High Flying Gyrfalcons - Hardbound & Full Color

[davidfrank]

http://www.westernsporting.com/mm5/graphics/00000001/HRFB1051AA.jpg


By Vic Hardaswick & Kent Christopher, Hardcover, Dust Jacket, 7 x 10, Color throughout, 14 chapters, Epilogue and References, 287 pages.

High Flying Gyrfalcons: The Guided Development Program may seem like it is about flying Gyrfalcons in a grand style, and it is, but it contains a great deal about flying longwings of any description. It teaches us about our relationship with our hawks and how to guide them to their full potential. This book was 20 years in the making and a great deal was learned and compiled during that time by very cleaver falconers.

If, as commonly opined in the 19th and first half of the 20th Centuries, the art of successfully flying the Gyrfalcon is lost, Vic Hardaswick and the late Kent Christopher have gone a long way in finding it for us once more. Aided by the products of modern captive breeding, radio telemetry, and contemporary pharmacology, these two have produced an invaluable work. The results of taking their theories into the field make for high-flying falcons and spectacular falconry. Yet one need not aspire to towering flights at sage grouse over windswept western plains to find great usefulness in this volume because the detailed description of imprinting alone makes the book a must. More than simply needing a place on every falconer’s bookshelf, this work deserves time and study. Its attributes will raise the standards of the practice of our sport.

S. Kent Carnie, Founding Director and Curator (Emeritus), The Archives of Falconry

Follow the Link below to order

http://www.westernsporting.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=1111&Product_Code=FB1051A&Category_Code=FB

[stavros_]

Any comments from members about that book?

[sharptail]

Any comments from members about that book?Americans had no history in falconry that told then that gyrfalcons will not wait on. Our Prairie falcon is different than sakers and will wait on well. To U.S. falconers that started on prairies when the taking of peregrines was outlawed, it was a natural progression to fly gyrs in the waiting on style. We did not understand that they would not wait well. Unlike many Sakers, gyrs will wait when flown on when flown at challanging quarry in the right place at the right tempratures. In the early days here in the U.S. waiting on and the fast and powerful stoop was, and still is the high class style. To many that started falconry about the time that I did(1968) Sakers in the U.S. were held in low esteam because they didnot wait on well and were the exception to the large longwings we had learned to fly. Teaching Prairie Falcons to wait well is more difficult than flying peregrines and is what may of the US longwingers started with. Even though they are more difficult to get waiting on, gyrs were and are the next progression of the native falcons here.

Captive breeding and the gyr/peregrine tiercel have changed everything. It is the purist from a time before commonly available breeding chamber birds, that even still thinks of getting gyrs and especially passage gyrs to wait on.

[Tanner]

Any comments from members about that book?

Great book. It is of interest and value even if you do not fly gyrs. Among other things, it contains excellent discussion on properly developing an imprint. I enjoyed it thoroughly.

[stavros_]

Many thanks for the replies guys