WINGED GLORY


Not all quail hunters use a shotgun.

STORY BY CHAD LOVE • PHOTOS BY TYLER SLADEN


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There is a small group of hunters who take our earth-bound fascination with birds of prey beyond passive observation and into a realm of interaction and cooperation few have the opportunity to witness and even fewer have the dedication to achieve.

Like all top-echelon predators, birds of prey fascinate us in ways other animals simply don’t. Not only is their method of hunting hypnotic in its beauty and sheer wildness, raptors seem to wear an air of languid superiority as comfortably as they wear their feathers.

The first thing you notice are the eyes. Disconcertingly intense and unmistakably wild, those twin wells of unfathomable depth don’t merely look past you, they penetrate you. In one cold, perfunctory glance, you’ve been sized up, found to be of no real consequence and then simply disregarded.

There is no such thing as a casual falconer. You either live this world and embrace its disciplines, or you do not. That’s the price of admission for the seat you’re granted at the show, a show very few people ever get to witness.

Once the covey flushes, you become mere spectator in a world you cannot enter, watching the eons-old drama unfold before your eyes. Sometimes the quail wins, sometimes the hawk wins, but either way, you become witness to – and in some small way a part of – wildness incarnate.

What draws someone into falconry, and what about it makes them develop such a monkish devotion to its practice? Friedrich Nietzsche may not have been a falconer, but his famous quote, “And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you” is as good an answer as any why this small community of disciples can be found on the prairie, the desert, and in the woods, sending their birds aloft in search of game in a cycle as old as history itself.

STORY BY CHAD LOVE

PHOTOS BY TYLER SLADEN