The ancient art of falconry lives on with a West Virginia teenager.
For more than a millennium, people in Japan and China have used aquatic birds called cormorants to help them catch fish. A fisherman ties a hemp snare around a trained bird’s throat so that, when the animal dives into the water after prey, big fish remain stuck in its gullet. The fisherman then brings the bird back onto his boat to spit up the trapped fish.
For centuries in West Africa, the Boran people of Ethiopia have worked alongside a bird known as the greater honeyguide. The bird leads tribespeople to honeybee nests using its calls and flight patterns. After the humans smoke the bees away and rob the honey, the bird gets to eat the leftover wax and insect larvae.
In Randolph County, West Virginia, Collin Waybright and his red-tailed hawk Ace have been hunting together for about a year. Ace flies from tree to tree as Waybright walks below. “He knows I’m going to flush something out,” Waybright says. When a critter eventually does emerge from the underbrush, Ace dives from his perch— often before Waybright knows what is going on—to overtake the prey and quickly dispatches it with the crushing grip and razor-sharp tips of his talons.
Ace isn’t much interested in fish or honeybee larvae. He prefers to hunt chipmunks, although he and Waybright caught their first grey squirrel together last November. Ace once caught a black kingsnake, too, which gave Waybright quite a scare. “They’ll take anything they can catch. You never know what you’re going to get if you go hunting with a hawk,” he says. “It’s never a boring time.”
Never boring and usually successful. Waybright says Ace catches something almost every time he goes into the woods—which is more than any other hunter can say for his prized shotgun or rifle. This is probably how ancient humans got the idea of hunting with birds in the first place. “I think at some point early man realized these birds were catching the quarry he himself was pursuing,” says Matthew Frey, co-founder of the West Virginia Falconry Club.
The origins of falconry are hazy. The practice likely goes back before the written word, but historians know the Mongols practiced falconry between 5,000 and 6,000 years ago. It spread throughout Asia and the Middle East but did not take hold in Europe until the Crusades, later becoming extremely popular during the Renaissance.
Falconry was more than entertainment, however. “Way back when, it was a viable way of bringing meat,” says Paul Fowler, master falconer. Reliable firearms were not available until the 1700s and even then the weapons were not very efficient or accurate. “Falconry was one of the only reliable ways to take winged prey,” Fowler says.
The sport declined in popularity as weapons improved. Falconry is relatively obscure today, with only several thousand state-licensed falconers in the United States and fewer than 20 falconers in West Virginia. Frey says he has seen increased interest in falconry over the last few years, but he also knows the sport likely will not and maybe should not become totally mainstream. “It’s really not for everybody. And, in fact, the people that are successful are a small, esoteric few,” he says. “You really have to be an expert, and to be an expert you have to be passionate about it.”
At 15 years old, Waybright is, as far as he knows, the youngest falconer in the state. He got his apprentice falconer’s license when he was 14, after learning about the sport at West Virginia’s Celebration of National Hunting and Fishing Days at Stonewall Resort State Park. At an age when most boys are thinking about learners’ driving permits, Waybright began the long process of becoming a licensed falconer.
West Virginia law requires beginning falconers to pass long multiple-choice tests and to pass equipment inspections by the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources (DNR). Applicants must then spend two years under the tutelage of more experienced falconers. Waybright didn’t know any falconers when he started but contacted DNR and found, as luck would have it, Paul Fowler located just 10 minutes away.
Once Waybright passed his test and had all the necessary equipment, Fowler helped his apprentice catch his first bird. State regulations only allow apprentices to hunt with red-tailed hawks or American kestrels, and students must catch their own hunting birds.
Fowler loaned Waybright a Swedish goshawk trap. The device features a hinged A-frame design so when it is set, the sides stand straight up to expose a bait animal in a special compartment at the bottom of the trap. When a bird swoops down after the bait, the sides of the A-frame snap together and enclose the raptor.
In early January 2015, Waybright and Fowler dropped the trap along a back road and drove away, hoping a bird of prey would come along and be hungry enough to take the bait. When they returned a short time later, the trap was closed. Waybright’s pulse quickened but he tried not to get his hopes up. “I thought the trap had been blown shut or something. We drove closer, and there he was.”
Inside the box was a red-tailed hawk—the bird soon to be known as Ace.
He was a little on the small side and missing one of his toes, likely due to a bad encounter with some would-be prey. Fowler helped Waybright put a hood on the hawk to calm the bird down, then taped its legs together and wrapped a towel over its wings to keep the bird from hurting itself or someone else. Back at Waybright’s house, they placed the hawk in the eight-foot-square mew Waybright and his dad built to house the bird and hooked anklets and a leash to its feet.
Waybright and Ace began training the next day. The first step was to get Ace to eat from Waybright’s glove, a way to earn trust. Food is the only thing that motivates a bird of prey. Raptors used for falconry do not desire the approval of their human partners and do not consider hunting a means of play. This means falconers must keep extremely close tabs on their birds’ weight and food intake, keeping them hungry enough to cooperate but not so hungry they become malnourished.
Once Waybright earned Ace’s trust—and established himself as a reliable source of food—it was on to the next step: getting Ace to jump from his perch onto Waybright’s leather glove. The more they practiced the farther Waybright moved from the perch, giving Ace the confidence to jump longer distances. Soon they moved this exercise outside the mew. With Ace attached to a creance—a cord falconers attach to their birds’ feet to keep them from flying away during training—Waybright started jumping the little hawk from 50 feet away, then slowly progressed to longer distances. Once Ace was comfortably flying 150 feet to Waybright’s fist, it was time to give Ace his first free flight.
Waybright walked to a field near his home with Ace firmly planted on his gauntlet. It had been only two weeks since Waybright first trapped the bird, and he was nervous about what would happen once he allowed Ace to take off on his own, with no tethers on his feet. “It was nerve-racking. Some people’s birds just up and go.”
Standing with his arms and legs apart, Waybright turned at his waist and stretched his arm toward Ace’s target—a large trailer stacked with hay bales. The bird took off, fast. The tracking bells on his feet jingled as his wings flapped, and in a few seconds Ace was perched atop one of the bales. Waybright blew two sharp chirps on his whistle and Ace came off the perch, soared across the snowy ground, and lighted back on Waybright’s forearm.
Waybright’s nerves dissolved into a heady rush. He repeated the exercise a few more times, and each time Ace correctly found his perch before returning gracefully to Waybright’s arm. It wasn’t long before they took these newfound skills into the woods. A video on Waybright’s Facebook page shows him flushing an animal from a big brush pile with a large stick. Ace sits atop the heap with his eyes peeled for movement. In an instant, he drops off his branch and onto the ground—his talons wrapped around a chipmunk.
The power dynamic is fascinating. Humans are so used to being at the top of the food chain and yet, when Waybright goes hunting with Ace, he is mostly relegated to the sidelines. He is the bird’s assistant—and it’s exhilarating. “I have this relationship with this wild animal that not very many people get to have. He actually comes to me when I call him,” he says. “And you’re hunting with it. You’re working with it cooperatively.”
Falconry creates a unique, rewarding relationship between birds and mankind, but it’s nothing like most relationships humans forge with animals. Although Waybright and his bird work closely together, Ace does not express love. Some days Ace will allow Waybright to pet him, but on other days he’s skittish and does not want to be touched. Some days he’s ready to hunt. Other days he’s not interested. “They’re always going to be wild, no matter how long you’re with them.”
But the boy and his bird do share a special bond. The longer Waybright hunts with Ace, the more he understands his hunting partner. “You figure out how it thinks.” And Waybright believes Ace is learning about him. He has seen the way the hawk reacts to his body language and emotions. Ace is learning how Waybright thinks, too. “He trusts me.”
As we readied this story for publication, I got a call from Waybright’s mother. “I have some bad news,” she told me. Just a few days after our interview, Waybright found Ace on the floor of his mew, dead. “It looked like he had just dropped. My heart just sank to my stomach,” Collin Waybright says.
There had been few signs the hawk was sick. He was a little sluggish a few days before but seemed fine otherwise. “He had performed awesome. He was coming to the fist even before I whistled,” Waybright says. Then all at once Ace stopped eating and wouldn’t hop on Waybright’s glove.
The family called the West Virginia Raptor Rehabilitation Center in Fairmont for help and made arrangements for Ace to see one of the center’s veterinarians if his health did not improve. The hawk took a turn for the worse before that could happen. Waybright is still working with the center to figure out what killed Ace, but they believe it could have been a congenital condition. His time with Waybright might have actually lengthened his life—captivity has been known to double or even triple the average lifespan of red-tailed hawks.
Ace’s death hasn’t affected Waybright’s interest in falconry. He plans to get another bird; he just doesn’t know when. “It’s just part of the sport. You get a bird and you like it and you keep it, it’s going to happen eventually,” he says. But that doesn’t make losing Ace, his first bird, any easier. This was the animal whose willing cooperation inducted Colin into a fellowship that predates recorded history.
But more than that, Ace was a huge part of Waybright’s everyday routine. “It’s a way of life. You’ve got to plan everything around the bird,” he says. “I’m having a hard time just believing he’s gone.”
This story was originally published in the February 2016 issue of Wonderful West Virginia.
written by Zack Harold