In the early months of 2021, every time I left the house felt portentous, cause for both celebration and alarm. By that point, we had been living under the threat of the coronavirus for almost an entire year, which meant I had become used to the rhythms of that lonely time. I was simply, almost pathetically grateful for any human contact outside my immediate family. I felt feral. And it was under these conditions that I went falconing for the very first time.

I did not fly a bird—you need a permit for that. Instead, I watched as a graceful peregrine falcon climbed into the sky above the yellow marshes of southern Maine, ascending into the blue in ever-widening circles. “You have to watch. Your job is to not take your eyes off him,” said hunter Pete Spadone. I didn’t need him to tell me. I didn’t want to look away, to miss a moment of the bird’s flight. Then, just minutes after he had been released from his leather hood, Iggy plunged. The swooping circles ceased, and he shot through the air like an arrow, straight into the body of a white dove.

He didn’t kill the dove on his first hit; he had to chase the plump bird around the marsh, and we had to chase Iggy. Maybe it would have been funny if it weren’t so exciting. Here we were, two seasoned, expert falconers, a camera-toting photographer, and an awe-eyed writer, stumble-running over muddy, grassy banks and shouting about a bird of prey. He wasn’t trying to escape us. He just wanted to follow his instincts: hunt, kill, eat.

It was a short flight, and the first of several short bird-watching excursions I would make that winter. I was trying to understand the art of falconry and the people who practice it. I was also trying to train my eyes to see more keenly the world around me, to value more highly my immediate environment, and to hold on more dearly to the present moment.

A falconer is a person who trains birds to hunt with them through a daily process of positive reinforcement. You might know about this practice from nature documentaries, or perhaps the 2014 bestseller by naturalist Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk. Most of my knowledge on the subject comes from children’s books. I used to have a cracked-spine, scribbled-on paperback of My Side of the Mountain as well as several medieval fantasy novels that taught me the basic terminology. Thanks to fiction, I could imagine a bird in a hood perched on her trainer’s gauntlet, ready to catch game. Yet, until recently, I never gave much thought to the existence of contemporary falconers. It seemed like something that happens only in books or on some distant heathery moor. Not in Kennebunk.

Yet that is where two of America’s most experienced falconers reside. They aren’t the only people who hunt with raptors in Maine, but Spadone and his former student, Scott McNeff, have been highly visible practitioners of the sport for decades. They’ve made multiple local and national media appearances (Spadone is featured in Macdonald’s book), and while it wouldn’t be right to call them celebrities, they are willing to serve as faces for their niche passion.

This is partially because Spadone and McNeff chafe at existing stereotypes about the American hunter, and long to set the record straight. They are not gun enthusiasts, nor are they trophy seekers. They care intensely about the environment and worry about the way climate change and species extinction are affecting their beloved landscape. “We’re always grumbling about Duck Dynasty,” says McNeff. “And how sick this country is about guns.” While they both know how to use a rifle, they hope to see better regulation of firearms. They aren’t the only hunters I’ve met with this perspective, but they are outliers, and they know it.

Compared to many hunting practices, falconry is a very old-fashioned sport. It hasn’t changed much in over 6,000 years. They still use the “same basic technology,” explains Spadone, as the nomadic tribes that roamed the Mongolian steppe before the dawn of the Common Era. This is part of why they like falconry. It doesn’t require a lot of gear, but that gear is specialized and often homemade. “You don’t just go to Walmart to buy it,” Spadone says. The birds wear hand-sewn leather hoods (to cover their eyes) and jesses (to tether their legs to the falconer’s glove). If an ancient hunter were to time-travel to the twenty-first century, McNeff and Spadone, in their wool sweaters and leather boots, wouldn’t seem too foreign to them. The biggest advances in falconry are invisible: hunters rely on modern veterinary medicine to keep their raptors healthy, and on radio telemetry to locate wayward birds.

While McNeff and Spadone are generous with their time and hope to see more falconers of all ages and genders entering the marshes, they recognize that there’s a large barrier to entry. Falconry requires a lot of commitment—you (or someone you trust) has to train and feed your bird every single day. Birds of prey live for a long time, so you’re committing to an enduring relationship with a wild animal. Not a lot of people participate—there’s only a couple dozen licensed falconers in the state of Maine—which means they spend a lot of time explaining the basics of their practice to people like me. But this intense form of hunting also fosters intimacy on several different levels. There’s the relationship between the falconer and their bird, obviously, but there’s also a camaraderie that exists between practitioners, plus a sense of familiarity with hand-sewn gear, as well as the closeness that develops between hunter and prey. “Falconry is very different from pulling the trigger,” says McNeff (who also hunts for deer annually). “You’re almost always the one to do the kill, not the hawk. We kill by our hands. It’s very poignant. It’s very weird.” Neither McNeff nor Spadone seems to relish that part of the day. “Pete’s gone really soft on it,” says McNeff. “I have, too. I don’t like killing animals. But you want your bird to succeed. You want to see them be self-actualized.”

Perhaps this is why, when I watched Iggy dive, I held my breath for him, not for the unfortunate dove. “I do love the hunting part of it,” Spadone later admits, “but what I really love is the bird, and him working with me.” He’s deeply interested in the “style” that Iggy displays during a hunt. His bird isn’t just sitting in a tree watching a pigeon, snagging it, and feasting. Iggy is a good example of a “self-actualized” bird. “He’s snappy and fit, and he’s working hard,” Spadone says. “You saw it. He put on a pretty good show,” he says. “It was average. And it was still pretty damn good. He was steady. He stayed with me. He went up pretty high. He was wide. He was putting in beautiful downward stoops.” It’s true; Iggy did move with a grace that is utterly inaccessible to a human body. It’s hard for me to say whether a bird is confident or has achieved self-actualization, but I think I understand. These animals aren’t being goaded or prodded into doing something that goes against their nature, like a lion jumping through flaming hoop. They’re not circus acts. They’re acting according to their instincts.

Just as there’s a brutal beauty to the winter marshes, there’s a simple elegance to falconry that I can’t help but admire. People tend to be drawn to this sport because they fall in love with the birds. They want to be close to something so wild, so fierce. I make the mistake of comparing my relationship with my dogs to the falconers’ with their raptors, and both men correct me. These are not domesticated animals. They don’t live to please humans, nor do they know from birth how to work with us. It’s something they must learn. And yet, McNeff says he’s sick of reading articles about falconry that include a quote from “some falconer” saying a variation of, “‘Oh, these are wild animals. They don’t form a bond with you. You don’t have a relationship with them. They don’t love you.’” He makes no bones about it. “I think that’s a load of crap.” His goshawk, Finn, knows him and willingly returns to him. He’s responsive to McNeff’s signals and knows his rhythms. Every spring, during Finn’s mating season, he hops onto McNeff with the same vigor he might bring to a female of his species. It sounds a bit weird, but it’s definitely evidence that Finn’s happy to see him. “My goshawk, I’ve had for longer than my dog. I know I’ll be really sad when I walk in one morning and find him dead on the floor of my chamber,” he says. He tries not to get sentimental, but McNeff refuses to downplay the relationship that has formed between him and Finn. “We have a bond,” he says.

I believe him, and not just because McNeff was once the president of the North American Falconers Association. Watching these falconers move with their birds, I’m struck by how calm everyone is. For the majority of the hunt, we were walking casually around the marsh while Iggy hung out on Spadone’s arm. Later, I get to meet Finn in his mews. He’s a lovely gray and white creature, utterly serene on his perch. I want to spend hours just looking at him, but of course we can’t be inside together for long. My mask is tight against my face, but I can’t stop myself from sighing, “He’s gorgeous.”

• 

• 

• 

Lockdown made me feel alone. I was filled with dread, fearing a complete apocalypse, a total societal collapse. I never hoarded toilet paper, but I did change how I stocked my shelves, how I prepared my food, how I interacted with my neighbors, and what I did during my leisure hours. I developed coping mechanisms—some of them healthy, others less so. I started watching the birds in my backyard more closely, until I was able to identify specific robins, crows, chickadees, and juncos. I tried eating every type of conifer tip I could find. I clung to my daily rituals of caretaking: baby, dogs, seeds, birds.

Looking back, the minutes I spent watching Iggy fly for a dove stand out starkly against the rest of the winter, blazing like a bright star in my memory. A few weeks later, I watched as a bird named Juno chased and caught a squirrel. I got to stand close to her while she ate, ripping through gray fur to get at the lean red meat beneath. I was amazed at her quickness, amazed at the red viscera, overjoyed to see a creature so in her element. That sight, too, gleams like a ruby amongst the dull, dirty-snow sameness of a quarantine winter. I’m glad to have these treasures, even though they are only borrowed. They still brought flavor, shape, and movement to my life.

• 

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Some hunters enjoy the chase, some enjoy the kill, some love both, some love neither. Some just love the meat. Others love the animals, even the ones they slaughter (perhaps especially the ones they slaughter). I can’t adequately explain why these falconers have fallen so hard for this practice, because there are many layers to it. There’s a sense of being close to the wilderness, and there’s a desire to communicate with a strange and fearsome creature. Human and bird both crave the flavorful wild meat, so there’s a shared hunger driving each on.

There’s also that final piece of the puzzle, that thing we’ve circled around and around. Hunting allows for an awakening. Spadone says, “When I’m with my bird, even on a daily basis of maintenance, I feel like my senses are open. My third eye popped. Everything is more colorful. Everything smells better. I feel a connection to things and a wonderful sense of privilege.” Although Spadone “hates to use the word ‘spiritual,’” he does, and so does McNeff. They have a reverence for their birds, for the process of hunting, and for the systems of life that make this possible. Working with an animal, hunting with it, killing with it, and eating with it—these things are primal, brutal, and sometimes beautiful. In a time filled with loss, it felt healing to remember that these small, animal deaths weren’t unnecessary or cruel. They were part of the order of things.

This didn’t make up for the injustice of a pandemic, nor did it make me stop missing the people I had lost. But it did serve as a reminder that I am tethered to more than just my immediate community, more than my family and friends. I am enmeshed in a web of life far more complicated and lovely than I can ever comprehend. It’s a system that has room for hawks and squirrels and doves, brackish mud and sandy beaches, dark winters and high summers. It has death. It’s life.

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