A falconer and his bird of prey

With an eager hop, Libby scrambled onto Dorsch’s gloved fist, and they walked out to the woods surrounding a nearby suburban Maryland neighborhood. A little beagle frisked around Dorsch’s feet, and a group of landscapers paused in their leaf blowing to watch the odd trio disappear into the long autumn shadows.

November started a fall ritual for the roughly 300 licenced falconers in Maryland and Virginia: the Eastern cottontail rabbit became fair game the first day of the month, and all the off-season care and preparation gave way to regular outings such as this one. Dorsch was off to “fly his bird”, a hunting routine that is part primeval contest between raptor and prey, part ballet between man and bird.

“I wait all year to get out here,” said Dorsch, a sales engineer who has been a licenced falconer for five years. Falconry is a generic term that refers to keeping and flying all kinds of birds of prey, including peregrine falcons, kestrels, hawks and even owls. “Even if you don’t get a rabbit, it’s beautiful just being out watching the bird,” he said.

Dorsch, 48, flies Libby almost every day at this time of year, often with his daughter Becca, 18. Just about any patch of brambly forest where he has the owner’s permission will do, although those unbuilt places are becoming more and more scarce.

Dorsch unleashed his beagle, and it immediately plunged wiggling into the brush. Next, Dorsch released his grip on the woven leather straps tied around Libby’s fearsome talons, and she flapped up to a nearby branch, bare of leaves and bouncing under her weight. Dorsch, wearing bramble-proof coveralls, waded in after his dog, beating the bushes with a long stick. Libby followed his every step with piercing intensity. “She thinks I have magical feet,” Dorsch said. “Rabbits just come out of them.”

That is the deal between falconer and bird, reached after months of training: Libby will stay nearby, flying from branch to branch as the party moves along, and he will scare up something for her to chase. In this part of Maryland, it’s usually cottontails. In other places, it might be quail or pheasant or waterfowl, resulting in dramatic midair dogfights.

“The purpose of falconry is not to show off the bird on your glove,” said Mary Goldie, who administers falconry licencing for the Maryland Department of Natural Resources. The certification to keep a raptor—which requires a two-year apprenticeship, an arduous written exam and annual inspections by wildlife officers—is the strictest faced by any hunter in the state. “The given is that this bird is going to go out and do what it naturally does, and the falconer is going to facilitate that. That’s the agreement that the falconer makes,” she said.

Three weeks into this season, Libby already had the routine down. From her branch, she snapped her head every time the dog let out the strangled, operatic howl that beagles use to sound the alarm. Every few minutes, Libby lifted off and swooped along a smooth parabola to the next tree, always keeping near her master. She wore tiny bells on her ankles to help Dorsch follow her progress.

Suddenly, the beagle howled. Dorsch shouted “Ho! Ho!,” and a streak of gray fuzz zipped out of the brush. Libby instantly took off, gained a few yards of altitude and then transformed herself from a regal flier to a diving missile of feathered muscle.

Down she tore, wings back, talons yearning forward, eyes burning into the rabbit’s churning haunches until, WHAM! The prey jerked to the right and the hunter plowed into the grass a millisecond behind it. Up she jumped, flapping hard and streaking after her escaping dinner. She rose to dive again, too late. The rabbit found its hole.

As he whistled Libby to his fist, Dorsch didn’t look at all like a hunter who had missed his shot or a trapper fooled out of his bait. “It’s all about the flight,” Dorsch said. “She defies gravity. You just look at her and say, ‘Wow.’ ”
Steve Hendrix, LATWP