Syracuse.com - Hunting with Harris's hawks for squirrels isn't as easy as one might think (includes video)

[HuntingNY-News]

“At times, it’s like balancing a pencil on your finger. Every bird is different,” Ken Aubin said. “And if you don’t hunt them every couple of days, they can lose their momentum.” Watch video

Ken Aubin readies Jade, his Harris's hawk, for a morning of hunting along the Charlie Major Nature Trail in Mottville. Dick Blume/The Post-Standard

Ken Aubin said getting his two Harris’s hawks ready to hunt can be a challenge.

Aubin, a licensed falconer, is constantly weighing his birds – particularly the night before, and the morning of the hunt. The goal is to figure out what weight they have to be so that they’re hungry, but yet still have enough energy to capture and kill their prey.

“At times, it’s like balancing a pencil on your finger. Every bird is different,” he said. “And if you don’t hunt them every couple of days, they can lose their momentum.”

Aubin and his wife, Melissa, were out earlier this week hunting on the Charlie Major Nature Trail in Mottville. That day he only brought, Jade, one of his two birds. His other hawk, Sapphire, was at home.

“She’s got about 4 -5 bad squirrel bites on her feet. You can actually see the tendons,” Aubin said. “I’ve giving her a week and a half off to heal up.”

Aubin transported Jade in a closed, wooden box in the back of his Hyundai hatchback. Getting her out, he put small bells on her legs and clipped a radio transmitter on her backside so he could track her if she got lost.

He grabbed a hockey stick from the back of his car that he uses to bang on trees to get the squirrels moving. Finally, he put on a jacket that contained a game bag, along with food for Jade (dead, day-old chicks), knives and awls (to finish off the squirrels if needed) and a slingshot and marbles.

“One of the favorite things for a squirrel to do is to run up to the top of trees and freeze, putting them out of sight for the birds,” he said. “Sometimes, I have to launch a couple of marbles close to the squirrel to get it moving again.”

Aubin, 26, of Mattydale, has been a licensed falconer since he was 18. He has hunted with kestrels, red-tailed hawks and peregrine falcons. He prefers hunting with Harris’s hawks, he said, because while most raptors are solitary hunters, this particular species is social.

“I like to hunt with other people,” he said.

Jade eyes a squirrel, lower right, that eventually escaped. Dick Blume/The Post-Standard Becoming a licensed falconer doesn’t happen overnight. It requires the passing of a hunting safety course and a special written falconry exam, plus a two-year apprenticeship with a licensed falconer. There’s other requirements once you get a bird, including an inspection of where its kept. Finally, state and federal licenses are needed, costing $120 every two years.

Aubin, who belongs to the New York State Falconry Association, is the state coordinator for matching falconry apprentices with licensed falconers. There’s currently about 200 licensed falconers across the state, he said.

Harris’s hawks, which are native to the Southwest, as adults are about the size of crows. The hawk’s beak looks intimidating, but the most dangerous body part is the talons, Aubin said.

“They can roughly put 160 to 170 pounds of pressure on the end of their talons,” he said. “They can really mess you up with them.”

The falconry season for small game lasts from Oct. 1 to March 31. Falconers can hunt also waterfowl (ducks, geese), but that requires the purchase of $15 federal duck stamp.

Melissa said her husband spends a lot of time with his birds. There’s time one must take to ensure that the bird bonds with the handler, time that must be taken for its care — and of course, time to constantly hunt with it.

Melissa Aubin, left, who accompanies her husband while he's hunting with hawks, says the sport takes a lot of time and that it's "a way of life." DIck Blume/The Post-Standard

“It’s a way of life,” she said.

In recent weeks, Jade and Sapphire have been a deadly duo, Aubin said.

“One day, we took three squirrels and a duck within 40 minutes,” he said. “I stopped because I didn’t want to wipe out the local squirrel population. At the rate we were going, there wouldn’t be any left.”

With Sapphire out of the action this past week, Jade seemed at a loss. She had a lackluster morning during the three-hour outing in Mottville.

Once released, she stayed up in the trees, following Aubin and his wife as he walked along the trail. She spotted a pair of mallard ducks in nearby Skaneateles Creek and quickly dove into the cold water, just missing them. For the next couple of hours, she came close, but couldn’t close the deal during 10 different squirrel encounters.

Sometimes the squirrels darted into holes in trees before Jade could get within range. Other times, they quickly climbed to the tops of trees to evade her. Or, they quickly scurried around tree trunks, managing to remain perfectly still and out of sight –changing their positions whenever Jade changed hers.

One time, Jade quickly descended on a squirrel nest and started ripping it apart with her talons and beak. Unbeknownst to her, the frightened squirrel had quickly existed from the bottom of the nest when she first arrived.

“Ho, ho, ho, up Jade, up — squirrel!” shouted Aubin, loudly rapping on the tree trunk with his hockey stick. “I don’t know what the heck her problem is today.”

Aubin was frustrated. He blamed himself for not getting Jade out hunting the past six days. He wondered if the bird weighed too much beforehand, if maybe she was out of sorts because of Sapphire’s absence — or if the initial, unsuccessful plunge into the cold creek had somehow made her more tentative.

In the past couple of weeks, Jade, hunting with Sapphire, Aubin's other Harris's hawk, have made for deadly duo when it comes to squirrels. Dick Blume/The Post-Standard

He stressed raptors are born to hunt and that he wasn’t about to give up.

“If she thinks she’s done, she has another thing coming,” he said. “We’re going to eat some lunch and go out again. “

More on falconry: See the New York State Falconry Association website.

View the full article on The Syracuse Outdoors Blog