For What It's Worth

© 2002, Matt Mullenix, Baton Rouge, LA

A satisfactory hobby must be in large degree useless, inefficient, laborious, or irrelevant . . . All in all, falconry is the perfect hobby.

-Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac


Americans value productivity. We think everything ought to pull its own weight, and we apply this standard uniformly to land, money, our marriages and our children's educations. Even our hobbies tend to serve some practical purpose (increase fitness, relieve stress, lower cholesterol), and if they can make us rich or famous, so much the better. Why settle for any single benefit when we might get two or three others with a little extra effort?

The rest of the world knows we're nuts for this. Some things are worthwhile just as they are - without profit or obvious utility - and what excels in one way shouldn't have to excel in every way to justify its value. A trained hawk is but one excellent example: Here is a creature of intrinsic value far beyond our human estimations and expectations. Even a Damn Yank can see that.

Yet . . . ask me why my Harris' hawk Charlie is so good, and I'll tell you about the afternoon he caught four rabbits and three rails. I'll tell you my free time is limited; so I need a hawk that does it all, flies any quarry under any circumstance. Charlie doesn't really do that, mind you, but that's the goal. And that's also my point: Somehow the value of my falconry depends increasingly on the ability of my hawks to "produce." To produce what? Fast and varied flights, high excitement, personal challenge, self-satisfaction, healthful exercise, deep diversion and a freezer full of game.

To Charlie's credit, he delivers on all points. But if his abilities lack any desirable thing, it is the element of surprise. The odds have always been in Charlie's favor. His parents performed just as well and over much of the same ground he flies today. I chose his species, and specifically him, because I felt these were the best suited to my hawking. I was, predictably, right. Charlie's is the curse of old money: the expectation of success.

But there was a time before all expectation. At fourteen years of age, my first falconry experiences were more like a summer camp crush: I loved my little broad-winged hawk, and anything she did was fine by me. When she finally flapped across the yard to my hand, I was dumbstruck and wide-eyed, almost panting. Weeks later, when she chased a robin beneath a neighbor's hedge, I crawled in beside her and knew no other ambition but to sit and watch her eat.

Ask that young man why his hawk is so good, and what will he say? His answer would have nothing to do with a full freezer or the benefits of good sport and exercise - things I didn't know falconry could provide. It would be an answer naïve and amusing, sweet in a way I now think of my children. Maybe I'd say she loved me. Or maybe I wouldn't have understood the question.

There is the arc of the distance between then and now. It is a distance I can barely see across or remember traveling. I wonder what I've lost along the way and if it's worth replacing.

My friend Eric still flies birds he's never tried before. He is a good falconer and notably competent in other pursuits, a man accustomed to success. But his failures are more interesting: There was a hybrid gyr, a huge, playful beast who never took his hunting seriously. There was a tiny prairie tiercel, trapped after great effort in the arid plains of Texas and flown briefly in the wet pastures of central Florida. Today he's training a young Barbary tiercel: a promising yet (at least to Eric) unproven imported speedster he hopes will catch a snipe.

Through each of these experiments, Eric has kept Daisy - a big, steady peregrine who kills lots of ducks. Before Daisy there was Buck, another killer of ducks. Before Buck, a string of red-tailed hawks and truckloads of small, dead mammals. There were merlins, too, Eric's being typically tame and deadly. Whatever his goal with a new bird, it is something more elusive than a repetition of past victory. And I suspect it is more elusive than a snipe.

I wonder why a man so familiar with success flirts so with failure. Maybe I don't understand the question. Just speaking the words success and failure must prove the nagging bias of my mind. It could be that Eric's falconry, as Leopold commended any good hobby, seeks no rational justification - that the snipe he hopes to catch is just the pretense of a snipe, the pretense of yet another victory. If so, this is the shiny thing I've lost along the way.