I’ve lived in Sacramento over a year. Last season I didn’t catch a single duck here. Not a single one. It wasn’t for a lack of trying. It was just that ponds were hard to come by, so little water early in the winter. The ducks never dispersed into smaller water, because, well, there wasn’t any. What I did find were mallards and Anakin was more than a little opposed. They’re a big duck. He’s a small falcon. He liked his bones and feathers just the way they were currently arranged on his body, thank you very much.

So on Christmas, when I found two mallards on a pond, a drake and a hen, I thought, Well buddy, at least you get to fly. Make it look good and I’ll pretend I didn’t notice that you didn’t really try.

There was a time I couldn’t really tell, you know? A stoop and a connect that didn’t quite yield a successful hunt always looked like bad luck to me. I’ve learned a lot in the last eight years, perhaps not as much as the falcon has learned about me, but I can tell the difference now between a real hunt and a faked one. I know what Anakin is capable of and when he doesn’t give it. I also know how to watch the ducks to tell if he means business. They see so much that I cannot. If the ducks aren’t all that worried, I know I’m being played.

Christmas Duck

But this time the ducks were worried.

And they had a right to be.

Anakin's First Flight

…wasn’t really a flight, in all honesty.

He sat on the roof of XB’s truck. Then he sat on a pole. And then he thought ponderously about coming to the lure, finally arriving, but protesting heavily that I wasn’t swinging it by strafing the stationary leather pouch five times before tackling it.

At least he got in the air. At least I got him back. At least I can say I’ve started.

In typical falconry fashion, right before this bit of nothing, XB put his bird over a pond –really two ponds adjacent to one another. One full of coots, the other with a gorgeous array of waterfowl. Booth, my Brittany, anxious to finally be hunting rushed full speed ahead in barking glee and jumped right into the wrong pond. Fortunately, but the time he starting flushing coots, XB’s bird had already lost a duck in a half-assed attempt at being a falcon. Oh, and XB’s dog had run off.

After retreiving Minnie the falcon, waiting 15 minutes for Booth to flush every coot he could find on the pond, and tracking XB’s dog on the other side of field, then retreiving her as well, we gave it another shot.

Just as the sun was setting, our prospects looking minimal, if not impossible, Minnie took a hen mallard in spectacular flight that required all five of us, dogs, humans and falcon working in tandem. XB graciously let Booth carry the duck back to the truck and all of us ended the day in bliss. It was a lovely way to start the holiday weekend.

There is a place in Lift I often find myself reading from at bookstores that describes Anakin falling and refers to Ken Franklin’s video of sky diving with his peregrine Frightful. I remember the falconry meet when Ken was keynote speaker and showed us the raw footage of the soon to be National Geographic special. The longwingers gave him standing ovation…some of them, I swear, with tears in their eyes.  I didn’t quite understand. It would be years later before I finally flew falcons, but I get it now. A peregrine stooping is simply impossible. It is natural magic. From a scene out of Lift at White Water Ranch…

This tuck and fall was pure committed peregrine and a vision that will be etched in my memory for the rest of my falconry career. It was a falcon defying air, redefining terminal velocity and now I was witness to this amazing feat of peregrine evolution.

I get chills every time I imagine it. And here is the video that made is possible for me to really see:

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