Corky
Practically Family
- Messages
- 507
- Location
- West Los Angeles
Weird Falconry Hat Story:
Kit-chup! Kit-chup! Kit-chup! Kit-chup! Kit-chup! Tom Cullen calls, approaching his aviary. The sun warms a March afternoon; raptor breeding season has just begun. Stray feathers and dry leaves litter the entryway to the wood-frame building. A dusty, acrid odor of guano tinges the air.
Kit-chup! Kit-chup! Kit-chup! Kit-chup! Zephyr, a male Barbary falcon (Falco pelegrinoides), responds from inside an adjacent room. Cullen keeps up his end of the high-pitched conversation as he grabs a broad hat off a peg and pops it on his head. It's a hat like few others: black rubber, with a tubular brim, a ripply dome, and a tuft of shag carpet on top. He enters the chamber and approaches Zephyr, who is calling from a shoulder-high shelf covered with pea gravel to mimic a nesting area. Kit-chup! Kit-chup! Kit-chup! Kit-chup! Cullen offers more assurance that he's ready to mate. With a rush of wings, the falcon flaps over and lands on Cullen's hat. After repositioning himself a few times, Zephyr lifts his wings, extends his tail, and flies off to his shelf, all in a matter of seconds. "Good boy!"
Exiting the chamber, Cullen doffs the hat and collects a few drops of semen from the brim with a pipette, transferring them into a small plastic vial. Down the hall lives a female Barbary that, like Zephyr, is imprinted on, or sexually oriented toward, Cullen, and so won't mate naturally. Later on, Cullen will put similar moves on her, sans hat. She'll turn up her tail feathers for him, exposing the opening to her reproductive tract. He'll insert a loaded pipette and complete the two birds' union. Such is the work of a raptor breeder—the ultimate go-between.
Falconer Bill Deckert with his male gyrfalcon-saker falcon hybrid
A falconer for forty-plus years, Cullen has been breeding raptors since the 1970s. He has nearly six dozen adult exotic birds of prey at his home in rural Goshen, New York. Last year he raised fifty-six baby falcons—Barbaries, lanners, luggers, sakers—mostly for sale to other falconers. And this year is shaping up to be a good one, too. (Some of his other work with birds has gotten him into trouble in the past. Most recently, he served four months in federal prison for illegally importing black sparrowhawks in 2000, a charge he disputes.) Cullen's operation represents a fairly new development in the ancient sport of falconry. The past four decades have seen advances in captive breeding, tracking technology, and veterinary care, as well as the advent of an extravagant form of falconry practiced in the Middle East. Those developments have changed the sport substantially—and sometimes controversially.
Story continues at Natural History Magazine web site.
Kit-chup! Kit-chup! Kit-chup! Kit-chup! Kit-chup! Tom Cullen calls, approaching his aviary. The sun warms a March afternoon; raptor breeding season has just begun. Stray feathers and dry leaves litter the entryway to the wood-frame building. A dusty, acrid odor of guano tinges the air.
Kit-chup! Kit-chup! Kit-chup! Kit-chup! Zephyr, a male Barbary falcon (Falco pelegrinoides), responds from inside an adjacent room. Cullen keeps up his end of the high-pitched conversation as he grabs a broad hat off a peg and pops it on his head. It's a hat like few others: black rubber, with a tubular brim, a ripply dome, and a tuft of shag carpet on top. He enters the chamber and approaches Zephyr, who is calling from a shoulder-high shelf covered with pea gravel to mimic a nesting area. Kit-chup! Kit-chup! Kit-chup! Kit-chup! Cullen offers more assurance that he's ready to mate. With a rush of wings, the falcon flaps over and lands on Cullen's hat. After repositioning himself a few times, Zephyr lifts his wings, extends his tail, and flies off to his shelf, all in a matter of seconds. "Good boy!"
Exiting the chamber, Cullen doffs the hat and collects a few drops of semen from the brim with a pipette, transferring them into a small plastic vial. Down the hall lives a female Barbary that, like Zephyr, is imprinted on, or sexually oriented toward, Cullen, and so won't mate naturally. Later on, Cullen will put similar moves on her, sans hat. She'll turn up her tail feathers for him, exposing the opening to her reproductive tract. He'll insert a loaded pipette and complete the two birds' union. Such is the work of a raptor breeder—the ultimate go-between.
Falconer Bill Deckert with his male gyrfalcon-saker falcon hybrid
A falconer for forty-plus years, Cullen has been breeding raptors since the 1970s. He has nearly six dozen adult exotic birds of prey at his home in rural Goshen, New York. Last year he raised fifty-six baby falcons—Barbaries, lanners, luggers, sakers—mostly for sale to other falconers. And this year is shaping up to be a good one, too. (Some of his other work with birds has gotten him into trouble in the past. Most recently, he served four months in federal prison for illegally importing black sparrowhawks in 2000, a charge he disputes.) Cullen's operation represents a fairly new development in the ancient sport of falconry. The past four decades have seen advances in captive breeding, tracking technology, and veterinary care, as well as the advent of an extravagant form of falconry practiced in the Middle East. Those developments have changed the sport substantially—and sometimes controversially.
Story continues at Natural History Magazine web site.
