Hawks Hunt Squirrels

Nicholas Francomano

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hris opened a Tupperware bowl full of dead mice and carefully scooped a few into a small blue-gray pouch, which he placed in one of the many pockets of his vest.

“How do most people find out about you?” I asked. I’d been leafing through a brochure on the way out to the hunting grounds. “Is it mostly word of mouth, or just seeing your sign from the road?” Chris’ “day job” is to research and write reports for the Federal government about endangered animals.

“I put ads in a local paper—one of those free weeklies.
I get a lot of responses from that.”

He kneeled in the back of the van, and opened one of the plywood cabinets lining the compartment. He clambered backwards into the flurrying snow with a large, chestnut colored hawk perched on his gloved left wrist.

Chris changed the leather jesses on the hawk’s feet. The pair it had been wearing in the locker connected it to a leash clipped to a perch of a metal swivel. A hawk flying through woods, wearing such jesses, ran a much higher risk of becoming caught in the branches of a tree or on a thorny bush. A snag while flying at speed could prove catastrophic.

“I’m supposed to have a meeting next week with a lady at a local radio station. I’m not really sure I want to do that, but we’re going to have a meeting.”

“They’ll produce the spot?”

“I suppose. We’re meeting next week. Her boss, though, just sent me an e-mail. He wants to take an introductory session. That’s word of mouth.”

“This is the same bird we flew last week?”

“I think it was two weeks ago. It was before Thanksgiving, right? She’s still relocating a little, but I was flying her recently and I gorged her on a squirrel,” Chris kept his eyes on the hawk’s ankles, as he threaded the other jesses. Then, with his right hand, he placed a small perch on a little metal scale. The hawk stayed on Chris’ left—gloved— hand. Chris lowered his hand to the scale. The hawk, still leashed, stepped on to be weighed.

“The squirrel was good positive reinforcement?”

“I think so, she’s been following a lot better.” He closed the back of the van. “We’re going to walk with her a little bit on my hand, since she’s been really interested in that old barn down there recently.”

Chris had backed his maroon van into a clearing at the end of a long dirt road just north of the UMass campus.

The three of us walked down a quiet trail into the woods.

The hawk beat its wings, trying to take flight. She got no farther than a few inches off the glove, jerked quickly towards the ground and let out a few screeches. Chris tugged at the jesses which had arrested the creature. She struggled upside down a second before righting herself and landing back on the glove.

 

“Let’s see if we can’t see any tracks,” he said, aiming his eyes to the ground. “We’ll know they’re fresh because of the snow.” He scanned for signs. “It looks pretty good to me, I see a lot of squirrel here. See? Look at this.” He pointed down to his right. Leaves blanketed the ground, a ruddy brown color of decay, interrupted by patches of shadow, snow and mud. I didn’t see a thing. I fell in step behind him, anxious not to destroy any sign that I certainly didn’t know how to interpret.

“We’ll let her go up here.” Chris said, turning to face me. He had small eyes and a narrow face, with distinct cheekbones and jaw line. Close cut, and dark at the top, his hair faded to a lighter gray along the sides of his head. His nose wasn’t quite aquiline.

We turned left off the main path onto a narrow lane between two thickets. Raising his wrist to the sky, he loosed the bird up towards the branches behind us, on the way we came. He and I watched as she spread out her wings to take to the air. The white underside of her wings and tail feathers spread out as she swooped down and then, with a few deft strokes, climbed to land on the high branch of a tree down the lane.

“Why don’t you stay here and keep and eye on her” Chris said to me. “I’m going to see if I can’t drive any squirrels out into the open. This way, if she decides to relocate we’ll have a bearing on her.” Chris darted into the thorny tangle of woods off the side of the path. He kicked at dense vines and shook the trunks of younger trees to beat out the quarry.

Snowflakes drifted slowly to the leafy ground between the hawk and me. She held her head low, between the joints of her folded wings and puffed out the feathers of her neck. A tapering mahogany silhouette flecked with white snow and white feathers; the ominous closing frame of a hundred films yet to be made.

Chris rustled out of the brush. The hawk extended her neck and pumped her wings, leaning forward into a dive across the lane and into the network of bare branches in the heights of a tree right above our heads. She spread her wings and extended her talons as she closed on a gray squirrel. The squirrel corkscrewed down the trunk of the tree and vanished as the shrieking hawk’s wings snagged nothing but branches.

 

Chris and I walked farther on into the woods. Every so often Chris would turn and raise his hand to wave the hawk forward to follow us. Then he would kick the tangle along the sides of the narrowing path to drive out any squirrels and rabbits hiding inside. We came to the edge of a gully; the hawk followed us. She continued clear across to the other side of the shallow ravine then perched in a tree overlooking a university parking lot. I lost sight of her, but Chris did not. He had the eyes of a master falconer with 27 years experience. All I could see was a heavy-framed student loading his car at the wood’s edge.

“Hey! Hey!” Chris shouted and let out a loud whistle to call the bird. The goateed student looked up at the shout. He could not see us through the snow-covered brambles.

“I don’t really know if she’s self-hunting, or if she just likes cars. Hey! Hey!” Chris shouted and the student looked up again to squint into the woods.

Looking up from his car a third time, the student caught sight of a great reddish brown hawk alighting gracefully atop a white Escalade parked behind him.

“Cars. Cars. I like the cars.” Chris read the hawk’s interior monologue in a clipped, nasal voice.

He produced a heart shaped bag on a tether from his bloodstained vest and began to spin it around in a slow circle in front of his face. “Hey! Hey!”

The student took his eyes off the hawk and turned them to the woods again. He could not see us, but she, being a Harris’ hawk could. She took off towards the spinning bag.

“Are the mice in that bag?”

“No, this is just a lure she’s trained with a lot,” Chris answered. He paused as the hawk landed on a branch in front of us with a high call. “You don’t think that I’m reinforcing negative behavior, do you?”

“Well, there are no mice in the bag, so I’d say no.”

“But the bag is a pre-cue to a reward. It’s kind of cheeky to use it without rewarding her.”

“You use no...” I tried to think of the right Skinnerian word… “Negative reinforcement?”

“No.” He looked at me slightly askance. “No negative reinforcement.”

 

After another encounter with a car parked farther up the tree line, Chris used his cheeky trick again to induce the hawk back to his glove. He decided that we should attempt to hunt with the two less experienced birds in the van’s other plywood lockers.

I stood in front of the van, watching the first of the two young hawks perch on a branch as we waited for Chris to fly her sister. Neither of these hawks had hunted before. Chris explained to me the importance of a young hawk’s first hunting kill.

“It’s a very important turning point. Right now I think these two are pretty good at free flying and following me, but they still look to me for food. One good chase in the wild with a kill changes everything; a kill turns these birds into hunters.”

“Won’t they hunt instinctually?” I asked.

“Yes, but they might be a little too high right now,” he said as he weighed the second young hawk the scale in his van. I decided not to ask what he meant, but instead to wait.
Chris shut the doors to the van and launched the second hawk, which promptly flew straight into a tangle of bare twigs on the closest tree and began to screech. I looked at the trapped bird, shocked.

“They’re still young and a little ungraceful, these birds. She’ll right herself in a second.” Chris walked by without giving much thought to the noisy hawk, and started off down the walking trail. I followed his track, making sure not to disrupt any signs of rodent quarry.

“See, she might be a little too high,” Chris said pointing up at the first hawk, who was flying level with the highest branches of the snow-frosted pines on our right.

“You mean she’s too far up to see prey?”

“No, no, her weight. There’s a response weight and a hunting weight.”

A cry from the hawk interrupted Chris’ explanation. She was still trapped.

“You hear that whiny food cry? Well, when they’re at their training weight they’ll take food as a reward. They might not chase it down.”

The noisier bird came calling and crying down the lane to catch up with us; she landed on one of the pines.

“Now, I think this bird is at her hunting weight. It’s like ‘Yeah, I guess I could eat’ or ‘Man, I need to fuckin’ eat something,’” He said imitating a slacker’s voice. “I’m just not sure that they’ll know not to look for me for the food. Especially this noisy one, up here.”

“Why don’t you go stand in that clearing?” Chris said to me. “I’ll see if I can’t drive out some squirrels in your direction. Sorry about that language, by the way. I’m sure you’ve heard it before.”

“It’s fine.”

I went and stood between the briar and the pines and scribbled some notes.

“Vest blood” is all I managed to put down. I heard a screech and looked up. A great brown and white mass with fearsome yellow accents rocketed towards my face. I ducked down and clutched my notebook to my chest as the bird sped past.

“Motherfucker!”

“She tried to land on you?” Chris called out from the brush. “Young birds will do that. Normally there are plenty of squirrels down in that little canyon with the stream in it. Let’s head on down there,” he said, emerging into the clearing.

 

“About 7 or 8 years ago the squirrel population really peaked here. You should have seen it. It was really something. Really something.”

Chris turned around and stopped as we negotiated our way down the slope of the gully. “I wonder where they all are now.”

Above the tweeting and cooing of the songbirds, we heard a high, short hoot. “Maybe that red tail from last time scared them off?” I ventured.

“Well, that was a pheasant.” Chris said. He pointed over into a patch of spiny brown bushes, where no hawk would hide.

“I suppose I don’t really know any birdcalls.”

Chris imitated the calls of several birds, sure that I would recognize some finch or warbler.

Chris grew up in Colorado, out in the country. His dad was a veterinarian. One of his father’s clients introduced Chris to falconry.

“I’m from the big city,” I said.

Everywhere we went in the gully we saw the signs of squirrels and rabbits. The tracks were fresh, but the creatures were hidden.

We walked along, up the bank of a quick running stream, jumping over the little brooks that fed it, scratching ourselves on the thorny bushes in our path.

Chris jumped across one of the little brooks and turned around to call the hawks forward. “Isn’t that great?”

I turned around to look. The hawks were perched in a shaft of warm light, one on a low power line, one on a snowy pine bough. They sat there, graceful, silent.

“You know, this must seem kind of random, kind of loosey-goosey, like we’re just walking around at random.”

“Not at all,” I said.

“We’re just getting into the pace of it, where it’s not that high up. We’re just getting into a kind of rhythm with the birds. It’s difficult because of the limits of our perception compared with theirs, but that’s their hunting place. For them—there’s not a lot of higher functioning. It’s really more sensory response.”

Along the lip of the ravine, a young couple walked their sweater-clad greyhound. They and their pet passed us without noticing us—or the hawks. Chris and I stood silently for a while. Then he looked back and up—at the hawks.

“Oh my God”, he said, ecstatically. “I wish we could see some squirrels.”

 

Illustrations from "Animals: 1419 Copyright-Free Illustrations," Dover Publications, 1979.

       

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