Trouble From Texas, Part 2
Her initial lunge forward, the impulse to follow a familiar signal, was followed by her sudden grip on the perch, one wing thrown out, back-pedaling, her second thoughts catching up with her.
A raven called from the top of a tree above the Pine Knoll almost as soon as we took Paige out to fly. My colleague and I started her at a moderate distance, cuing her back and forth from gloved hand to gloved hand across the mown grass field. One of Paige’s jesses trailed behind her, and the other she clutched tightly in her foot, an extension of her tennis ball habit, I supposed. The raven continued calling, then flew over, cocking its head and dipping a little brown eye toward us, examining the strange scene.
I took a few large steps back until Paige was covering more than a hundred feet in each ground-skimming flight. She was still massive, and clumsy, and she kicked my arm back with each launch, brushing her wingtips in the grass, pumping her wings furiously until she had enough momentum to glide, just for a few seconds, before slamming into my colleague’s glove on the other side, like a kid on ice skates crashing into the wall at the rink. The whole exchange took long enough that I could see the gears turning in her brain. She cocked her own head up at the raven, who by now had brought its mate to witness the spectacle.
Back and forth Paige flew, twenty lengths of the field, and with each it seemed a new black bird joined the raven pair in the sky. The three crows that hung about the nature center’s grounds after hours, picking through the parking lot, came in when they heard what the ravens were saying: something about a large hawk, it’s here, it’s flying, it’s with the humans. Come, everyone.
I could only marvel at the still-young hawk. How confident she’d become in herself and in the world. It hadn’t been very long since I was walking her around the edges of this very field, through the dry, crunching leaves, and the motion of my foot through them sent her into a panic. This field, where she’d trapped me one day, unable to think about taking a further step because of her constant vigilant anxiety about each new thing she couldn’t understand. To look at her now—still checking, still learning, but trusting, finally, in this place, and in her humans, enough to ignore a murder of crows circling right over her head. I began to fall in love.
Later that summer, I came in to work very early to prepare for an outreach. I was going to bring a few of the ambassador birds to a local park to meet some summer campers so they could learn about the pivotal role raptors play in the balance of an ecosystem. As I flipped on the lights, I peeked in on each of the birds in their enclosures, checking that they were present, had made it through the night, and if they had done anything fun with their enrichment.
Paige was on the ground, mantling over something. Her dark chocolate wings were spread flat in the classic position of a bird who has just caught something precious and delicious and does not want anyone to know about it. It was not out of the question that she could have caught a mouse or a vole in there—we’d seen the little things running around outside the building all summer.
But when Paige lifted her head at the greeting sound I made, her eyes were unfocused and wide, completely untethered from this world, and her head lolled to one side. She stumbled over and tread on one wing.
“Paige?!”
I threw open her door and was crouching by her side before I knew I had crossed the room. She kicked her yellow legs out vaguely in my direction, unclear whether she was trying to grab me or escape. She couldn’t get her legs underneath her, couldn’t move beyond what her weak wing extension did to roll her back and forth along the gravel while her head, occasionally buoyed up by some sudden muscle effort, fell back again and again and I could see the mounting panic in her wide pupils. I scooped her up in my arms and she didn’t protest, unable to close her immense talons, feeling less substantial than a dish rag in my arms.
I nearly ran to the rehabilitation clinic, where Grae was working the morning shift. The brows above her light eyes shot to the top of her face when she saw me, and the limp hawk I carried. I held Paige while Grae whipped through her diagnostics, studying the dilating and contracting pupils with a strong light, feeling the long bones in her wings and legs for breaks, looking into her mouth for blood. “Nothing’s broken.” Even this little amount of jostling was clearly taking its toll on Paige, who somehow to me felt lighter and weaker with the passing seconds. Grae whisked a towel over her and placed her in the oxygen chamber.
The rehabilitator shook her head as I tried to explain how I’d found her, weak and bewildered, her limbs unsteady. It seemed like head trauma, like perhaps Paige had flown into something, and hard. Grae had plenty of experience with window strikes, wild birds that see the reflection of trees in a window’s glass and think they can fly straight through. The two windows in Paige’s enclosure were sealed over with soft mesh, that not only should have cushioned a strike, but disrupted any reflection. In addition, her enclosure wasn’t any larger than twelve feet across—she might have flown into a wall, but it was hard to believe she could have built up enough momentum to seriously injure herself doing it. Then, Grae remembered: we’d had a major thunderstorm the night before. The first real cloudburst of that summer. We both wondered whether Paige could have been spooked but the crashing sounds outside, flying circles around her enclosure in panic until a wall or a perch arrested her path.
After a few more moments I had to leave, had to tear myself away and resume preparing for the day. I stole one last look at Paige through the window of the oxygen chamber, and my heart wailed. Her head rested on a fold of towel, her eyes were closed to thin, tortured slits, and her legs were limp beneath her. She breathed, laborious and slow.
I backed out of the clinic and steered my mind towards other tasks.
It didn’t work very well. I delivered the outreach lesson, but the entire time I was driving there, setting up my table, waiting for the students to settle into their seats, and cleaning it all up again, I was thinking about Paige. I wasn’t sure whether to be anticipating or dreading returning to the nature center at the end of the afternoon, afraid of the news that might greet me there. I began imagining the worst-case scenario, just to prepare myself for it, but too quickly tears filled my eyes and I forced myself to return to easy subjects, so I would not need to pull over to sob.
When I returned, I parked the outreach van right outside of the rehabilitation clinic and found Grae.
“She’s still with us,” she said, seeing my face. “She even stood up a little bit.” I’m surprised I didn’t flood the clinic with my relief.
Paige had been moved to a tiny cubicle, and when I peeked in at her she grumbled a defensive little rrrr. Her eyes were focused again. She was standing on her hocks like a baby bird does, wobbling a bit but unquestionably upright. Grae was at my shoulder as I crouched and smiled. “Look at you!” I cooed.
“I wouldn’t be certain yet,” Grae said. “But this is a good sign.”
Paige did grow stronger every day. In a week, it was as if nothing had ever happened. By then, the rehab interns were begging me to take her back to her old enclosure. She had discovered the trick of footing them in the chest when they changed out her water dish. Her growls became full-blown screams, and soon whenever they opened the door to her small enclosure to toss in her food, she would gallop out and talon their pants legs with daily increasing gusto. That must have been when we started calling her Trouble from Texas.
The day I came to pick her up and bring her to her old enclosure, it felt like taking my crying child back from the arms of a dear friend. Paige leapt to the gloved fist and mantled over it like a cartoon, her head down, hackles vertical, and wings dropped to either side of my arm as if the glove was the most coveted treasure in the world.
I have had the uneasy privilege of working with birds that were so smart I didn’t realize I was being manipulated until several training sessions too late. A peregrine falcon once played me so hard it took another trainer weeks to untangle the mess. The peregrine had enormous, puppy-brown eyes, and a way of insistently grabbing your gaze in his own. He was the first of our birds to fully internalize the clicker training, and the only that I taught to recognize an “all done” signal, so that he would let me leave his enclosure after I was all out of food. I taught him to walk into his crate, the goal being that he could fly over from wherever he was in his enclosure to a crate on the windowsill and enter on his own. While shaping this behavior, I called him to various perches that were closer and closer to the crate, to get him going on the right path, and rewarded him every step of the way. He quickly figured out, however, that there was a workaround. After receiving his earnings for getting to the perch right in front of the crate, he would fly back to the first perch, so that I had to go through the whole sequence again to get him back into position. Thus, he could get a second rounds of treats for doing essentially nothing. He once did this three times in a row before I noticed I was being had. Clever boy.
And then there was Paige, the bird who couldn’t figure out how to get down out of a tree.
We had made great leaps forward from the previous winter when she was afraid of everything, so when the program season came full swing that summer, Paige began free flights. If she were flying from one glove to another in the stage area of the amphitheater, she had precious little patience and would simply bounce from one gloved fist to the next faster than they could be raised to catch her. However, when asked to fly over the benches where the audience would be seated, she spent a second or two hesitating. I could see the gears turning in her brain. Her initial lunge forward, the impulse to follow a familiar signal, was followed by her sudden grip on the perch, one wing thrown out, back-pedaling, her second thoughts catching up with her. She’d do it, invariably, but that moment’s hesitation was always there. Nothing that couldn’t be worked through, I knew. Practice would get rid of it, and we just needed to do this more, and more.
Eventually she came around to it, as I had hoped. Flying over the benches and to perches lashed up to trees was no problem for her whatsoever. But, these benches were still empty. We’d been careful to keep people off of them, and only occasionally would a staff member, someone whom Paige worked with every day, be seated stone-still on a bench some distance from where she was flying.
We worked her to the point where I was confident enough in her abilities to let a young man who was spending his birthday at the nature center sit directly beneath Paige as she flew over him and his parents—her first flight over strangers in her life. She did perfectly, sailing over them like they were just part of the scenery, her dusty brown eyes only for the gloves she knew would catch her. She did half a dozen flights for the birthday boy, my joy matching his.
With that success, I got cocky. Paige was ready for bigger things, clearly, and why waste a moment. The next day I asked the nature center staff, from the administrators usually tucked in their offices upstairs, to the summer camp instructors about to head off for adventures with a dozen campers each, to sit on the benches in the amphitheater. There were maybe 25 people, not any more than Paige would have seen in that space, and they were all instructed to sit still, and calm, and just enjoy the ride.
She started out marvelously. Paige popped out from backstage and flew two simple flights between handlers in front of the audience. Then I asked her to come to a perch in a tree off to the left side of the audience, and back to the front. My heart glided with her as she pumped her wings once-twice and skimmed over our facilities manager, lighted on the glove and spun around, ready to go again.
I called her to another perch, this time in the far back of the audience, and she hesitated—just a second, just like she had done before. I called her again, knowing she had the skills to push through, willing her to complete this leap she’d done a dozen times, only now with more eyes watching. This time she came, for a few feet barreling right toward me, but then abruptly lifted her gaze away, angled her wings upward, and ascended into the top of a maple tree.
Alright, I thought.
I called her down to the same perch she’d just balked at, and she vocalized but didn’t budge. Her head lowered and she watched me, but jumped into the air. I sent the staff about the rest of their days, confident that Paige would come down if all these unfamiliar people got out of her extremely large personal bubble. But it made no difference. She flew to a different tree, this one taller than the other, and I sent another trainer to get a mobile perch and a large piece of food, hoping to make her next decision easy.
It didn’t work.
Paige moved from tree to tree for the rest of the day. She hung out in a white pine above our nature trails, in the middle of the woods, until dark. When the summer sun fully set and we were confident she wouldn’t move in the night, I went home with plans to come back before dawn the next day. There was little else we could do.
I lay in bed and occasionally shifted positions until it was time to get up.
This was so much worse than when our Broad-winged Hawk flew off four years prior. The tenacious little bird was gone for all of two and a half hours, and he couldn’t get very far from us on a compromised shoulder joint. By contrast, Paige was in good physical shape, though evidently her mental shape left something to be desired. She could go anywhere.
We continued calling her down the next day, and she continued to hesitate. Every once in a while, she would call out, but when I showed her the glove or the large white rat she could have, it didn’t spur her to action. A few times she actually peeped—a tiny squeak of a call that bubbles over from sheer excitement for food—but still would not come down out of the tree. Following her through the woods, to increasingly improbable perches all day long, I had the thought that she didn’t know how to fly down.
And I kept thinking: what have I gotten myself into? What dangerous audacity did I have to think I could train a Harris’s Hawk for free flight? Me, a Jewish girl from suburban New Jersey, entirely self-taught in the world of animal training. What right did I have thinking I was skilled enough to be responsible for this fantastic creature?
The team was tireless. Half a dozen of us, rotating through different shifts, were out in the woods tracking and coaxing her for three, sixteen-hour days. I had no words to express my gratitude, and they seemed to expect none. We all had one task to do, we needed each other to do it, and that was that.
The last time I saw Paige, we had to abandon the search. A severe thunderstorm was on its way and standing around in a state park’s forest was not going to be safe for us. Or for her.
This was the punishment, then, for my recklessness. It smarted worse than any blow she could have dealt me with her talons.
After the fourth day, her telemetry stopped working. We got no signal from anywhere in a 10-mile radius. It was unlikely that she’d flown that far in the middle of the night, so we assumed the battery had died. We put her story out to the community, hoping that someone, anyone, would see her.
Dozens of reports came in. None of them were her. Newspapers two states away picked up the tale, and one, hoping to help people identify the Harris’s Hawk, carelessly published a picture of a Red-tailed Hawk. We were inundated with calls about what were always local, wild birds when we went to check them out. Two weeks passed, and I spent them in a fog of helpless misery.
A local TV reporter came to interview me on camera. He asked me to return to that moment, when the telemetry signal had cut out, right after the big thunderstorm—what was going through my mind?
I burst into tears.
“I’m sorry,” he said, after he’d wrapped on my bare emotions. “I mean, it’s TV gold, but I’m sorry.”
I shrugged. Usually I reflexively comfort people around me, but I couldn’t muster a damn thing.
But we did get her back.
She found her way into someone’s backyard just over the river from the nature center. They were spending the bright, August afternoon barbecuing a steak on their deck, and she plopped herself down to their railing and started begging. They fed her some steak and called us. She was apparently also eating basil from their planter. I had just that morning been wandering around the same area, with a glove and a rat and calling her name.
She was gone for 20 days and had probably never left the woods within a mile of the nature center. She also had apparently not been eating well at all. She was filthy, and had several intestinal parasites, and we half-jokingly wondered if she had been eating dirt. She had lost nearly a quarter of her body weight.
Remarkably, her telemetry’s battery was still working, but she had somehow removed the antenna. This meant that we would have had to be standing within six feet of her to pick up a signal. She may have even been watching us; panicking, desperate, confused, while we searched blindly below. I sat with her in her mew for as long as she would let me. I never wanted her out of my sight again.
We probably would have left it there, if Jess hadn’t offered to kick us back into gear. How on Earth could I justify letting Paige do free flights ever again, when losing her for three weeks, and her nearly killing herself, might be the result? It wouldn’t be me again, that’s for sure.
Well, Jess explained, she’s had a lot of practice now. We both just needed some honing of the skills we’d been haphazardly collecting.
Jess’s huge field was loosely bordered by woods, two homes, and a quiet little road. She had a few American Kestrel nest boxes scattered around, and some tall perches here and there for flying her own hawks. Jess stood a little way off while I unloaded Paige’s crate from the car, carefully affixed the new telemetry wire to her ankle, and removed her leash. My hands shook and the process took way longer than it should have.
“Alright,” I said, trying to sound ready.
“Let her go,” said Jess.
I held Paige up into the light breeze. She called, and looked down at me, but did not move.
“Let’s walk,” Jess said, and strode away up the slope of the field on her long legs. I trotted to keep up.
Soon, Jess raised her glove and Paige hesitated, but flew to it. Nothing that unusual, but I was pleased to see her adapting to flying in this new space so quickly. Paige flew back to me, then we did a few more of these exchanges, increasing the distance between us, until Jess said it was time to try something new.
“Drop your glove,” she said, the next time Paige was sailing toward me.
“What?”
“Don’t catch her,” Jess repeated, right as I caught her. “I want you to see what she does if she has nowhere to land.”
The next time, I did as asked, and called Paige over with a raised glove, then dropped it when she was still some distance from me. Paige kept coming, as I don’t think either of us could believe I wasn’t about to catch her. I kept my arm down, and she kept closing the distance, and just about a yard from me, she plopped unceremoniously into the grass at my feet.
Jess laughed. She collected herself and said. “Come on, let’s do it again.”
We played that game for another big loop of the field—sometimes I would catch Paige on my glove if I called her, sometimes I would not. Sometimes she would land on the ground, other times she would bank and choose a perch close by. If we simply walked away from her in either of these places, she would follow, calling, wondering when her next chance to get the glove would be.
I don’t know how much Paige learned from that session, but for me, it turned my world around. I had lost all trust in her and in myself, and now I knew that Paige had never stopped trusting me. She could do this. We could do this. We were going to try again.
I could feel her eyes on my back as I walked toward the tall perch behind the audience. There was a large summer crowd of people watching us. Though I couldn’t see her, I knew Paige was tracking me. I reached the perch and lifted my hand to get her attention, but she was already on her way. She kicked the tree perch away behind her and flapped a perfect, even line across the benches, over the heads of the awed onlookers, right past me to the next perch. In the split second she brushed shoulder with her wing, “I love you,” came out of my mouth directly from my heart.
If you love what you read, let me know by dropping by my Ko-fi page:
Anna, as you know I have the honor of knowing and flying this tremendous hawk and going through this ordeal. You write of it with the passion that we all felt in some measure but not the true burden,
responsibility , fear and the love of what you felt! I experienced every sentence. Even today, I am so sensitive to her moods and fears, giving her reassurance and encouragement as she flies. I marvel at her. Her improvement in this story demonstrates your incredible skill as a certified rapture trainer and handler. Thank you.