Hunting with hawks

By David Horst  sandhill7@gmail.com

Mira is ready to hunt.
Learn more at www.wisconsinfalconers.org

The gentle jingle of a small bell creates a false sense of peacefulness as silent feathers glide overhead. This is a killing machine, as good as nature can design them.

The bell is tethered to Mira, about a 9-year-old Harris hawk. She flies free from tree branch to fence to rooftop following Randy Stoeger. He is out rabbit hunting. Mira is his weapon.

To Mira, Stoeger is a hunting partner. That's why the master falconer prefers a Harris. Unlike most hawks, they hunt in groups.

"They're aggressive on game and docile with humans," Stoeger says. "I'm just part of the pack."

Stoeger is spending Saturday afternoon hunting with Mira and a young male named Attila, both purchased from Arizona where they are native. He is joined by apprentice falconers Jason LeMay and Lee Schleicher, and Bob Smead, a general class falconer who is the sponsor for Schleicher as a newcomer to the sport.

The four men walk through the field behind the Appleton Memorial Park ice arena, beating the brush with walking sticks with Mira and Attila following within striking distance. When a rabbit bolts from its hiding spot, the men shout, "Hey, hey, hey" to alert the birds. They acquire the target, match its agility on the ground with precision in the air and dive, talons-first.

The hawks are, to say the least, focused. One rabbit dashes for a gap under a chainlink fence. Attila launches himself, crashing into the spot where the fence meets the pavement. "That hawk's not getting up," I think to myself, but Attila shakes it off like an adrenaline-crazed linebacker.

Horton meets Yertle

By David Horst  sandhill7@gmail.com

Horton meets Yertle.
Learn more about Blanding's turtles

Llamas are curious animals, and the way turtles are put together makes them quite a curiosity.

The two converged in our pasture a couple of weeks ago and it made for good comedy.

The sand hill where we built our home turned out to be on the path to the turtle maternity ward. Early each summer, mother turtles make their way from a wetlands, over a farm field, across a road, up an escarpment and past our house to a sandy field where they lay their eggs. It's a journey of about half a mile, though I don't know what that translates to in turtle miles.

Along the way is the llama pasture, and sometimes the turtles take a shortcut through there. They have continuation of their species on their minds, so they don't care that they're entering the home of animals that have about 300 pounds on them. Actually, it's the llamas that get alarmed.

On this particular morning, we saw the llamas all facing one direction, staring at something beyond the fence. It turned out to be a turtle, a good 10 inches long. It was intent on crossing the pasture, so it ducked under the fence and plodded along through the sand. Encountering a 3-foot-tall mound of, well, future garden fertilizer, the turtle chose not to divert around it. It crawled up to the top, looked around and headed on for the opposite fenceline.

Ingenuity vs. the wasps

By David Horst  sandhill7@gmail.com

This is the story of a wife's "I told you so."

A few weeks  ago, my wife spotted, in an oak tree in our llama pasture, a volleyball-sized hornet nest. The gray, papery nest hung entwined on a branch about 5 feet off the ground.

"One of the llamas is going to try to eat a leaf off of that branch and get stung," she said, issuing a call to action.

We had both already been stung this summer when we unwittingly disturbed other nests, so we knew how aggressively baldfaced hornets defend their homes. I'm a firm believer in letting nature take its course so I was hesitant to mess with a hornet nest that hadn't even been noticed up until then.

These inverted-pear-shaped paper nests are impressive works of architecture. They house multiple egg-filled combs and up to thousands of adults. So called for its white face on a black and white body, the baldfaced hornet is actually a wasp in the yellowjacket family. They can sting fast and often.