Ed Pitcher gives his reasons
There's been a growing discussion about the new book "The Flying of Falcons" by Ed Pitcher and Ricardo Velarde.
Both Ed and Ricardo have been good friends and Marshall customers over the years, so we added the book to the Marshall Radio website since we support it's originality and observations on the development of our birds.
Just last week, Ed sent this interesting summary of what the book is, what it isn't, and why they even did it. I think his own words here might be of interest to customers and others:
"This book is the end result of my forty years of flying falcons and over twenty-five years of constant encouragement by Ricardo Velarde. Our friendship started in 1978 at a North American Falconers Association meet in Alamosa, Colorado. For some reason Ricardo was able to appreciate my approach to falconry. It was not long after we met that he began to suggest that I write down my thoughts and methods while working with my falcons. I was not that interested in writing a book and really didn’t feel competent as an aspiring falconer. Because of my own goals as a young falconer, I was more consumed with the efforts required to be successful at this unique sport.
Ricardo tried everything he could think of to help me record my thoughts and experiences. He suggested using a micro-recorder as I drove my car or during times when I was struck with insightful ideas, that didn’t work. Later, he gave me a hard covered notebook and suggested I write down my thinking about training falcons. That didn’t work either. It seemed that I never had the book or recorder with me when I was struck with ideas or thoughts about my approach to flying falcons. What did work was using any piece of paper I could find to write down my moments of inspiration. Paper shopping bags, old receipts and the backside of envelopes began to make up the bulk of my recording efforts. This approach drove my wife nuts because bits and pieces of paper were soon littering our house. She tried to help organize the litter and began using manila folders filled with my scribbling notes.
Ricardo finally assembled about a hundred pages of script in order to show me that we actually had a project that needed to be completed. With his constant encouragement, the book gradually began to take shape. I was slowly convinced to make the effort of writing down my approach to managing falcons. By using my field experiences with falcons as examples, I make an attempt to entertain the reader as I relate the more didactic explanations of my thinking.
My efforts are guided by what I hope are new insights to the natural developmental sequence of most raptors. Birds of prey mature as our children do. Falcons learn about the world around them and then interact with their environment in an intelligent way just as we do. Falcons learn and interact with what I call in the book, “the neighborhood.” This cognitive ability of falcons to assess and then interact convinced me that operate conditioning and repetitive training techniques were not required. Falcons are much more than ‘instinct driven’ animals.
With the endless help from Ricardo and our editor, Bergitta Kater, we assembled the book into an autobiographical format that carries the reader through my experiences and revelations over my forty years as a falconer. Instead of using the typical numbered chapters usually seen in most books, the book is divided into sections. Each section is introduced with a quote from the book that Ricardo felt would outline the basic intent of each section. The reader is then taken through subsections that further illustrate my intentions with hawking stories or other examples.
My early years in falconry are the initial sections with the people and falcons that influenced my first interpretations of this artful and complex sport. The next section deals with reflective collections of my interpretations in order to prepare the reader for the more complex sections that follow. Falcon development, their cognitive and predatory abilities are outlined in the next sections of the book. Appreciation of falcon development and their cognitive abilities is pivotal to understanding the motivations of falcons and birds of prey in general. I discuss what I think are important milestones in falcon development such as Fidelity Factor, Fear Factor, Categorical Thinking and Trust. These sections carry the reader through what I hope are insightful ways to understand and then manage falcons in a new and more enlightened way.
Traditional Falconry is discussed as a matter of reference to this new way of falcon management. The traditional approach to falconry and its practices should not be abandoned but instead, they can be and I think should be, built upon. The more we advance our thinking about raptor behavior and development, the more we can establish the real partnership between man and hawk in this sport we call falconry. This new approach replaces the traditional interpretation of strict weight control as a life long management tool. Later in the book, I discuss the insightful wisdom of the traditional falconers who fully reclaimed falcons to their natural robust weights after the initial lower weights of training and manning.
American falconers in particular took the initial goals of weight reduction in falcon training and reclamation as the final goal of management. These interpretations of strict weight management resulted from the traditional literature not outlining weight management of falcons being flown at game. The wisdom of the traditional falconers knew wild taken falcons only needed to tolerate the falconer and then be allowed to return to their full capacity as an avian predator. And, the traditional falconers knew wild falcons did not need to be taught ‘how to fly.’ ‘Teaching’ falcons how to fly is relatively new in the falconry literature. For the most part it is not needed.
With these new perspectives on weight management, the developmental sequences of young falcons and the cognitive abilities of falcons, I soon abandoned training falcons. I began to understand what motivated my falcons to remain faithful when flying for extended periods of time at the limits of binoculars. Enlisting the natural growth and development of falcons and understanding the concepts of fidelity exposed me to another level of falconry that could be routinely experienced.
Most falconers already know most of what is written in our recent publication. What I bring to the table is clarification of well-established practices. The idea of natural development, self-actualization and eventually being free of the scale add clarity to what many falconers have already experienced. Encouraging the falconer to trust his/her falcons through understanding the falcon’s mindset allows each falconer to take his/her relationships with both falcons and people to the next level.
I began to assemble my experiences with flying falcons that reflected the natural attributes of falcons instead of the dogma of training techniques. This more liberal approach allowed me to observe the response of falcons being flown at quarry. The subtle influence of eye contact between predator and prey provided insights to the benefits of falcons being flown slightly out of position instead of directly overhead. The story in the book about the Black Shaheen followed by the section on eye contact outline this influence on my approach to falcon management. Most birds of prey will respond in a positive and natural way if managed to their best benefit. Each section of the book carries this simple theme to my approach.
In the long run my efforts are simply a synthesis of what traditional falconers always knew and what contemporary falconers have replaced with structured training regimes. Read the book with the knowledge that my approach is no more than a perspective supported by personal experience. I encourage the reader to use my perspective in a way that improves their falconry rather than emulating mine.
- Ed Pitcher"
You can see more about this, including the great new artwork, by going here.
RB
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Originally Posted by Tony James
