By John Wisely
Detroit Free Press
WHITE LAKE TOWNSHIP, Mich. (AP) - John Shuell's hunting companions weigh just over 1 pound each, but they are anything but lightweights.
Donnie and Marie, a pair of Harris's hawks trained to hunt rabbits, accompany him almost every day during Michigan's small game season. They prowl the woods not far from his home in White Lake Township with the help of two dogs, Gracie and Norman.
"It's a ball. If you like the outdoors, this is absolutely fantastic," Shuell, 72, told the Detroit Free Press. "I've been doing this 20 some years."
Shuell is one of 119 hunters in Michigan with a permit to hunt with birds of prey, making him part of Michigan's most exclusive group of hunters. While Michigan has more than 600,000 licensed deer hunters, falconers are a rare breed.
"We're a very small hunting group," said Chris Martello of the Michigan Hawking Club, a group that helps promote the sport in Michigan. "We have about 100 members, give or take, during the year and of those 100 members, about half actively have birds and practice the sport during the course of the year."
The sport is known as falconry, but it covers other birds of prey as well, including hawks, owls, even golden eagles. The prey can include rabbits, field mice, squirrels, rodents and even other birds like pigeons. Most hunters don't eat the prey their birds catch. They leave it to their birds to eat in the field or they take it home and butcher it for the birds to eat later.
Shuell hunts through walks in the woods with his two hunting dogs and Harris Hawks. When one of the dogs picks up a rabbit scent, it starts to follow it. As it draws closer to the prey, it starts a staccato yelping.
"The birds know what that means," Shuell said.
If a dog is able to flush out a rabbit, the falcons swoop in for the kill. On a recent weekday, the rabbit being hunted sought refuge under scrap wood and other debris dumped in the forest. Shuell finally called off the dogs to avoid them getting hurt from protruding nails and broken glass.
That day's hunt yielded no prey, but Shuell didn't let his companions go hungry. He pulled from his pocket a small plastic sandwich bag with finger-length strips of flesh from the rabbit the birds caught the day before.
With his arm extended, he called his birds and held out lunch. They glided in and landed on his leather work glove and took food from his other hand. When a scrap fell to the ground, Donnie and Marie were quick to clean it up.
Falconry has been around for centuries, appearing in Mongolia as early as 1000 BC By the Middle Ages, it had spread to Europe, where it became known as the sport of kings. Falcons often were presented as diplomatic gifts between leaders of nations.
It's unclear when it was first practiced in North America, though the North American Falconers Association notes that Christopher Columbus brought at least one falconer with him prior to 1500 who reportedly hunted in what is now Haiti.
Becoming a falconer takes practice - and training.
"There is a pretty long process," Martello said. "Falconry is a highly regulated sport."
To capture a bird, falconers use a trap made of fishing line tied in a series of nooses. The trap is baited with a mouse or a gerbil, Martello said. The falconer drives under the bird he's trying to catch and throws the trap out the window, Martello said.
"You hope that they are hungry enough to come down and check out your mouse," Martello said.
If the bird attacks, the noose become ensnared around its talons and the falconer covers the bird with a towel to calm it and bring it into a cage. The bird is then taken back to a mews, usually an enclosed building for housing it.
"You train this bird to get used to people," Martello said.
The birds typically have a fenced-in outdoor area as well, where they can stretch their wings with short flights without the risk of escape. The areas are built to keep other animals out and to keep the birds in.
Falconers manage the weights of their birds to make sure they aren't too famished to hunt successfully or too full to bother.
To make sure they don't fly away, the birds are typically tethered at first with a cord attached to one of their feet. It allows them to get up in the air but not escape.
But eventually, the falconer must try them at free flight, and trust that the relationship is solid. The first time an apprentice falconer releases the bird for free flight, it learns whether the bird will come back.
"That's the moment of truth," Martello said.
Birds are typically trapped in the fall and the law requires falconers to take only immature birds, meaning birds that were born that year. David Hogan, a falconer and bird rehabilitation specialist from Monroe, said the trapping of young falcons actually increases their likelihood of survival because about 80 percent of raptors don't survive their first winter.
"Through the hardest time in their life, their first winter, we help them through that," Hogan said.
By keeping the bird fed and teaching it to hunt, the falconer makes the bird stronger. But that kind of work can't just be for one season, Hogan said. Falconers must work their birds constantly so that they can hone their hunting skills.
"It's something you've got to do every day, at the minimum of an hour or two a day with them. " Hogan said.
Hunting is the lifeblood of falcons and hawks because they don't eat vegetables or berries.
"Strictly carnivores," Hogan said.
Published: Mon, Jan 04, 2016
