Trouble From Texas, Part 1
She came with a cowlick. Right on the top of her head, two feathers grew and pressed against each other like opponents on a battlefield.
She came with a cowlick. Right on the top of her head, two feathers grew and pressed against each other like opponents on a battlefield. Perhaps she’d rubbed it into that shape in her crate during the flight from Austin to Boston, we thought, but her previous trainer said it had always been there. Once he even tried to push the cowlick down with his finger, and it sprang back up. I started calling it her “speed fin”.
She was something like eight months old, and she was the biggest Harris’s Hawk I’d ever seen. Paige weighed more than a kilogram and stood nearly a foot and a half tall on a cowgirl’s bowed, bright yellow legs. Her stance was almost too wide for the glove. She still had her juvenile plumage, her coffee brown contours streaked liberally with cream. She contrasted her colleague, our older male Harris’ whose dark feathers (black, no sugar) and eyes framed by prominent brow ridges gave him a severe scowl. He was twenty years her senior, half her size, and he liked a quiet neighborhood. When Paige arrived, she had an inexhaustible lung capacity, and vocalized every time she saw anyone. The male wouldn’t suffer this for more than fifteen seconds before interrupting with his own rasping growl: Can’t an old man get some peace? Kids these days!
Paige’s behavior had also yet to mature. Each morning, one of us brought a scale into her enclosure to weigh her. This is a daily ritual for all the birds in our care, serving as a measure of health and a way to keep up with their dietary needs. I would slide the scale forward onto a small platform and she would glide over my shoulder, plunking her puppy-massive, taloned feet onto the perch. Sometimes, she’d be carrying a tennis ball in her foot, one she’d been given yesterday as part of her enrichment. More than fourteen hours later, she was still carrying the treasured item around. The number on the scale told me she was significantly overweight, but my guess was some of that weight was bright green and fuzzy.
Paige hung onto a tennis ball like Linus with his blanket. She seemed to get comfort from simply having it in her foot. If she forgot about it and it dropped to the gravel with a soft PAhsh, the motion of the fall would call her attention back to it, and she would dive down after it, grab it again, and carry it back to her perch. Then I’d hear her triumphant voice: mmrEH! mREH! mREH! (And fifteen seconds later, the male: HAAAAAAAARRrehh!)
We all have such things, don’t we? Things that we hold onto dearly, objects that we clutch tightly in our fists, search for distractedly until they are found, feel a strange sense of vulnerability, akin to nakedness, when they are not at hand?
Did it feel right and good for Paige to have something of that size and texture gripped in her talons? Was this how she seized control in this new environment, far from everything she’d grown up around, in this place that terrified her?
The nature center had acquired Paige as an education ambassador, both to take some of the programming burden off the older male, and to be quick and easy to train. Nathan, Paige’s new trainer, found her easy enough to work with inside of her enclosure. In the wide, sheltered space containing three fixed perches and a swing, a bath pan, and two meshed-over, sunny windows, Paige largely understood things. Sometimes Nathan came in with a glove over his left hand and she would hop on, digging between his thumb and forefinger for the mouse tidbit hidden inside. But if they then moved towards the door, and made it out into the hallway, Paige lost her mind. Seized by panic, she flew repeatedly off the glove, each time caught by her jesses, until she was so exhausted that she hung upside down and could not to right herself.
Broadly speaking, this was not new to Nathan. He and I had both worked with skittish birds of prey before, birds who balked at the sight of a stroller, or an umbrella, or found passing through the threshold of a door much too much. Nathan had a calm, scrutinizing way of being with animals. He had a keen interest in the science of animal training, reading every book and article he could find on the subject that held a shred of wisdom. He read, and he thought, but most importantly, he put into practice. Nathan drew careful lines between understanding motivation and simply observing behavior and reacting to it. He worked hard with Paige for six months, and I watched them through all of it, trying to absorb the details of their work together. If she crouched low on her long legs, her eyes darting, a clear precursor to jumping off the glove, Nathan froze, and let her take the time she needed to recover from what had spooked her. If her feathers slicked tighter to her body, just a pin’s width, he froze again, and offered her a tidbit of food when she calmed, reinforcing the relaxed hawk.
This strategy had worked through many trials with other ambassador birds, but it did next to nothing for Paige. Her fear of being outside of her enclosure was all-consuming. She refused food, so frightened that she couldn’t process what Nathan was trying to show her.
One afternoon I sat in the heavy, thawing February snow watching them try to walk down a path. Nathan lifted his foot to take a step and Paige launched off the glove in panic. Not all that surprising: this gravel path was the mountain the two of them attempted to climb together every day. Every day, Paige refused to trust that her guide would keep her safe.
Nathan replaced his foot as Paige regained the glove, and ducked his hand into his pocket, ready to reward her next calm body posture. But then, without warning, she launched off again.
We looked at each other. “I just thought about moving my leg,” he replied to my unspoken question. “Just the thought of it. She must have felt my muscles tense.”
“Wow.”
Nathan missed nothing in her body language, but that wasn’t the problem: it was that Paige missed nothing in his.
Later that week, we were standing around in the mews with a master falconer. Jess pressed us on Paige’s origins: where exactly was she bred? By whom? What did they say about her early training and personality? And how much did they let her go for, again?
With each answer, one corner of the falconer’s mouth edged downward, and she shook her head. Basically, Jess explained, we might have ourselves a dud. After all, Jess had opened her falconry school with eight Harris’s, and how many did she have flying in her programs now? Just three. You need the right bird for the job, and sometimes it doesn’t work out for one, or five.
Nathan and I found ourselves staring at the gravel floor. To the team at our nonprofit who had taken such pains to acquire her, it would be nearly impossible to justify giving up on this bird. Our male was getting on in years, and Paige was supposed to take over from him. And after six months, it was hard to imagine starting over with a completely new bird, and no guarantee they would be any different. Jess saw our pained expressions and suggested some exercises Nathan could do, and what amount of pushing through Paige’s fears would not be damaging to her trust in him. We thanked Jess profusely for her insight, and when she left, Nathan and I stood next to each other, arms folded, looking at the giant feather ball of nerves through her window.
“I think you should train her,” he said. “I want her to succeed, and I don’t think I can make it happen.”
His admission startled me. Nathan and I had been each other’s right hands for three years, but I usually felt like his student when it came to training. “What makes you think I can?”
“I don’t,” he replied, with bluntness I had come to rely on. “But we should try it.”
I must have agreed.
Training an animal is this: you and the animal invent a common language from scratch, and then you have a conversation.
Imagine you are sitting across the room from someone you don’t know. You can see and hear them, and you assume they can see and hear you. You share no words in common, and they don’t seem interested in interacting with you anyway. How do you get them to understand you? To trust you? Then to be willing to do what you ask? How might you do this when the balance of trust is already against you?
You must figure out how to communicate. You have no choice but to find some way, any way, you both can express yourselves, and then you must listen to each other. Your expressions cannot be complicated, at first. They must be consistent. And it must be worth both of your energy to keep the conversation going.
Animal training, like teaching, was not something I thought of as a career possibility until I was already doing it. I think the image of an animal trainer that occupied my young mind was that of an energetic blond in a wet suit commanding an indoor pool full of dolphins to do flips. It was sometimes floated as the only animal-focused career alternative to “veterinarian,” but it had even less appeal to me. Animal training, in my ‘90s childhood, bore that certain stigma of animals in cages being forced to perform unnatural behaviors against their will. A wild dolphin would never have to balance a ball on its nose or jump through a flaming hoop.
As it turns out, I was offensively wrong about the modern state of animal training. There is a whole world of dedicated people who recognize it can be done differently, done better, and who have worked to invent whole new disciplines. The world of animal training that I was fortunate enough to climb onto the shoulders of was one that focused on welfare, choice, and natural behaviors. The foundations of excellent animal training are trust and two-way communication. It must be clear to the bird or the horse or the dog what you are asking them, and it must be just as clear to you as the trainer what they are communicating back. We can set ourselves up for success by understanding the body language and the biology of the animals we work with, so that we can better address their needs and desires.
Parsing out the likes and dislikes of a wild animal can be difficult, but most have an obvious like: food. Many trainers use food as a positive reinforcer of behavior: something good added to the mix as consequence of a behavior, which increases the likelihood the behavior will be done again. Paige stepped onto the glove and got a mouse; next time the glove appears, she will likely step onto it expecting a mouse.
Most wild animals also have an obvious dislike: humans. Nathan and I could read about reinforcing behavior with food all we wanted, but many of the birds we trained weren’t fresh, eager-to-learn, golden retriever puppies; our mere presence in their lives was aversive.
Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, a young Barn Owl from another facility did not arrive into our care during his first, most impressionable months. The bird we received was terrified of humans anywhere within his view, and manifested this fear by flying erratically around his enclosure, even clinging to the mesh ceiling.
We were heartbroken. But I wondered if we could change this behavior. So, he and I started inventing a language.
I didn’t worry about positive reinforcement in the early days—we could feed the Barn Owl without entering his enclosure, so we knew at least he would not starve. Instead, once or twice a day I would place myself just into his line of sight, only for a moment or two. If he seemed comfortable, not wide-eyed staring at me, one foot tucked up under his belly feathers, I might push a little. I might put my hand on the door latch or start to creak it open. If at any point he got nervous—if he planted his foot back on the perch, or looked at me then up at the ceiling, ready to fly—I backed out and left. That was all; I was gone.
Over the span of a few days, visiting him in this way, the Barn Owl learned that he could make me go away. I had given him a powerful bit of language. By putting his foot down, literally, the Barn Owl could send me skittering whenever he pleased. He had the final word in his space, and that control built his confidence and tolerance of me. When learned he could dictate my movements, I was allowed further and further into his enclosure. It took 3 weeks until he chose to move towards me, and to step onto the glove I held a few inches from him, adorned with a choice piece of meat.
Paige’s anxiety had a very different flavor. As a member of one of the few social raptor species, she was predisposed to think about her role in a group. For a growing female Harris’s Hawk, that role might one day be that of the matriarch of her family: her mates and children taking cues from her about the hunt, the chase, and the meal that followed. She was likely of a mind to be putting others in their place. This way of thinking, when shellacked over a group of human trainers, could develop into a huge problem.
Unsure of our standing when I started working with her, Paige and I had to get to know each other. Our first order of business was “glove manners,” and though I thought of myself as the etiquette instructor, clearly so did she. If I offered my glove for her to step onto it, she did so readily, but then tried to push the envelope up my arm and towards my face. She would scream the loudest, nastiest Harris’s Hawk insult she could think of and throw a taloned foot in my direction, rarely connecting. Throughout, she held her head held low, a jagged ridge of feathers staked up from the back of her skull to the valley between her shoulder blades. She never left the glove and retreated to a perch, though she was absolutely free to do so. Unlike the Barn Owl, Paige wanted to dictate the rules from right here, this spot, all up in my face.
Noticing she would never actually grab me, my role was somehow to ignore all of this, to not allow the invitation to widen beyond its original wording. I would not reward her entries into my space with the reaction she was expecting, whatever that was. I broke her social rules, the cultural norms she insisted on. I just stood there, the embodiment of an awkward silence.
But in the tiny spaces of time where she ignored me, where she lifted her head and gazed away at something that had caught her attention elsewhere, I offered her an alternative. I picked up the conversation where Nathan had left it—by marking the moment with a click and handing her a piece of food. THAT! That motion. That caused this food. Don’t believe me? Try it again.
When Nathan months ago had suggested clicker training our birds as an aid to our communication, images of wet-blond-dolphin-lady come to mind again. But my curiosity won out, and I got to work on perhaps our toughest customer. A Red-tailed Hawk who’d developed a reputation for being stubborn and mistrustful of unfamiliar people took to clicker training like a squirrel up a tree. We’d once thought he had vision problems, but it was suddenly clear he’d just never understood what we were asking him, had never associated the food that appeared on his perch with the behavior he’d just done. As soon as the Red-tail had the click, the bridge, the language to understand, his reticence to work vanished. The doors had flown open in both our minds.
The click was our common language. Paige and I both wanted those clicks to happen, fast and frequent, because it meant food, and it meant progress. Slowly, she caught on to the game. She would look to me with a dark dagger in her eye, then remember something, and look away. Click, food. Our dance became a much gentler waltz, where we were listening to each other and moving to a softer, calmer music.
Eventually, we had to get out the door. She would only be a successful education ambassador if she could move smoothly from her world into mine. But Paige was a completely different bird outside of her enclosure. To her, my world (the world) was full of shocking, dangerous things. It must be something like a haunted house, where you never know which of the bizarre things around you is going to try to jump out and grab you. I knew I was going to have to push her, and it wasn’t going to be easy for either of us. When she rode my glove as it took her over the threshold and into the hallway, certain of her freedoms would be gone. At the time, this was out of necessity. If she panicked and tried to leave the glove here, my firm grip on her jesses would prevent her getting loose, striking the window, or clinging to the walls and frightening the other birds in the building. It also meant that this harrowing experience was followed by another unpleasant one—dangling by her legs, upside down, no choice but to return towards the thing that had probably scared her in the first place.
Soon enough, I got to the same point with her that Nathan had: I couldn't move without her leaping off my glove, and just afterward, a point where I couldn't even think about moving without triggering her panicked escapes. So, we went back to what had been our pleasant small talk, hanging around in her enclosure, and slowly began a new conversation that skirted the edge of telepathy. I began rewarding her with a tidbit of food whenever I got away with thinking about contracting the muscles in my leg—without actually doing so—and she remained calmly on the glove. We built back up in these tiny increments—now I will tense those muscles, now I will move my foot—until, one day, we were miraculously standing in the hallway, and she wagged her tail.
It is not quite like a dog wags its tail, but there is no other way to describe it. Many hawks will shake out their tails, a few flicks side-to-side, as you or I might shake water off our hands. In Harris’s Hawks, I often interpret the tail wag as anticipation, readiness, or concentration. To me, it was a clear sign that Paige was thinking, and that was what I needed. I needed Paige to be thinking about something, anything, other than bolting, and I happily took the tail wag as sign of her ease.
This took the unsurprising turn that she then started to wag her tail in order to ask for food. Though we are long past her most difficult days, she still will occasionally gaze off into the distance, waggle her black-and-white tail, then whip around to the treat pouch on my hip, ready.
All that mattered was that she understood. Finally, we could talk.
Stay tuned for Part 2 next week! No apologies for long essays here.
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Brilliant and engaging. If you've ever wondered what it takes to tame a dragon, er... raptor, read this. Happily, not all raptors are as challenging to glove train as Paige, but they all have their quirks. Kudos to Anna for taking the time to build Paige's confidence and trust. It's an honor to work with them both.
Loved this! So interesting. Paige has come a long way, literally and figuratively, and she’s a joy to work with. Good job.