Featured Story:

Early History of Telemetry Use for Falconry

by Steve Sherrod

I think it was 1971, and a group of us from Utah including Clayton White, Neil Wolffindin, myself and others from various places, like Alan Beske, were arriving in Yankton, South Dakota. At the time, the official meeting of the fledgling Raptor Research Society, started originally and mostly by falconers, was held in conjunction with the NAFA Meet. In those days there were not many falconers attending and not many longwings or other hawks in the little, unfenced weathering yard---perhaps only 15 birds all together blocked/perched in the grass next to the motel parking lot. A couple of gyrs, a peregrine or maybe two, and some gosses and redtails along with a Cooper’s or so were spaced out there. With my own beach bird left back home in Utah, my mouth had watered as there were tons of wild pheasants and many land owners who could care less about anyone flying a bird after them. That changed drastically on all fronts later, but it was true as of this era.

It was during a period when wild and captive peregrine numbers were very low and much of the discussion at the RRF meeting was about breeding peregrines in captivity, focused primarily on how to do it. The meeting mostly consisted of an open floor with various speculations voicing about how breeding could best be accomplished since very few peregrines had been bred in captivity in those days. Wayne Nelson from Canada shared a lot of information about his observations in the wild of the Peale’s on Langara Island in the Queen Charlottes, and I listened with intense interest to everything that various peregrinophiles had to offer. (At the time, I had no idea that Clay and I would be out on Amchitka Island within a year studying the big black Peale’s of the Aleutian Islands as well as the huge population of Bald Eagles that inhabited the chain.) Of course, I had my own ideas about breeding peregrines in captivity as did Clay White, and we set our efforts to breed peregrines in motion once we returned to Utah by building chambers on top of the zoology building at BYU where we succeeded in getting infertile eggs but nothing more.

In addition to the talk about captive falcon breeding, a guy with a handle bar mustache named Jim Weaver was there. At the break between sessions about breeding, Jim asked for a few minutes to talk to the group. He showed us all a small gray box, similar to a quarter sized lunch pail with handle on top. When he flipped it open, there were a couple of knobs and a speaker. To that could be attached an antenna called a Yagi. He explained that a guy named Tony Szelpel in Illinois, where Jim himself had grown up, was putting this contraption on the market to help track falconry birds by picking up the signals of a radio transmitter that could be attached to their legs. Seems like the cost was going to be something around $400, which was astronomical in those days, at least to me. I was interested, but didn’t even consider it. Nobody in those days had any type of tracking device, and I had never lost a bird yet. Hey I was all of 22 years old too.

Later back in my native Oklahoma that Christmas on the annual trip home from graduate school in Utah, I was flying my intermewed beach bird. It was a balmy morning of perhaps 40 degrees with only a 10 mph breeze. Scarlet was the best peregrine I had ever trapped, and she was a really high flier. I was out in a huge grass pasture close to my home town as I approached a shallow, earthen dam obscuring the widgeons that were swimming in the small pond on the other side. She was up there, barely visible to the naked eye, when I rushed over the dam to flush the ducks. They took off free and clear, but much to my surprise, from the only tree in sight, a lowly, six foot willow growing out of the dam, also flushed a great horned owl. The owl took off flying, and Scarlet completely ignored the ducks winging across the pasture. Instinct kicked in, and she zeroed-in on the owl as it flew low and hard straight away over the grassy field. You could hear her bells whistling and the loud whirring of wind through her feathers as she rocketed downward, but you could hear louder that characteristic kak, kak, kak as she screamed her instinctive hatred for the feathered death of the night. She bottomed and leveled out from her stoop, clocking the owl from behind and knocking it ass over tea kettle. It should have been dead, but it jumped up and was off again flying straight away in a bee line for all it was worth. Scarlet continued kakking and stooping back and forth as she followed, raking it with each stoop and throwing up, clear into the horizon. I was panicked. She was wearing bells, but the wind rose, and after three days of looking at every hawk in the county through a spotting scope, my blurry eyes gave up. But I remembered that gray box that Jim Weaver had talked about in Yankton, and I wished I had had one.
Within three years, I did have one, and it really helped when things got tough. I once found my imprint jerkin, Hoka, with a signal in an airplane some 40 miles away from where he taken off after an unsuccessful sage grouse flight. I watched Bill Burnham drill a hole down through the middle of his brand new pickup cab roof. This, so he would be able to turn an antenna mounted in that location from inside where it was warm when we were in hot pursuit of our lost gyrs and just learning about eagle- killed falcons on sage grouse. We used telemetry not only on our personal falconry birds, but we equipped the peregrines we were hacking for the reintroduction program in the eastern U.S. with transmitters carrying taped-in batteries so we could keep track of their progress. I put them on young peregrines in Australia and Greenland so I could locate them each day as I was studying their post-fledging behavior including how they learned to hunt and what role their parents played in that process. In contrast, I compared the progress of the young hacked birds that had become independent without any help from parents. Later, I hacked scores of falconry birds using this same type of telemetry, and all the experience to which I had been exposed during those earlier days really came in handy.

We experimented with leg mounts, neck mounts, and even backpacks on everything from eagles to falcons. We raised young falcons for falconry with dummy transmitters on them so they would be accustomed to that thing on their legs, necks, or backs. I rappelled into many nest ledges first to place such dummies on the legs of downies before going into the nest again later to place the real thing on the same birds, just prior to fledging, that were to be studied in the wild.

But, as miraculous as that early equipment seemed at the time, radio telemetry has come an incredibly long way. The old gray box that Jim Weaver had held up to the crowd in Yankton in 1971 was a sturdy model that performed well for decades and still does today. However, I continue to be overwhelmed at the advancements in all current radio telemetry. The spring loaded antenna-receiver models introduced by Marshall almost smack of James Bond, and comments to that effect were made recently when I demonstrated such a unit at a dinner presentation. The transmitters with magnetic switches mounted with simplified backpacks make things so much easier for the falconer as well as safer for the falcon. Transmitter battery life is extended by much greater efficiencies in circuit design and power usage, and simple things like battery installation with a screw-on cap rather than being taped are taken for granted. And the quality keeps getting better with a variety of channels and frequencies, and on top of that, things keep getting smaller and lighter. Plus, it now includes tracking collars for our dogs as well as the tiny high-power transmitters for raptors.

When I think of the advances that have occurred in telemetry since back in the days when we all flew without any tracking devices, in the days when a lost bird meant days of driving the roads and throwing tethered or sealed pigeons in hopes of luring in the errant falcon, in the days when our hearts were in our throats every time our birds got up over a thousand feet (even though we really liked it), well, today, we are really lucky! Here’s to telemetry and to the guys and gals who make it, continually refine and improve it, and produce reliable products that allow us all to practice high quality falconry without fear of losing our birds every time we cast them off our fists.

Thanks Marshall. You do a great job!

- Steve!

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