Connecticut. The other students standing in this mowed meadow with hawks on their outstretched arms also have lives far from the business at hand--truck driver, mechanical engineer, retired airport manager, saleswoman, chef.

They have come to the British School of Falconry to learn something about an ancient sport once the exclusive domain of royalty.

Operating out of the Equinox Resort in southwestern Vermont, the 5-year-old school is the only one in the country that offers hands-on training and hunting with the birds, says lead instructor and master falconer Rob Waite.

“We get a lot of people who just want to do something different,” says Waite, 34.

For the armchair falconer, the school offers one-hour introductory lessons. The novice who wants more can take a four-day course on how to train a hawk or falcon to be a loyal hunter.

The Equinox program was inspired by a falconry school at Scotland’s Gleneagles Hotel. Costs range from $75 for an introductory lesson to $1,692 for the four-day session, which includes a single-occupancy stay at the resort.

Students learn to make equipment for the birds--hoods, leashes, bells and cages--and about stringent standards to earn state and federal permits. They learn how to condition a bird to increase its stamina and have it respond to whistled commands.

The school has 15 birds. Most are Harris hawks, which are social birds with good temperaments. Bred in captivity and trained from birth, the birds are accustomed to many different handlers.

Students quickly learn the birds are opportunistic predators that care little for those handlers. Their only concern is that morsel of meat in the fist.

The ancient Chinese and Persians are believed to have hunted with falcons. The European and British aristocracy picked up the sport in the Middle Ages. Falconry fell out of favor among the elite in the 1600s, when firearms came into common use.

The sport enjoyed an American resurgence in the 1920s after a National Geographic magazine report, but by mid-century, pesticides were decimating the numbers of birds of prey. Strict regulations enacted to protect wild birds also restricted access to them.

Today, becoming a licensed falconer takes several years of training that begin with apprenticing to a veteran handler, then trapping a bird in the wild. Would-be falconers must then pass a series of permitting exams administered by wildlife officials.

Waite takes pains to explain what the falconry school does and does not do. It doesn’t award permits, but it does teach students the sport’s biology and history, and it introduces them to training methods.

Few of Waite’s students intend to become licensed falconers. For dedicated falconers, that’s just fine. The fragility of the birds’ populations demands restrictions, says Brian Millsap, president of the North American Falconers Assn.

The NAFA, with 3,000 members the largest such organization in the world, takes a dim view of the British School, fearing it will popularize the sport and encourage a “casual dalliance,” Millsap says.

“We don’t disagree with the notion of exposing people to birds of prey,” says Millsap, a master falconer and a biologist with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. But “we certainly don’t want to see falconry grow just for the sake of seeing it grow.”

Kent Carnie, archivist for the Archives of American Falconry in Boise, Idaho, takes a similarly critical view.

“The very nature of the sport is too demanding,” he says. “People do not practice falconry to hunt things. They practice it to see the bird fly at its utmost. Their utmost is absolutely spectacular.”

Waite fully agrees. Watching one Harris hawk fly across the meadow, Waite speaks with the same wide-eyed wonder as a beginner. But he insists there’s nothing wrong with letting people whistle at birds and have them perch on their fists.

On the final day of the course, students go to an 800-acre preserve near Rutland and actually hunt with the birds. Instead of scraps of beef, the prey is the real thing: rodents, rabbits and squirrels. A trained spaniel flushes the quarry from the undergrowth, the birds pounce on them, and the novice falconers and instructors grab the captured game before the birds can devour it.

For Waite and other falconers, that’s all it is: a pure sport with a legacy of thousands of years and an ethic that values patience and a respect for nature.

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On the Web: The British School of Falconry at the Equinox:

https://www.equinoxresort.com/html/falconry.html

North American Falconers Assn.:

https://www.n-a-f-a.org