"Falconry is not a hobby or an amusement: it is a rage. You eat it and drink it, sleep it and think it. You tremble to write of it, even in recollection. It is, as King James the First remarked, an extreme stirrer of passions." T.H. White

The Godstone and Blackymor, 1959 (First American Edition) Van Rees Press, New York, page 18.

Monday, September 27, 2010

Trapping 1

How does one prepare to trap a Red Tailed Hawk?  Hopefully with a tad more insight and possibly a smidge less "irrational exuberance" than I displayed.

To begin with, we decided that only a bird from the North Carolina mountains would do.  North Carolina because trapping started a month earlier there than it does here in South Carolina, and the mountains because, as any good outdoorsman will tell you, you just have to suffer a little bit if you want to have any chance at a good hunt.  I think the logic really fell along the lines of "the mountains are the natural flyway of migrating raptors which will be bigger and stronger than native birds".  I didn't buy this for a second though, because, as an amateur mind reader, I could practically feel Al's thoughts, even through the vibram soles of my shoes, screaming "I need to get out of this town FAR ENOUGH AWAY so that I can't even consider going back early!"  Fortunately, both my sister and my father were to be in the area for this trip so a mini family reunion, with a key emphasis on hawking was planned.

The preparations for the trip centered around organizing and admiring my many traps and making numerous lists of what to bring.  More interesting than anything on the lists themselves were the choices of list material.  Some were the typical sticky note material, but other, more inspired lists sprang from receipts, pieces of wood, my flesh, a milk carton, and one even written on a scalpel box.  When I caught myself about to scribble on a Hemoccult card, I realized I was almost crossing some inviolate line, the consequences of which I don't want to contemplate.

Needless to say, with lists of that degree, one can find it quite difficult to load every bit of necessary crap in a single vehicle while preserving enough room to seat two other adults.  I had to choose between strapping Al to the roof or finagling my wife's ginormous kid conveyor, the suburban.  Even after swallowing my pride and seeing that smirk on my wife's face (don't kid yourself, you know the look I'm talking about), I thought that Rich was going to have to ride in Al's lap. This was especially concerning when I showed up at Al's and it became clear that he had been making lists as well.

Somehow we schlepped three grown men, twelve pigeons (six of whom spontaneously turned into gerbils at some point during the night), and four metric tons of the barest of necessities to Beech Mountain, arriving at the crack of three am.  Yes, I know you are asking your self if it is true, but we did indeed make a five hour trip in just over nine hours.  Lots of things went through my head during that drive, not the least of which were the lists of things I had forgotten (Al refused to write them down for me and wouldn't even hand me a pen so I could jot them on Laura's visor), but the one thing I can't completely nail down is how I managed to create time on that trip.  I remember the feeling of omnipotence as I realized that I, Ab Wilkinson, had almost doubled the number of hours in the car that we got to experience over what normal people would have gotten with the same amount of effort.

Three confusing hours of sleep later found us stuffing down a hearty breakfast at Dann'l Boone's Restaurant.  Kimmy and Dad met us there and we all got to enjoy watching Rich twitch because we weren't out in the field yet.  An hour later found us hiking up a mountain to set out our traps.  Lines were run to tethered pigeons wearing noose covered leather armor, gerbils were busily exploring their new wire accommodations in the BCs, and I was test driving my bownet masterpiece.  We hid ourselves as best we could and waited for the migrating raptors to come see the feast we had laid out for them.

While it is no doubt true that our delectable array of fur and fowl would have called down even those political savvy raptors who had reluctantly followed Bill Clinton to a plant based diet, it was also true that we had set our table approximately one month too early.  As I have found to be the case often in my life, timing is everything and hope is never a good strategy.  It seems that even though the migration was well underway in Pennsylvania, no self respecting bird of prey wanted to be the first one to NC.  Of course it may be true that they were suffering from the same inexplicable phenomenon that struck me as I traversed that great state where time seemed to expand like the lycra pants on the women shopping in WalMart.

Regardless, the skies were empty and not even the faint rumblings of our prior breakfast could distract us from our abject failure to attract our prize.  We decided that migrating birds were too finicky for guys like us, but we still liked the notion of a bird trained at altitude.  If professional athletes can train in the mountains so as not to have to resort to doping, the same must hold true for raptors, right?  We decided to swallow our pride (a fairly small mouthful but still difficult after that big breakfast), pull up our traps, and look for some local birds to trap.  That is how we found ourselves headed to the dump.

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