Ferruginous Letters
I was in hospital yesterday. It was for one of those examinations that has you shown into some stark room, where you lose everything except your shoes and socks – which makes you look and feel ridiculous – and gain a flimsy smock that won't close properly. You are then left. You wait in your little room staring at the trays of implements next to you. You look around the room. You lie down. You close your eyes. You sit back up. You wait. And you wait. Finally, the consultant comes in.
My consultant was rude and impatient. I'd already heard him next door giving the Dictaphone some of the rough stuff. Now it was my turn. He tore into me, firing a barrage of questions about previous illnesses. I watched his face. It was obvious my answers were not precise enough. I tried harder. His tone indicated TRY HARDER STILL , and there was a hint of something evil – maybe the surgical glove and marrow-sized finger I was shortly to meet. ‘Any injuries?' ‘You mean recently?' ‘No, ANY .' Now I could be precise – and fill his bloody note pad! I started with surgery to a damaged ankle and was heading towards a frozen chunk of spine, ready to continue to a dislocated shoulder, when I stopped at my scarred right knee. And suddenly his voice was as distant and muffled as it had been with the Dictaphone and I was somewhere else and it was a long time ago…
I could hear another helicopter coming in. That humming, buzzing, chopping drone that's impossible to mimic. Maybe a skier, the place was full of them. I was in a sport's injury hospital in Germany. It was my second stay, the knee surgery was going to require a bit more help if I was ever going to use the leg properly again and so a few weeks' work on a special machine – and a daily jab of god knows what – had been prescribed. There was an army of us. The walking wounded: crutches, sticks, and leg braces straight from Cyborg World.
It was a mixed-sex complex, its plush twin-bed rooms giving it a holiday hotel feel. It was Club Med for the lame. You met up, you went to the pool, you got some sun. And if you were my roommate, a male ballet dancer from somewhere in South America, you went the whole single-male holiday hog as often as you could! He was movie star perfect – body and looks – and the girls fell at his feet. I remember just one, a stunningly attractive blonde who introduced herself by sitting opposite me, putting her legs up on the bench and showing me right up the leg of her skimpy but wide shorts. She wore nothing underneath and the view held me just about as long as she intended it to.
In hospital you read a lot. Even if you're not a reader, you read, eventually . I read a lot. And after I'd read a lot, I wrote a lot. The captive can be a dedicated student – just look at the number of highly qualified long-term prison inmates. My topic was the ferruginous hawk. I wanted to know about the ferruginous, and so I wrote a heap of information-seeking letters.
The ferruginous was then, as it really is today, the most baffling bird employed – or not employed – in the sport. It's impossible not to be fascinated. This bird is some weird and wonderful creation made up from bits of other species. There isn't a bird on the planet that looks or behaves remotely like it. It's stolen a falcon's wings – or at least the feathers from them – taken a golden eagle's feathered legs, and decided to hinge its head just behind the eyes to accommodate a steppe eagle car-swallowing mouth. Maybe it got a little confused with its feet – a fraction small. But it decided to put matters right, back with the falcons: forget the feet, it would slay its victims with a biting tearing falcon beak. Then it dumped raptors altogether and grabbed the chest of some over-trained pit bull. And while with the pit bull, it decided to borrow a never-say-die, never-give-in attitude. And to go with all of this, it wanted weight: about five pounds seemed to do it. Oh yes, I wanted to know a lot more about this bird.
But I wasn't totally ignorant. I'd flown the species in the UK, where I'd been revved up to a glass-shattering scream by Beebe's assessment of it in Hawks, Falcons and Falconry . And I'd seen that Beebe was right, had seen the bird's astonishing powers of flight and drive to hunt. But I'd seen too that the UK-based ferruginous was a very square peg not ready at all to be forced into a concrete-hard and very round English hole. Our quarries were wrong – and often the landscapes too: it couldn't use its falcon wings on rabbits – they didn't run far enough – and it didn't feel at home with brown hares either (though later, the moors and mountain hares of Scotland would have the bird feeling a bit more at ease). No one really did well with the ferruginous in the UK, or any part of Europe for that matter.
But I didn't want to know the European ferruginous, I wanted to know the real one – the bird of Beebe's writings. And so my letters went to America, and they skipped the entire East Coast with one great jackrabbit bound to land west of the Mississippi in the bird's true homeland. This is where I would find the real ferruginous, and real ferruginous falconers.
Email would have made it all so easy, and probably turned my ‘heap' into a mountain! Email is fantastic and once you're into it, you correspond – talk – with such fluid informality that friendships develop with a wonderful ease. You chat with email in a way you would never use a pen: the pen is slow, it gives you time to think, reflect, tone down passion, anger and praise. And email is fast – very fast.
Letters are very different. Anticipated, maybe long awaited, letters arrive, are individual in shape, style and size. They are held, looked at and carefully opened. And with equal care they are stored away; popped into draws – maybe for days, maybe for years. Maybe for centuries. Letters from overseas are more special still. And the further they travel, the more their value: odd stamps, odd postmarks, and an eager eye becomes the swift detective before busy fingers get to work. Recently I had an unexpected package from Russia. The door opened and the postman handed me a cylinder-shaped parcel wrapped in heavy dark slightly wrinkled parchment paper and tied up with what could have easily been dried animal sinews. Ink and handwriting matched it perfectly. It hadn't come from Russia, it had come from another time!
When you're hospital confined, a prison guest, or desert-island abandoned, the arrival of mail is something special. I think it was wildlife writer Mike Tomkies who, living in some cabin in a remote corner of Canada, described the ritual of opening mail, leaving it until the last moment that it might be savoured. And so, still half-captive at home, I waited for my letters and romanticised and fantasised about where they would be coming from.
I've always had an interest in the western US. Maybe it's the space. I like the Gertrude Stein quote Bruce Haak uses in Pirate of the Plains : ‘In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. This is what makes America what it is.' But it's not just space, it's the kind of space and what lies in it. My American space is deserts, vast plains, and horizons the European eye just can't adjust to. And it has hares. And it has great big ferruginous hawks to go with them. It's from all of this that my letters would be coming, brushed with just enough desert sand to make them authentic.
The first one was a crushing disappointment: ‘Sorry Martin, but you seen to know more about the ferruginous than I do.' I scanned along the line – hope . There was a ‘but….' and another name was offered. Off went another letter. Meanwhile another reply. And another. And the postmarks were bang on: Utah and Idaho. Suddenly, Justin Tanner was telling me about flights to hares from the back of a pickup crashing through the sage, and Charles Browning was giving me slope soaring with his bird soaring out over sage flats to stoop at targets flushed by his dogs. The praise just rolled from the pages, and slowly I had a bird that was starting to look more like the bird Beebe had insisted was out there.
More letters arrived. Morlan Nelson was telling me about the ferruginous probably being the most capable of the buteos. And there was insight-giving Richard Howard of the Bureau of Land Management. Richard not only turned up the heat about the bird's hare catching ability, he also helped me start to get to know the wild ferruginous and its habitat by sending me scientific papers. Now the picture was really coming together and my appreciation of this incredible raptor mushroomed. I could see Beebe nodding: ‘Told you so.'
If there was one niggle, then it had to be that most of those who had so much praise for the ferruginous had moved on to other birds. Nobody was flying one now. Then one day that long forgotten ‘but…' dropped through the door. A quick scan: Ramona, California. It was thick – photos? Swift but careful hands ripped it open. Yes, photos! I spread them out – the letter could wait. There was a slim guy striding through tall, suitably foreign looking vegetation with an enormous light-phase ferruginous. Next shot: no vegetation, vast country, short-coated dog – vizsla? Another: the slim guy again, now on lonely desert road scanning endless sage desert, ferruginous on glove, rump of big hare poking out of game bag. Next: open plain, looks hot , dog working out in front – now definitely a vizsla. Then WHAM! A hare as big as the dog held high in two hands as if being presented, and sitting on it and feeding from a huge crimson gash was that monster hawk again. Quick, the letter – the name? Craig Culver.
I began to read. Now here was someone different, someone still exploring, still questioning, still captivated by the bird; other birds might join it, but the ferruginous obviously held a very special place in this man's heart. There would never be any ‘moving on' for this guy.
Craig was primarily hawking the local desert cottontails and sage hares (the rump showing from the game bag). But what about that monster hare? I've always had a passion for hares and hare hawking – have maybe envied the Americans their wider variety – and I immediately recognised that the big hare being presented was a mighty prairie hare. He was hawking prairie hares with a ferruginous!
Prairie hare. You don't need to say any more to an American falconer. The name says it all: size, speed – respect! This is an animal that is talked about in library whispers, with eyes cast down. It's a woolly-coated winter-white Behemoth that, to borrow a line from a NAFA journal, ‘lopes into view and blots out the sun.' It has long shared a relationship with the ferruginous, but more in the realms of ‘should work', and ‘the bird looks just right for the task' than in practical being done falconry. Craig was making the ‘should' read does – and does very well indeed! And he was so modest about it. He was hawking one of the most impressive hares in the world with one of falconry's most little known birds – was bringing the mythical partnership to life – and he wanted to do anything but shout about it. Others would have been on the rooftops screaming!
We kept in touch and I badgered him (so much easier in recent years with that wonderful email!) with more questions: more about the birds – male, female, passager, eyass, captive bred – and about the vizsla (the photo-dog now identified as Velvet). Questions, questions, questions. And always he was ready to give my pestering the consideration it didn't deserve. And through all of this, I came to learn more about the man himself. This was someone who had fully immersed himself in the sport, being fascinated with both the past and the present. And he was a traveller – the rest of the Culver clan too. From partridge hawking with goshawks in Pakistan to grouse hawking in Scotland, this guy had been around! And always there was that modest man from the first letters.
Craig has assisted me with at least two book projects; sometimes just chewing hard on a few issues, at other times jumping right in. He flew to my aid with The Complete Rabbit and Hare Hawk , his experience with the ferruginous really giving the regalis text something special. He rolled back years to take me out to Fiesta Island to pursue an isolated population of sage hares – bagging an albino in the process. And then we left his usual hawking ground on the beaches and deserts to head off on prairie hare expeditions; now I got winter-frozen hawking camps and snow storms.