Rock Eagle

They don't build 'em like this anymore, either.

Near Eatonton, Georgia is Rock Eagle, the best-known "Indian Mound" in this part of Georgia. There is also a Rock Hawk in the same county (Putnam), and these are considered the only two bird effigy mounds east of the Mississippi River. (There are possibly other effigy mounds in the area, including a Rock Snake, but there is apparently some disagreement on the exact number and configuration of mounds.) Their precise ceremonial purpose is unknown—there is some indication, though little in the way of definitive evidence, that they may have been burial sites—but their very existence and size vouches for an important spiritual significance. The Rock Eagle mound, approximately one to three thousand years old, measures 120 feet from wingtip to wingtip, and 102 feet from head to tail, with its component rocks of quartzite piled eight to ten feet high at the belly.

The observation tower, built by the Civilian Conservations Corps in the 1930s, is interesting in its own right, and with its native-stone and timber construction, made for a good picnic shelter on the quiet weekday of our visit. (Even if some of the tower's denizens did make Jessa a bit nervous.)

Jessa was happy to leave the wasps behind, and we enjoyed photographing wildflowers, herps and actual soaring birds (mostly turkey vultures) outside by the stone effigy.

Apparently the CCC were very serious about using whatever materials were close to hand when working on this project; we saw no fewer than four old millstones used as pavers on the stone path surrounding the eagle mound. "Waste not, want not," I suppose was the mentality...

Elder's Mill Covered Bridge

Elder's Mill Covered Bridge near Watkinsville, Georgia. The bridge was originally built in 1897 to span Call's Creek for a road connecting Athens and Watkinsville, at which point it presumably had a different name, and relocated here to Rose Creek, just upstream from Elder's Mill, in 1924. (Call's Creek is a tributary of the Middle Oconee River; Rose Creek flows into the combined Oconee River below the confluence of the Middle and Upper Oconee.)

Elder's Mill itself, a three-storey wooden frame building, was built circa 1900 and ceased operating in 1941.

Except for some steel guardrails strategically protecting the vertical supports and for the metal roof, the bridge appears to be built entirely of wood, with wooden pegs holding the interior latticework together. The result is strikingly beautiful.

The land through which this stretch of Rose Creek flows is about as pretty as any I've seen, and the creek itself was running clear and cold.

They don't build 'em like this anymore...

It seemed like a good idea at the time

Behold another Athens landmark, the double-barrelled cannon. Cast in 1862 at the Athens Steam Company, this was an experimental weapon that ultimately failed, but it's certainly not without interest.

The cannon was the brainchild of John Gilleland, a builder serving in the Mitchell Thunderbolts, a home guard unit of professional men too aged, infirm, or locally indispensable to serve in the regular Confederate armed forces. Closely resembling a 17th-century design by a Florentine gunmaker named Petrini—it's not entirely clear whether Gilleland was aware of the precedent—the cannon was a "chain-shot" gun, designed to fire two cannonballs connected by a length of chain. The gun's barrels diverge by approximately three degrees so that the balls would likewise diverge and stretch the chain taut. (By contrast, the barrels of a double shotgun converge ever so slightly; although the two barrels are not fired simultaneously, the shot patterns of a well-regulated gun cross at approximately forty yards.) The balls with their connecting chain would then "mow down the enemy somewhat as a scythe cuts wheat". So went the theory, at any rate.

The problem for Gilleland's cannon, as it had been for Petrini's, was that of synchrony. The cannon had a touch-hole for each barrel, plus a third, central touch-hole intended to fire both barrels simultaneously. Unfortunately for Gilleland, the mechanism was insufficiently precise. The first time the gun was test-fired, a witness reported, the balls-and-chain rig emerged in "a kind of circular motion, plowed up about an acre of ground, tore up a cornfield, mowed down saplings, and the chain broke, the two balls going in different directions." Subsequent tests produced erratic results, most resulting from uncoordinated firing of the two barrels. "When both barrels did happen to explode exactly together," another witness observed, "no chain was found strong enough to hold the balls together in flight." Needless to say, a cannonball with chain attached is going to have an unpredictable trajectory. One shot knocked down a house's chimney with one ball and killed a cow with the other; both chimney and cow were well away from the intended target.

Undeterred by these results, Gilleland sent the cannon off to the arsenal at Augusta for further testing. The Confederate authorities wisely concluded the gun was impractical at best, dangerous to their own troops at worst, and sent it back to Athens, where it was placed in front of City Hall, to be used as a signal gun should the enemy approach.

When the Federals did in fact approach Athens, in August of 1864, Gilleland's gun was sent into action with the Lumpkin Artillery. The barrels were loaded with canister, like an oversized shotgun, and fired independently. The skirmish—the gun's sole combat engagement—ended quickly, with only a few volleys fired, and the cannon was again returned to City Hall.

After the war, the gun was sold, then lost for a number of years, and finally rediscovered and restored to condition. It was then presented to the city of Athens, "where...it has been preserved as an object of curiosity, and where it performed sturdy service for many years in celebrating political victories."

Oconee Forest Park

More trees of historic significance—purely personal significance, in this case. After our visit to TTTOI, we made an early-evening stop at Oconee Forest Park, on the banks of Lake Herrick.

The intramural fields on the opposite side of Lake Herrick are where I first saw and later played toli, but Oconee Forest Park is where I became a falconer. This was my hawking grounds for the two years of my apprenticeship and the one year that followed, before moving out to Nebraska. And I will forever be grateful to the forest manager, who, in recognition of falconry's minimal impact, made this outstanding wood available to me.

The Georgia piedmont doesn't hold many rabbits, and they tend to be found in thick, often impenetrable briars ("cheek cutters" is the local vernacular for the taller stands), so grey squirrels were our quarry. The tiercel redtail I flew during my apprenticeship, Watauga, was a truly brilliant squirrel hawk; his successor (after a couple of false starts with female redtails), Pocomoke, was less gifted but still effective, and transitioned to fox squirrels upon our move west. The grey squirrels Jessa photographed foraging in the treetops in the waning light of evening are the 20x-great-grandchildren of the squirrels we chased back in the day.

It was good to see the population is still thriving. At one point during our walk, I demonstrated a hawking technique Jessa hadn't seen before, "ringing the doorbell": I grasped a stout grapevine that climbed high up a tree to a squirrel drey, gave it a few abrupt pulls, and three squirrels obligingly popped out of the drey. Talley ho, had we a hawk with us. As it was, we saw only a Cooper's hawk nest. (The day before, I actually witnessed a pair of Cooper's mating from the backyard of our rental, but no birds were in evidence here.)

Of course the nest was in a pine—there are lone pines here and there, and even a few stands of pine, but the glory of Oconee Forest Park is in its hardwoods. I remember red oaks, tulip poplars, and sweetgum as the dominant species, but there is a fair bit of diversity here, and since this particular forest hasn't been logged for over a hundred years, some good-sized specimens as well. (Plus a few oddities and a nicely developed understory.)

I feel doubly fortunate to have begun my hawking career in this forest: not only was it beautiful and well-supplied with exciting quarry, but I know that I will always be able to come back and visit. Too many falconers' first fields have been paved over. Long live OFP.

The Tree That Owns Itself

One of Athens' best-known and -loved landmarks is The Tree That Owns Itself, located at the corner of Finley and Dearing Streets. A white oak (Quercus alba), TTTOI is a fine specimen of shade tree; it receives more visitors when in leaf, but I like this stark late-winter portrait.

  

The tree's fame, of course, stems from its legal status, summed up on this stone tablet:

In truth, the tree loved by Col. Jackson is long gone; what stands at Finley and Dearing now is its son and heir.

The tree's Wikipedia entry includes a debunking of the Jackson legend and a skeptical discussion of the tree's actual legal status, but in the English common-law tradition, the line between law and custom is blurry. The people of Athens accept that the tree has special status, the city/county government holds the same position, and so the tree does own itself. Vox populi, vox dei.

Finley Street itself has another small claim to fame: the single steep block that descends from Dearing Street to Broad Street is, to the best of my knowledge, the last cobblestone street in town. And lovely cobbles they are...

Too subtle?

Twenty-some years ago, when I was living in Athens, Georgia, I was standing outside one of my favourite eateries on Atlanta Highway when a pickup truck with Barrow County plates (two counties over from Athens/Clarke County) pulled up to the kerb and the driver hailed me: "Hey, 'scuse me... This here a Chai-neeze restaurant?"

I glanced at my surroundings, wondering what could possibly have given it away.

I can't remember if I managed a "Yessir" or merely an "Uh-huh", but Observant Barrow County Pickup Man thanked me and drove off. (Possibly to make inquiries about bear candles...)

  

Jessa and I are just returned from Georgia, and over the next few days, I'll be posting photos from a few other Athens-area landmarks. Not near as many as I had hoped; this was an ill-starred trip that saw the car break down in inconvenient and expensive fashion and then the two of us rendered equally useless from flu. (The "Bad Day" video was actually posted on our best day of the trip.) By the time Jess took this last picture, I wasn't sure if we were stalking Mr. Black or if he was stalking us.

"Bad Day"

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.

Click it or ticket?

On my way back from hawking the other day, I encountered one of those massive electronic signs on the motorway—hardly noteworthy, as they have become ubiquitous—except that I was struck yet again by how misused they typically are.

ACCIDENT AHEAD
PREPARE TO STOP

is useful, I admit.

WINTER WEATHER CONDITIONS
DRIVE WITH CAUTION

could I suppose be useful as well, although one would think most motorists would have noticed already. But as often as not, these signs bear messages—multi-screen messages, mind you, with each screen displayed for several seconds to accommodate the slowest reader in the fast lane—along the lines of

HELLO, I'M AN
ENORMOUS ELECTRONIC SIGN
PLEASE READ ME AND ALSO
DISTRACTED DRIVING IS BAD.

(Have these DOT people never heard of the Stroop-Stirling effect? You can't really opt out of reading these things, not without a great deal of conscious effort, anyway.)

But the one that triggers my ire, despite its brevity, is CLICK IT OR TICKET. Really, that's the best we can do to promote the use of safety belts, CLICK IT OR TICKET? Pathetic.

Allow me to suggest an alternative. It would really work best as a PSA on the radio, read in an authoritative voice...British accent...hint of menace. I'm thinking Mark Strong, or maybe Vinnie Jones. But if DOT want to put it on a big flashy sign, I reckon the precedent is there... Anyway, here it is:

SEAT BELTS ARE SAFETY DEVICES
THE REASON TO CHECK THEM ALL TWICE IS
TO AVOID A CITATION
OR A DEFENESTRATION
'CAUSE YOU DON'T WANT TO PAY THOSE STEEP PRICES

Tom Cade, 1928-2019

Dr. Tom J. Cade passed away last week. He was a falconer, ornithologist, and family man, best known as the founder of The Peregrine Fund.

The Peregrine Fund got its start, and its name, in 1970, when Tom Cade was at Cornell University. A couple of kids sent him a check with a note requesting that the money be used "to save the peregrine". He went to the bank, opened a new account for that purpose, and when the bank teller asked what name should be put on the account, he blanked for a moment. "Let's just call it the peregrine fund," he replied, and the name stuck.

But The Peregrine Fund was emphatically not just a financial arrangement, disbursing money to conservationists doing work on the ground. Tom Cade, Jim Weaver, and other P-Fund pioneers were decidedly hands-on—and make no mistake, they were pioneers. Peregrines had been bred in captivity—occasionally, rarely. Cade, Weaver, et al. set out to breed peregrines on an industrial scale, then release them into the wild through a modified form of the ancient falconry technique of hacking. Most conservationists assumed it couldn't be done. Quite a few, in fact, thought it shouldn't be done—there were people and even organisations arguing for "extinction with dignity" as preferential to "intrusive" or "manipulative" intervention in nature. (I equate this point of view with American isolationism in the late 1930s and early 1940s; thank the gods that neither prevailed in the end.)

P-Fund married faith to hard work and good science, and the birds did come, a trickle at first and eventually a torrent, while a small army of students, pensioners, falconers, and birdwatchers mobilised to oversee their transition into the wild as hacksite attendants. I'm proud to have been a part of that army.


Although I've trained some small falcons—several American kestrels and a merlin—I've never yet flown a peregrine. But I have participated in hunts with peregrines at pheasant, duck, snipe, and prairie grouse. I've hacked captive-bred eyasses on the Montana prairie and in the mountains of Georgia, seen hacked birds return to their "natal" territories, and banded eyasses from wild nests on skyscrapers. I've watched peregrines migrating down Appalachian ridgelines and along Gulf Coast beaches, and observed resident birds soaring over Sonoran desert and slickrock canyons out west. I've seen peregrines scatter city pigeons and herd flocks of shorebirds, seen them loafing beneath the Francis Scott Key Bridge (the "Car-Tangled Spanner") in Baltimore and casually scaling cliffs in the mountains where The Last of the Mohicans was filmed. I've arisen what I thought was early, only to find a blonde tundrius peregrine fresh from the Arctic plucking an even earlier-rising sandpiper atop a piece of driftwood, and stayed out past dark to watch young "cadei" peregrines catch bats in the floodlights of a state capitol building. And every one of these experiences I owe, directly or indirectly (mostly directly), to Tom Cade.

Thanks for everything, Dr. Tom.