It’s no flight of fancy when a Georgia family works with noble birds of prey.
Story by Cara Clark, Photos by Eliza Daffin
Silhouetted against a nearly cloudless pale sky, a bird of prey turns in a widening spiral, wings outstretched to drift on indiscernible air currents high above a stand of pines. Phil and Dr. Carrie Cowley keep a sharp eye on the bird’s movements, and it’s Carrie who first catches a glimpse of carmine-colored feathers, identifying the avian as a red-tailed hawk.
The keen interest is to be sure the bird keeps its distance from their backyard, where falconer Phil, daughter Elizabeth, and son John are falconers. At the moment, they are flying a juvenile red-tailed hawk. Birds of prey can be territorial, making it wise to keep a cautious eye on the wild visitor in the distance.
The creatures are also adept and adaptable. Phil explains raptors can be trained to hunt with a falconer in just three weeks of work. That’s a short time to build trust — the birds fly free as they hunt and could respond to a call of the wild at any point during their outings.
This season, the Cowleys work with three markedly different birds — Alice, a Cooper’s hawk; Millie, a Merlin falcon; and Klinger, a Red-Tailed hawk. The Merlin falcon, the second smallest in North America, hails from the Georgia coast, while the other raptors are common throughout the state. Each needs a measured approach to training and continuity of care. Carrie is a crucial part of the team as their veterinarian, providing any needed care to keep the birds healthy.
With late afternoon sun glimmering on the lake’s surface, Phil gently raises his gloved hand, and watches as Klinger, the red-tailed hawk, soars away on his second solo flight since training began. He settles for a moment on a low pine bough, then ascends branch by branch in a process called “laddering up.” When Klinger reaches a lofty limb, he intently studies the activity on the ground, pausing to consider angles and options before swooping to the bait. It’s an exercise in mutual trust — one that showcases the regal hawk’s natural grandeur.
A ROYAL TRADITION
Hundreds of years ago, falconry was a sport for reagents and European gentry on vast estates or for Bedouins traveling the Arabian Peninsula and North Africa, whose raptors helped them find food in sparse conditions. It and capability to do it.”
It’s a time-consuming interest — the birds, for all their powerful talons and sharp, curved beaks, are delicate. They are weighed daily before and after eating to ensure they maintain optimum weight. Because Phil traveled often in his real estate development work, it was when Elizabeth was old enough to help with the endeavor in 2019 that he could devote the time and attention to falconry. His lifetime of studying the winged hunters was another piece of the puzzle.
“She could handle the birds when I was traveling, and it’s something we could do together,” Phil says. “We started right before Covid, and when everything shut down, we had time to study, trap, and train the birds. It was perfect timing in our lives. Everything came together. Elizabeth was the youngest licensed falconer in Georgia and one of only 20 or so women falconers. I was very proud of her.”
The family, including Elizabeth, now a freshman majoring in avian biology at the University of Georgia, and son John, have all found a passion for the creatures, who rely on wit, speed, agility, and sharp eyes to keep themselves fed in the wild. One of the most rewarding aspects of falconry in the Cowley family is knowing they are giving a young bird a chance it might not have had. Falconers can only trap “passagers” or “juveniles,” which are birds less than a year old.
“The reason is that about 80 percent of raptors do not make it through their first year,” Elizabeth explains. “When trapping a first-year-bird, you know that the odds of that bird making it through the winter on its own are low. We train and hunt with first-year birds keeping them well-fed, healthy, and active through the hunting season, which starts in the fall and ends in early spring. Typically, we release our birds at the end of the hunting season, and there’s a good shot they are going to make it since they were well cared throughout the winter, which is their riskiest season.”
A wild red-tailed hawk needs three or four mice daily to survive, a constant challenge for a bird to sustain itself, especially in the winter. With the falconry partnership, the captured bird is nurtured and then returned to the wild. Because the birds fly unfettered, but for lightweight bells, they’re free to fly away during a hunt. When they find game in the field, the falconer allows the raptor to sample the fare, then substitutes or “trades off” the wildlife with food kept in his vest.
Training that animal to hunt and return involves working with food-garnished lures. The birds are released and fly onto a lure, where they find tidbits of meat, working at incrementally increasing distances. When they return to the gloved hand of their hunter, they are again rewarded with food. It’s a symbiotic relationship.
“Raptors are federally regulated through the Migratory Bird Treaty Act,” Elizabeth explains. “Then, each state adopts its own rules and regs for falconry. In Georgia, you must pass a written test to show your knowledge of raptor health, husbandry, hunting, and disease. Then you have to have a sponsor who is a general class or master class falconer, who will essentially agree to be your mentor. The next step is to build a bird facility that the State Department of Natural Resources inspects, and once that passes inspection, you have all three requirements to get your license.”
Regulations are critical — the birds are not pets.
“It’s a wild animal we fly free and hunt with,” she says. “If you’re not going to do it ethically, you should not participate in the sport.”
HOME SAFE HOME
The birds inhabit a mews, an enclosure for raptors, designed with insight from Carrie, who studied at Auburn University, and Phil. Before building the structure, the two studied the habitat at Auburn’s Raptor Center and adjusted the design to perfect it for their needs. Above the arched door are the French words “Château des Oiseaux” (House or Castle of Birds), which echoes the silver tin roof architecture of their home. It overlooks a private lake with a wide-open field for training the birds and timbered areas that create homes for rodents and other potential prey.
The diets for each winged predator are varied — smaller falcons enjoy a tasty dragonfly, while more high-strung Cooper’s hawks are keen to dine on smaller birds. Red-tailed hawks prefer squirrels and rabbits. Falcons are known for scooping up songbirds from feeders, leaving behind only a poof of scattered feathers.
Fall and winter are the preferred seasons for falconry when leaves are off the trees, and the birds focus sharply to see any prey, but theoretically, Elizabeth says, you can fly the raptors year-round. The exception is a critical one. Don’t fly a bird when it is molting, a process when it loses feathers and grows a new set, usually in late summer. Blood is being pumped into the new feathers as they grow and develop.
Unlike some birds, including waterfowl that lose all of their feathers at once and temporarily become flightless, birds of prey lose their feathers in a strategic order and symmetrically to allow them to continue to fly throughout the molt — a necessity in meeting sustenance needs.
“The fourth feather on the left wing and the right wing will drop at the same time,” Elizabeth says. “You don’t hunt during the molt because if they break a feather that’s in blood, it could permanently damage that feather or worse, cause the bird to bleed out.”
Phil, Elizabeth, and John are general-class falconers (the middle rung between apprentice and master falconer), and Phil has also become a federally licensed raptor rehabilitator. When a bird of prey is injured—one was recently found with a treble-fish hook injury—Phil can treat and release or hold it while it rehabilitates from more serious injuries. The Department of Natural Resources reaches out when a bird is found in his area.
Releasing the birds he has trained and hunted is both difficult and rewarding.
“You get attached to every bird,” Phil said. “Each bird has a different personality. It’s a good and bad feeling — it’s great that the bird did well and is being released, but it’s also a little sad.”
When the partnership is ended, it’s difficult not to turn to anthropomorphism, hoping the bird also feels that bond and will miss the trainer. Phil is too practical for that.
But as Carrie watches the wild red-tailed hawk circling over the distant treeline but not encroaching on Klinger’s territory, she shares a fond memory. One of the red-tailed hawks they trained, Tina, would often come back and sit in the trees to watch the family, clearly recalling the connection to the “Château des Oiseaux.”
A BOND OF TRUST: MASTERING FALCONRY
Steve Hoddy, a master falconer, founded Earthquest more than 30 years ago and has been involved for 50 years in Wildlife Education. Steve, based in Pine Mountain, Georgia, travels the country with birds of prey, introducing them to groups of all ages to engender an appreciation of the magnificent birds.
He hosts a Birds of Prey Show at the Georgia Renaissance Festival in Fairburn, Georgia, scheduled to run this year on Saturdays through Dec. 7
Steve has a rich background handling the majestic creatures and has worked with celebrities such as Jack Hanna and Jim Fowler of Wild Kingdom, assisting them with managing the birds on such talk shows as David Letterman.
As a close friend of Phil and Carrie Cowley, Steve brings an impressive collection of birds to fly on the property, including Zulee, a Steppes Eagle from the family of Golden Eagles. He also has a longtime hunting partner in Quilla (the Incan Goddess of the Moon, an Aplomado falcon, and a serene show stealer in Boba, the Eurasian eagle-owl with a charming tendency to swivel his head and chant, “who-who” as he studies observers with brilliant amber eyes.
It’s a memorable experience to watch Steve handle the predators. From memory, he quotes Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem, The Eagle, late one afternoon as he walks in from working with the birds with obvious devotion.
The Eagle
He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring’d with the azure world, he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.
Learn more about the festival at www.garenfest.com. Donations to the nonprofit Earthquest can be made at www. earthquest.org. com.
