Dance Moms and Daughters
There were four of them: two mothers, each with a daughter – 12-ish, I’d say – in Hershey for a dance competition. This foursome, being more adventurous than most, decided to explore the wild side of nature during their downtime between dances.
The girls were outfitted more appropriately for dancing than flying hawks, each wearing sandals with a 3-inch-wide strap of rabbit fur across the instep. Pink rabbit fur.
Expert that I am, I said to myself, that probably won’t be a problem. I turned Thunder, one of our elder Harris’s hawks, loose and he went to the trees as usual. After a short lesson in falconry technique, I asked everyone to follow me out into the field. One of the girls stood up, took a few steps, and Thunder left the trees like a miniature Cruise missile. Shortly, he had the youngster’s foot firmly in both feet. Fortunately, the sandals had no back straps, so the young lady took the correct action and quickly backed her foot out of the sandal, whereupon Thunder proceeded to kill the sandal, then pluck it. Wisps of pink rabbit fur drifted across the field.
Luckily, everyone, even Mom, thought this was hilarious. After checking the girl for punctures, so did I. Somehow, she managed to escape without a single hole in her foot. With a little coaxing, I was able to convince Thunder to give up his sandal for a lure, an animal facsimile garnished with a meat reward and swung in the air or dragged on the ground. Falconers often use a lure to transfer a hawk from captured quarry to another “live” animal. Meanwhile the real prey is quickly transferred to the game bag – out of sight, out of mind.
Having learned my lesson, I asked both girls to transfer their sandals to their mothers’ pocketbooks and we finished the program with four bare feet. It was summer, Thunder went back on his perch in the weathering yard, and the next hawk up had no interest in bare human feet.
In retrospect, here was my mistake: Harris’s hawks are native to the Southwest, where their eclectic list of prey includes birds and reptiles, but primarily a wide variety of mammals. The latter, from mice to hares, are furry creatures that move across the ground, much like a prey-size human foot with fur on the top. During the winter, we host many guests wearing fur – parka ruffs, earmuffs, hats, even jackets – and on the coldest days I’ll often wear my Mongolian-style fox fur hat just to show off. Evidently, the hawks perceive these garments as part of the hairy human, disqualifying them as eligible prey. Move that “prey” across the ground, however, and that human foot becomes potential dinner!
In the end, the entire group had a good laugh. PHEW! “You know,” exclaimed Mom, “he’s going to be telling that story for years to come!” And here I am. The year was somewhere around 2010.
