The case for walking away

Started a couple of weeks ago, and only finished just now...

As a falconer, one of my primary responsibilities is to flush game for my hawk. It is arguably my chief function, in fact—once training is completed and we're in the field, I'm just one of the dogs, and on some days the only dog. With passage hawks in particular, so many factors are beyond the falconer's control that producing quarry becomes by default the single biggest factor in the hawk's development: do it reliably and well, and the hawk may become great; do it poorly or sporadically and the hawk will never achieve her full potential, may even become unreliable herself.

...Which is why it's odd that sometimes what works is getting out of the hawk's way and letting her handle things herself.

The most common venue for such laissez-faire tactics involves brushpiles. Medium-sized brushpiles, specifically: not so big that dislodging game is an impossibility, but not so small as to make it a certainty, either.

Stekoa and I encountered such a brushpile a couple of weeks ago, on a piece of public land we hadn't hunted for a few years. Stekoa took a perch atop one in a long line of cedars forming a windbreak along the southern edge of the property; between the windscreen and the road was a recent (since our previous visit, anyway) pile of cedar and hawthorn. Tracks in the snow provided definitive evidence of rabbit activity, so I did my duty, climbing atop the pile, poking my stick down amongst the branches, even springboarding up and down a bit while remaining mindful of thorns. No joy, so after a couple of minutes I clambered carefully back down to terra firma, gave the brushpile a final desultory whack with my stick, and walked away. Crawled away, actually, back under the windbreak, but then walked away hoping to lead Stekoa to more productive ground. Nothing doing. As I turned back to call him on, I saw him disappear behind the windbreak, and heard the squalling of a rabbit.

And that's how it often happens: the bunny will sit tight through all manner of commotion—rabbits never get sufficient credit for their nerve—and then try to sneak out once it believes the danger has passed, unaware of the hawk watching from above.

Yesterday's hunt unfolded a bit differently. We were at a property we visit regularly, but exploring an area new to us. It soon became apparent, thanks this time to the absence of tracks in the snow, that rabbits were not using this particular treeline, nor the fringe of cattail marsh alongside. So, holding out little hope for the neighbouring field of sunflowers, I began to trudge (in the Chaucerian sense) across a snowy but otherwise empty soybean field, back toward another treeline known to harbour rabbits.

Stekoa, again, had other ideas. When I was about two hundred yards away, I heard him leave his perch high in a cottonwood snag and turned to see him flying, not toward me, but away to the side, toward the sunflowers. Flying with an evident purpose, he angled slightly downward, trading altitude for speed, then abruptly threw himself into a tight wingover. I waited for him to reappear, but saw and heard nothing from the sunflowers, so I began trudging the long way back to where I had seen Stekoa disappear. When I finally found him, he was halfway through eating a bobwhite quail, his first in years of trying.

He's always been a birdy redtail, and already had a pheasant kill to his credit, but the truth is that the dogs and I are a handicap to him when it comes to bird hunting. We've spoiled countless slips by flushing birds wild when we assumed he was eyeing rabbits—and I make no apologies to anyone but him, since he is after all primarily a rabbit hawk and flushing bunnies is our job. But it was nice to see him finally catch a quail. I'm just glad it was such a calm day that I could hear his bells from a distance, turn, and witness the flight. After all, what made it possible was that I had been walking away.