I've hunted all my life.
Bird hunting has always been
my favorite,
pheasant and duck hunting.
I knew at some point in my life,
I wanted to practice falconry.
I love to hunt
and I love birds of prey.
It's the ultimate combination
of the two.
Werap birds out of the wild.
This particular bird
is not wild.
This is a captive-produced bird.
This is a goshawk.
This is Daisy.
She's six years old now.
She's a seasoned hunter now.
I mostly fly pheasants with her,
but I do hunt ducks, and
some squirrels with her, also.
But pheasants are what we
spend most of our time hunting.
We don't train them to hunt.
Nature has done that.
So we are training them
to return to us.
That's the training
portion of it,
so you can get your--
get your birds back
at the end of the hunt.
This is a field here
that I've hunted a couple times
here for pheasants.
I did spot a rooster
hunkered down.
Maybe more than one.
They run down into that cover,
into that draw.
So, once we get over the hill,
and see if we can't
get a flight on him.
The best word to describe it
is a partnership.
We are hunting partners,
and the dog there is the third
partner in the partnership.
Ideally, my dog will locate
a pheasant.
In the perfect world,
he'll point it.
The pheasant will hold
real tight and allow us then
to approach very closely.
So for her to have a chance
of catching a pheasant
on the rise,
it's got to be very, very close,
and it's extremely difficult.
Wow!
He flew nice!
We do a lot more chasing
than we do catching.
It's a real challenge
to put anything in the bag.
So, if you want to fill
your game bag, you know,
a shotgun is a far, far better
method than a hawk.
It's just thing of beauty
watching a rooster pheasant
rise up out of the cover
and watch a goshawk
try to climb up into the sky
and tackle it and pull it down.
More than likely, the pheasant
probably beat her to cover.
She has a transmitter on her,
and now we're going to go
track her down.
I transferred her off
onto some other food.
We have the possibility
in falconry
of doing catch-and-release.
The cover didn't allow him
to get up and away,
so I'm going to let him go.
A lot of people will say to me,
"That's a real interesting
hobby."
You can ask my wife, I mean,
it is definitely, you know,
for most falconers,
it is a lifestyle.
I don't know of
many other things like it
in the world today.
We're getting so far removed,
it seems, society in general,
from the natural world.
Falconry is a very,
very intimate relationship
with nature.