Close Season

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The biggest problem with fishing is that there is a period in each year when you just can’t fish. This can be because the weather is against it or, more likely in the case of salmon and other migratory fishes, that they’re simply not around at that time. There are, of course, legal close seasons on most fisheries too.

It doesn’t take too much time to figure out either, that when there is a close season in one fishery, another one somewhere in the world is at its peak. This gives a guy a whole wealth of bedazzling possibilities. My sworn objective is to fish for a week each month throughout the year, somewhere in the world. Don’t know when that will become a reality, but if you can dream it, you can make it happen.

Here in Scotland, we can fish for salmon up until the end of November and then start again around the 14^th of January in different rivers; all within 2 hours drive from where I live. But that aside, it has to be said that fishing in January through April is a pretty desperate and often freezing, futile activity. In recent years, the early running spring salmon have declined to the extent that they are almost extinct and given that Scotland during these months is still in the grip of winter, you need to be pretty desperate to go out. But sometimes it has to be done; I go every year to the Spey in early February around opening day on the 12^th . I’ve yet to actually hook a fresh fish, but the sport with the kelts (salmon which have spawned) can be fun for a while. But only for a while – these are spent fish and many are diseased, with lesions and sores, and all of them drip with a thick mucous. They also have small, razor sharp teeth which shred flies, leaders and more importantly neoprene gloves making it a real palaver to unhook and return them.

You have to return them by law anyway, which poses quite a conundrum. Here in Scotland, like everywhere else, there is a huge debate about catch and release. Many anglers state, with complete conviction, that fish which are released all die. I know this to be nonsense as I have been able to fish a very small, private stillwater fishery for many years and all fish are released here. I could count on one hand those fish that have died after the experience. Yet, those same anglers who are rabid fish mongers will happily release a kelt; a fish that is doomed anyway (90% of Atlantic salmon kelts die before returning to sea) because it's the law. Folk, and the law, are strange.

So for me, my salmon fishing pretty much starts seriously in May and wraps up in mid October (although I usually have a last fling in November around my birthday on the river Tweed). That’s a long time to be away from fish.

Ever since I got the marlin bug however, I’ve made a point of heading for blue water sometime around February. This helps scratch the close season itch to some extent, but it’s still only one week in what can be a long, slow period of waiting.

So, I needed a hobby. And then I found Anna.

Anna, just so we’re straight about this, is a 2lb 2oz female Harris hawk. When I met her, she belonged to my friend Gerard and, technically, she still does. But since it’s me who flies her and looks after her, I consider that I have at least a small share.

I’ve loved birds in general, and birds of prey in particular, since I was a child and used to devour books on falconry, dreaming of owning my own hawk. One day, I invited Gerard on a day's salmon fishing, he brought Anna along and I fell in love. Simple as that.

After that, I just wanted a bird more than ever before and Gerard offered me the possibility of realising this by kindly offering to keep it for me. So I got my first hawk, called CC (too long and boring a story to explain), in 1996 and she was a holy terror. She was really stroppy and if she didn’t get a kill in minutes of loosing her, she’d simply fly off and hunt on her own.

Perhaps I should explain a bit more about what is going on here; falconry is basically hunting prey using a hawk or falcon. To be crystal clear, it’s not a “trained hawk”; in no way can you describe a hawk or falcon as a “trained” bird. They are just simply doing what comes naturally and hunting and killing anything that they can catch. What it is about is conditioning the bird to believe that she can only get food from the handler. To do this, you have to keep the bird a little on the hungry side; not too hungry so that it becomes ill, but hungry enough so that it is sharp and responsive and probably just as hungry as it would be in the wild. When the bird is like this, she will come to you easily for a small piece of chicken. At least that’s the theory; it doesn’t always work like that and birds can and do fly off. One of my early birds, Tay,  flew away and was gone for 14 days; when we got her back she was in an old lady's garden trying to get kill her cat. The old lady called the police and told them "an eagle" was in her garden, they traced the ring number on her leg and I got her back.

You feed the birds primarily on dead day-old chicks, which seems a bit grisly until you realise that dead day-old chicks are a by product of the egg industry. Cockerels don’t lay eggs, so they are euthanased at a day old, blast frozen and sold to the pet trade. And the hawks love them.

There are two branches to the sport - hawking and falconry. I have never owned a falcon but I have watched them work and it is something to behold. First you find a pheasant or covey of game birds with a pointer, then you send the falcon up into the sky as high as it can go (and sometimes that is as much as 1000 ft by which time they are no more than a mere spec above you), then you send in the pointer or a couple of spaniels to flush the birds. And, all being well, you will see the most achingly beautiful, but ultimately bloodthirsty act in nature; a stooping falcon taking prey. It is absolutely breathtaking to see, and some falcons have bells fitted which have a vent that screams like a falling bomb as they come down. Awesome is the only word that truly describes the spectacle.

But as I said, I couldn’t possibly own a falcon (too high maintenance) and so I opted for a hawk. A hawk will hunt primarily from your fist, or it will fly into a nearby tree or fencepost and follow you around waiting for you (and your dog or ferret) to flush game. Normally, but not exclusively, ground game; they will take pheasant and even partridge if they can nail them against a barrier such as a thicket or fence.

The power of these birds is unbelievable. Contrary to what you might think, it’s not their hooked beaks that you have to watch for, it’s their feet: so that’s why you wear a heavy duty leather glove. Their grip is incredible and if, by chance, you get grabbed on your ungloved hand when they are cranked up on a kill then you can expect blood. A lot of blood. And the more you struggle, the harder they’ll grip you so you have to just learn to grit your teeth and relax until they let you go. That can take a while, trust me. You learn to love the scars.

To say that they make a kill is erroneous; they basically grab and subdue the prey with their talons and then they simply start to eat it. Alive. It’s grim stuff so it’s the falconers job (I believe if you fly a hawk you’re called an Austringer, but that sounds way too pretentious to me and falconer will do) is to get in there and despatch the quarry, usually by breaking its’ neck. This is when you get grabbed, more often than not, as the hawk will be really pumped by this time and the slightest movement will get her mad and lashing out.

Besides, they know what’s coming.

They’ve just caught something and they are really pleased with themselves, and now they know you want to take it away from them. Clearly they don’t want to give it to you, so you have to do a little deal. First you cover the dead rabbit/pheasant/whatever with your bag ( you need to move real slow at this point). Once the hawk can’t see the kill, she starts to relax a bit. Then you offer her a piece of chicken, or even a whole day-old chick. But you offer it to her just out of range of her bill. To be successful here, you have to hold onto the prey as she’ll just drag it with her. You’d be surprised how easily they will give up a 4lb pheasant for a 1oz day old chick. It’s a fair trade for me.

So, to get back to it, my first bird was called CC and she was a fearless, psychotic killer. She would nail anything that moved and had huge stamina. It was a favourite gag amongst the other falconers to sneak up on a pheasant that was holding in cover close to CC, then flush the pheasant and watch it disappear over the hilltops, with CC in hot pursuit, and leaving me to run a couple of miles to get her back. Very droll...

I knew that I wouldn’t have her long because within 3 weeks of acquiring her she had ripped a 4 inch gash in her right wing, tearing through a barbed wire fence in hot pursuit of a bunny. She got the bunny too. You could almost hear her say "It's just a scratch..."

A couple of months later, she grabbed a big buck rabbit which put up a fight. This happens from time to time, for obvious reasons. Normally, hawks only catch the young, the stupid or the sick as nature intended it to be. But every so often they get hold of a very fit adult in its prime and there is a life or death battle. Literally. This time, CC got kicked and badly beaten up by the big bunny buck and she was just too plain aggressive to let it go. The vet had a try at saving her but sadly she died from her injuries.

I have to confess that I can be quite an emotional guy and I was very upset at losing her, much to the surprise and consternation of the falconer, Adrian, who brought her corpse to me. I've still got one of her primary feathers on my fishing hat and I kept her jesses in a frame in my office (jesses are leather straps fitted to her legs which you use to hold them whilst they are on your fist).

A while back, my friend Gerard had literally hundreds of hawks and falcons at his estate plus three or four guys to look after them. He was running it as a hobby business, taking corporate clients on a “day to remember” with hawks and falcons and even eagles. Adrian, who was the head falconer,  sold Tay to me after CC was gone. Tay was CC’s sister and had many of CC’s characteristics, but mercifully she was a bit less psychotic. I always fly female hawks because they are bigger than males and can catch bigger game. In the wild, a pair of hawks the same size in the same territory would quickly deplete the available game. So the males and females are different sizes so that they can co-exist.

Tay was a great bird, but her only flaw was that she hated children with a real passion. And since my kids almost always came with me, I couldn’t fly Tay as often as I needed to because she would attack them. It was scary to see, too, and she once scratched my nephew’s head by swooping at him, claws down for the kill. Never could figure out why she was like that, but clearly it was an untenable situation.

So, Tay was exchanged for Tango who proved to be a joy! She was great with the kids and would sit happily on their fists, even though she was too heavy for them to hold her for any length of time. Her only flaw was that she would give you a nip with her beak from time to time if she was feeding and you moved your hand too close. Oh yes, and she hated horses. If she saw a horse, she would fly to the farthest tree she could find and simply sit up there and sulk.

Hawks spend a fair bit of time sulking; if they don’t get what they chase, they exude a mixture of fury and petulance and no amount of tempting will bring them back until they’ve had their tantrum. In the winter it's no problem because there are no leaves on the trees and you can see where they are sitting. But in summer and autumn, they can just melt into the background and you can spend ages wandering around yelling "TAAAAAANNNNNGGGGOOOOOOOOOO" to no avail. That's why we put bells on them; so that when they move they jingle and give us at least a hint as to where they may be hiding. But they also sit stock still for literally ages, so you need to get used to the waiting game.

I had a really good season with Tango and then Gerard decided that he didn’t want to keep birds anymore and the guys that he employed to look after them all went to work elsewhere. At the same time, I was too busy at work myself to put in the time needed to really look after a bird on my own. So Tango, sadly, was sold.

I should point out at this juncture that we give them names for our sakes, not for theirs. They never answer to any name and are only interested in food. They will go to anyone who has food, irrespective of what they call them and you can yell "TAAAAAANNNNNGGGGOOOOOOOOOO" until your lungs burst and it won't bring them anywhere near you unless they are hungry. Weight is important: every bird has it's best flying weight and you watch it assiduously. If they eat too much, they are "fed up" and they simply won't do anything but sit and digest their food. Hence the expression: fed-up.

Anyway, I thought that my falconry days were over, but Gerard kept a couple of the mews (special pens for hawks) and also kept Anna for sentimental reasons. One of the guys who used to work for him kept another bird called Osca and he went round to feed them both and I pitched in to clean them out. Gerard told me to fly Anna whenever I wanted to. So I started to take her out, as it were.

Anna does have one  problem: her weight. The mews she lives in is also populated with sparrows and Anna has become very adept at ambushing them on the bars of her pen. You can have her on perfect weight, then go to take her out and find out she's heavy for no reason. Casting about, you'll notice the tell-tale small brown feathers on the floor of her mews and then, usually, her battered and bloody feet where she has smashed into the wire bars grabbing the hapless sparrow.

But she’s a very settled, very steady, very professional killer. And she loves her work. She knows exactly what is going on when I arrive to jess her up. She has hunting straps fitted to her legs permanently, but I also made a set of mews jesses for her that I fit first to her legs and then secure with a cord leash whilst I take her to where I will fly her. It makes it easier to control her around Gerard’s tame guinea fowl.

Chic McSherry September 2001

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