The anticipation of working with a creature as wild and fierce as a bird of prey sent a tickle of fear down my neck, which only added to the excitement.
Now, this was it: Standing on a tall, T-shaped perch about 100 feet away, a Harris hawk stretched his black wings, more than 3 feet across, tip to tip. He dropped, cinnamon-red shoulders glowing like fiery epaulets. He swooped low across the lawn. He was coming fast.
At the last moment, he arced upward to descend upon my gauntlet from above, his leg bells jingling. Beetle-black talons, surprisingly dainty, extended from his screaming-yellow feet.
A hawk's talons can grip with a pressure of 100 to 200 pounds per square inch, allowing it to seize prey almost three times its own weight. So the barely detectable squeeze of his toes through the gauntlet came as a surprise. This hawk weighed more than a pound and a half, but felt even lighter. He gulped the smidgeon of raw beef that the falconer, Rob Waite, had smeared on my glove. The bird's beak, yellow like his feet, was hooked like a miniature scimitar.
"Good boy, Elmer," Waite said.
The handsome, regal bird didn't seem to mind his folksy name. "Harris hawks are the Labrador retrievers of the birds of prey," said Waite, a native of Buckinghamshire, England, who managed this sole branch of the British School of Falconry, at the Equinox Resort in Manchester.
The breed inhabits the high deserts of Central and South America and the Southwestern United States, which are cold enough to allow the birds to acclimate to Vermont winters. Just as important, for teaching purposes, they are the rare social birds of prey, meaning that in the wild, they live in loose family groups and hunt cooperatively. This makes them easier to train to tolerate human contact than most of their loner kin. Hence, falconry isn't only about falcons, the long-winged species known for their plummeting vertical dives, called stoops.
