If we could watch our dogs fly

Unhooded. The world explodes into light. Feathers rustle. Tree and cloud, perch and pond quiver with life and color.

The jesses are off. And the leash. A step, a leap and only the air remains, and that’s all that’s needed to swoop low and then rise over rooftops and power lines until the world is a circle, and everything within it is game.

Wings flick against the wind, pausing, kiting, hovering, steadily staircasing higher, widening this gyre and watching everything within it -- blades of grass, patterns across the water, errant sparrows, cottontails, solitary field mice -- but waiting for a cue from man and dog.

They trek slowly across the field. A familiar flutter stirs beside the man, streaking fast and everything stops. Wings jet back, and the world, instantaneously rising, blurs, except for the speckles on the back of the pigeon’s nape. Feet and talons extend. Thump.

Only the air remains, now filled with torn feathers. A flutter in the grass, and another broad racking pass, then another, and the pigeon is on the ground, talons needling its mantle. It barely stirs. One shredding bite of feathers and one tearing bite of skin still it, and soon the skull is laid bare to the brains.

Dog circles. Man watches.

“She’s like a bottle of fine wine,” he says. “A nice piece of Spanish peregrine. No junky hybrid. This is the purest stuff.”

Tom Stephan stands in the open field. His yellow Lab, Buckshot, noses and pokes his way through the weeds. Brooke will eat a while longer before she is jessed-up, hooded and the world goes dark.

Mysterious, barbaric and arcane, what more needs to be said about falconing? What more -- other than that it is also beautiful. And that like other pastimes that involve the pursuit and the killing of game for pleasure, it is rich with contradictions.

“A falconer needs to be both predator and St. Francis,” says naturalist and sportsman Stephen Bodio, and between these extremes is the scope of a falconer’s world.

Falconers can wring the neck of a rabbit or toss a pigeon to the mercy of their birds, while arguing for the protection of grassland habitats or the preservation of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Theirs is the Ducks Unlimited brand of conservation -- save the pond in order to hunt it -- because hunting is, after all, at the heart of their sport.

Raptors flown from the fist are shotguns with talons. The kill-rate may not be especially high (“a lot of hunting and not much killing,” Stephan says), but listen to a rabbit mew as it dies and those of a certain sensibility will hear Thumper pleading against sadism.

Dreams of falconing usually start early. “My Side of the Mountain,” a 1937 National Geographic photo spread and The Hardy Boys’ “The Hooded Hawk Mystery” contributed to the obsessions of the mostly 40-ish, male crowd back in their pre-adolescent days. But Elisa McCormick is different.

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Puncture wounds

Push aside stereotypes about who a falconer is -- a refugee from the Renaissance Pleasure Faire waiting for a casting call from “Dragon Slayer IV,” a Saudi prince disaffected by his recent European tour, an idler from the Venice boardwalk whose tattoos and piercings have somehow lost their je ne sais quoi. If falconers seem less exotic than their sport warrants, don’t be surprised.

Falconing is all about discipline and sacrifice. As one website asks prospective falconers: Are you willing to dedicate your waking hours to a creature that merely tolerates your presence, is as affectionate as a stone and will cause you heartache and puncture wounds?

McCormick, a 32-year-old one-time religious studies student from UC Santa Barbara, is not your typical candidate for this boys’ club.

Falconers will tell you that the demographics of the sport are changing, that more women are getting involved, but they’ll also tell you that female hawkers are driven more by maternal instincts than killing instincts.

Save it for Naia, McCormick says. Naia is McCormick’s red-tailed hawk, now flying from telephone pole to billboard looking for game.

“Hohohohoho.” McCormick is trying to draw Naia’s attention to a rabbit. She’s standing near the interchange of the 60 and the 15 freeways in what once was a vineyard and is now a debris-strewn lot with three abandoned and well-tagged buildings, fast collapsing, hard up against a junkyard, warehouses and the Caltrans easement.

McCormick, who lives in Altadena, began her 100-mile round-trip drive to this vacant lot well before dawn. Her two-door Nissan is rigged with a perch in the backseat that sits on top of an old blanket and shower curtain.

An apprentice falconer, McCormick is following a course set by the Department of Fish and Game for anyone who wants to handle one of these birds. She passed a multiple choice, true-and-false test. She bought a hunting license. She found a sponsor (every new falconer is apprenticed to a master falconer), built a coop, known in the sport’s argot as a “mew,” and purchased all the necessary equipment.

Then she had to set a trap.

McCormick and her helpers saw Naia perched on a lamppost and slowly drove beneath her, barely stopping to open the passenger door and lay out a cage topped with a tangle of monofilament fishing line, and baited with a store-bought hamster. Then they hid behind a warehouse and waited. Naia wasted no time, quickly descending but getting caught in the mesh. McCormick and her friends rushed out to retrieve her. Holding her wings, they untangled her legs from the trap and leashed her ankles with jesses and two leather straps with bells known as bewits.

“When they handed the bird to me, it was a feeling of panic and wonder,” she remembers. “She was so beautiful and looked about as wild as she could get. When I first felt her on the glove, I was totally convinced of the power of her feet. The compression is phenomenal. It’s like putting your hand in a vise.”

Naia flies down from her billboard perch. McCormick runs the distance to where the bird stands on the ground with a cottontail, caught in that grip.

“Oh, you got it,” she says. “Good girl. Good girl.”

McCormick reaches down, breaks the rabbit’s neck, and with a pair of scissors helps Naia tear through the fur and skin and get to the flesh beneath.

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A swift stoop

There are some 4,000 falconers in the United States, almost 450 in California, and almost all of them gathered at the Red Lion Inn in Sacramento in January for the annual field meet. If you had wandered out by the pool that weekend, you’d have discovered more than 50 falcons, hawks and eagles surrounded by photographers, oglers and owners, diffidently sitting on knee-high perches atop a small fenced knoll, waiting for room service to bring them the mouse of the day.

Stare into a raptor’s eye and you stare into a long history of domestication that began in Central Asia thousands of years ago. The sport spread along the silk route into the Arabian world and then into Europe at the time of the Crusades and west into Japan. Falconers are not shy about celebrating this past -- from the bizarre accouterments (some of which seem ripped from an S&M; catalog for miniatures) to the texts of the sport itself (most of which seem to have been written before Shakespeare was born).

Beyond these trappings, however, lies the deeper appeal of the sport: Where else can you have such an intimate relationship with something so wild? Feed a raptor, train it well and it will always -- almost always -- return to you. Working with a bird, says one falconer, is like “walking a dog in three dimensions.” And who wouldn’t want to fly a dog?

On a dirt road overlooking a large open field in the Central Valley, nearly 200 people have gathered in the cold clear dawn. They stand around in knit caps with Styrofoam coffee cups in their hands, dogs on leashes and little kids jumping about. A bright yellow catering truck, Amor Tacos Azteca, can’t serve up the tamales and coffee fast enough. Two large Sunn speakers, driven by a generator, power out a succession of tunes by the Four Tops, the Beach Boys and Credence Clearwater Revival.

The California Hawking Club’s Sky Trials is the weekend gathering’s final event. Beyond the shoptalk and seminars, there are two formal meets. During the lure competition, a dozen or so falconers and hawkers demonstrated how well their birds attacked a pigeon decoy twirled on a 15-foot lanyard. It’s a cat-and-mouse game, and the birds’ acrobatics -- banking, turning, pivoting, stooping -- drew ooohs and ahhhs from the crowd.

But the Sky Trials is what everyone waits for. Once called -- in less sensitive times -- a pigeon derby, the event is a simulated hunt, in which the falconer lets go of his bird, watches it circle and climb into position high overhead and then signals for a racing pigeon to be let loose. Judges grade each falcon based on how high and fast and aggressively it flies after the pigeon.

For the pigeons, the odds are better than even: More escape than get caught. Which says something about how well they fly, for a falcon in its attack is not easy to elude. In clocking a falcon’s stoop -- that precipitous fall from the height of its flight to the quarry below -- researchers have clocked these birds in excess of 200 mph.

“When you think about what these birds go through in a stoop,” says Pat Redig, director of the Raptor Center at the University of Minnesota, “it almost goes outside the scientific arena. It takes you into a metaphysical world. It seems beyond Newtonian physics and how we normally regard falling objects in a gravitational world.”

Factor in that raptors can see at 160 feet what we see at 20 feet, have an extraordinarily fast flicker fusion rate (the point at which the oscillations of light disappear to become a continuous stream) that allows them to see the slightest movements, and you have flying -- and hunting -- machines without equal.

This makes the near extinction of the peregrine falcon 35 years ago all the more unsettling. By 1968, hunting and the promiscuous use of DDT had killed off the entire peregrine population in the eastern United States, and only through the dedicated work of a few wildlife managers and biologists and falconers did it recover. Founded in 1969, the Peregrine Fund is a model for other captive breeding programs, and by 1999, the endangered species list no longer included them. It remains one of the greatest triumphs of wildlife conservation in the 20th century.

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Dangerous hubris?

Like all blood sports in this increasingly blood-wary age, at a time when some ascribe rights to all species, falconry faces questioning.

Before launching into a discussion of psycho- and socio-biology, genetics and natural selection, falconers trot out common sense: Wild birds have a shorter life than captured birds. Falconers are only sharpening the bird’s natural instincts. Most of these birds can be released into the wild at any moment and survive.

Remembering the afternoon she captured Naia, McCormick admits that at first she had concerns. “But I don’t see anything wrong with being a spectator of natural selection. It’s all about the play between prey and predator, and I have seen how incredibly well-adapted the prey animals are in eluding their pursuers.”

Falconers call their fixation the most advanced form of bird watching, an understatement that raises an issue: When a human steps into nature, should it be as binocular-toting observer or falcon-armed participant?

Falconers see our species immersed in an eat-or-be-eaten continuum of predators and prey, as much a part of the evolutionary, biological cycles of life as any other. They say that denying this, or distancing ourselves from this truth, only feeds a dangerous hubris.

“Our relationship with nature gets messed up when we think of man and nature as being apart from one another,” says Stephen Layman, a guru in the falconing world. “It creates a hierarchical relationship which leads to a more presumptuous and dominant role for man.”

Dave Cherry, who looks like scruffy rocker Tom Petty, lives in Temecula with his wife, Lisa, their birds, three dogs, two cats and Jenny the burro.

It’s an older ranch-style home, fast being hemmed in by the rising tide of housing developments, golf courses and a shopping center called Silver Hawk. Like many falconers, the Cherrys have found themselves over the last 20 years moving and moving in an attempt to escape suburbanization.

Cherry maneuvers his Toyota T-100 pickup along a washboard road hemmed by a muddy shoulder and barbed wire fence. He turns left on an access road and stops in the middle of a field of winter wheat. It stands 8 inches high, its blades shimmering green and yellow in the breeze. Meadowlarks sing. The sky drops down and it starts to rain.

Undeterred, Cherry grabs a pheasant from a carrier. He tucks its head under its wing and waves the bird around and around to disorient it, then places it under a lone tumbleweed some 50 yards away.

Today he’s flying Louie, his 2-year old gyr-peregrine. Louie’s feathers are charcoal with white flecks, his eyes dark and amber. Cherry opens up the back of his pickup where Louie is perched, hooded and unaware.

He places a homing transmitter on Louie’s leg and on his tail feathers, then he puts on his glove and unties Louie from his perch. The bird steps onto his fist. Then in a series of graceful one-handed maneuvers, Cherry removes Louie’s leash, jesses and hood.

The bird rouses his feathers and is off.

Once Louie is high overhead, Cherry calls out to his dogs -- “Where’s the bird?” -- and the field is soon laced with their crisscrossing search.

Jamie, the English pointer, gets there first but keeps her distance. Sally and Jessie, the Springer spaniels, are less reserved. The bird takes off. Louie drops on it like the lightning that approaches from the south.

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On the Web: Watch a video report on the falconry subculture and see additional photos in an interactive slide show at latimes.com/falcon.