Festival of Falconry

An e-mail from Kazakhstan pinged into my mailbox the other day. I laughed out loud when I opened the attachment - a photo with newly-made Kazakh friends at the Festival of Falconry, held in Reading, England in 2007. My camera died shortly after arriving – and I had virtually no photos of my own.

One thing I love about falconry meets on the Continent, is the rich multiculturalism. Sitting at dinner with falconers from several different nations, discussing the day's sport and a myriad of other things as best one can through shared languages and fragmented translations, never grows old.

Oddly, fragmented though the conversations may have been, I never remember them that way - the translator is quickly forgotten and, when I think back on the memory, it is as though we were conversing quite fine on our own.

With that sentiment, I enjoyed myself to no end in Reading - the Festival is proof that falconry transcends age, socioeconomic status, and language - it is amazing the kinds of detailed flights that one is able to gesticulate and recount through a small universal vocabulary! In particular, I found it a treasure for eagle falconry.

Eagle falconers from across Europe and central Asia attended. I fondly recall discussing such things as the Velvet Revolution and its impacts on falconry with a Slovak, methods of hacking eagles with an Austrian, the homeryi race of golden eagles with a Belgian, the thrill of waiting-on flights with the Brits, and the virtues of passage eagles with Kazakhs.

Of course, there is much more than the eagle side of things, and far more to be said on the event in general. The second Festival is scheduled for July 11-12th, 2009.

One photo I did manage; Turkmen falconers.

Urban Merlin

I'm in an ornithology class at the moment. I've taken and TA'ed a "Bird Ecology" course, but that was down at the university's Biological Station and only lasted the better part of two weeks. This new, semester-long course is proving to be good fun. As expected (and one would hope), we're often out in the field looking for birds.

I missed an excursion last week. I did have an excuse - I was watching a presentation on monitoring Peregrine populations in Scotland, but the next day I arrived in class to find everyone chatting enthusiastically about an unusual sighting.

Amidst the bustle of the enclosed city of Norman, the class had spied a Merlin. In a newly built neighborhood edition, there he was on a lone, gnarled and bare tree. Placid and accommodating, perhaps preoccupied with scanning the field that stretched out in front, the Merlin allowed a gaggle of college students get close.



A herpetology student in our class, Sam Martin, took these fine photos. I was delighted to see them; there is something special about Merlins. He also spotted the Eastern Bluebird pictured above and this Lesser Yellowlegs below. The latter was methodically working around the pond edge after a flock of Green-winged Teal had fled.

Eagles in Central Europe

There is no shortage of junk of Youtube, but I stumbled across a worthwhile video today.

Here's a short video of golden eagles being flown on brown hare and roe deer in central Europe. It is quite good; the creator also made a brief video (that has already made the Internet rounds) of a well known "Christmas Meet" in Austria, where eagles were being flown in casts after roe through a snow-laden landscape.

There is also a goshawk hidden in there - which looks positively tiny in comparison. Many of these areas are devoid of rabbits, and even small goshawks become very proficient at taking brown hares. I particularly enjoy the final flight in the video, where an eagle overhauls a roe but just can't work her way up the head before being kicked off.



The video hints at the herds of roe that one can find in open fields in Austria, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary. In many places the deer are considered pests, they are so numerous. The first roe I ever saw genuinely startled me. I was walking through chest-high, somewhat thick, rapeseed in Czech when I noticed something big shift in from of me. All of the sudden a lanky form sprang upwards and galloped out into the open. It was rather like flushing a pheasant at your feet - a characteristic explosion of movement that I had not anticipated at all.