Birds of prey have stirred human emotions since time immemorial because of their fierce beauty, great strength, commanding presence, and superlative skill as hunters. Who knows when the first primitive man looked skyward and decided to adopt the eagle as his totem? Who first saw a peregrine stoop and thought to take her for his hunting companion? Surely it happened well before recorded history.
Today, birds of prey are arguably the most popular group of birds. Certainly they attract the most ardent and zealous devotees, whether they be falconers, rehabilitators, breeders, banders, scientists, or birdwatchers. There is something about these winged predators that evokes the strongest possible feelings in the breasts of their admirers and causes such people to do all kinds of strange things in order to maintain a closeness with their feathered idols, as Bill Gilbert detailed in a most revealing account for Audubon some years ago. To have such a magnificent creature as a hawk, falcon, or eagle accept you as its companion and to allow you t enter its space is to gain a rare perspective on life.
At a time in our social and cultural development when most human beings have lost direct contact with nature and living things and are separated more and more from the natural world, there is a great need for nurturing avocations that give people the opportunity for intimate, eye-to-eye relationships with other kinds of animals. Deep in the human psyche there is a longing to know other bloods. It is a part of what the Harvard biologist, EO Wilson, has termed biophilia - the love of life that stems from the ancestral and mystical connectedness that human beings have and feel for other forms of life. For many it is vibrant, overt passion for a few, special people. An opportunity to experience this kinship with other animals and with nature helps people to understand their dependence on the earth's natural processes and on the web of interconnected relationships among all living things.
Unfortunately, all too many of us now receive most of our information and knowledge of animals and the living world from television or the glossy pages of magazines and coffee table books. More and more human attitudes about nature are shaped by these representational, often distorted pictures rather than by real-life experiences.
It was not always so. When I was a boy growing up in the 1930s and 1940s in Texas, and later in California, I had a constant succession of wild pets ranging from jars full of red ants to horny toads, ground squirrels, deer mice, opossums, crows, owls, and my first hawk when I was nine years old. This venerable tradition of pet-keeping no doubt goes back to the very origins of humanity and was the basis for the domestication of animals. The list of great naturalists and biologists whose careers sprang from such simple pursuits is too long to enumerate but includes such names as Aristotle, Frederick II of Hohenstufen, John James Audubon, Louis Agassiz, Theodore Roosevelt, William Beebe, Aldo Leopold, Roger Tory Peterson, Fran Hamerstrom, and at least tow Nobel prize winners, Niko Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz, whose classic 1935 paper, Der Kumpan in der Umwelt des Vogels, was based largely on his personal experiences with hand-tamed birds.
One wonders how many potentially great biologists are being lost to society now because opportunities for hands-on experiences with wild animals are so limited. Gone are the days when a young boy or girl could go freely into the woods or field and bring back a wild pet as a companion. It is now against the law to do so in most places. There are international treaties, national laws, state and provincial laws, municipal laws, and societal disapprobation of all sorts. It is, of course, true and we all know that many of these wild creatures that used to be taken so lovingly into childhood embrace ended up either dead or leading miserable lives in confinement. That is part of the reason for the laws and social disapproval. Still, on balance, there is much to be said in favor of keeping wild animals as companions, and today the grosser forms of unintended mistreatment can be avoided with modern knowledge of veterinary practices, husbandry, and caretaking.
It is of more than passing interest that falconry, raptor rehabilitation, and captive breeding are among the few legal and acceptable ways in which people can still have personal relationships with nondomesticated animals. The practitioners of these pursuits are privileged members of society, and because birds of prey are so highly esteemed and basically rare creatures, they have a special responsibility to make certain that the birds which come into their ken and care receive the most enlightened and humane treatment possible. Many new innovations in the care and handling of birds of prey have come about in the last 30 years: captive breeding, telemetry, greatly increased knowledge of nutrition and treatment of diseases and injuries, understanding of behavior and how it can be modified, especially by imprinting, and new equipment such as Aylmeri jesses, loop leashes, shelf perches and other things. |
