CALIFORNIA GAMEHAWKERS ASSOCIATION

It is our purpose to recognize Falconry as the legal sport of taking wild game with

a trained bird of prey under natural circumstances as recognized and provided for

under statute and to assure the continued legal protection of the sport.

President :

I have never been casual about my falconry. After nearly 40 years in the sport I have never grown bored or tired with it and never missed a season in all that time.

I do not know what drives me; I do not want to know. Falconry is best when it no longer requires the will, when it evolves into something sort of like landing a fish and all objectivity is absorbed into the moment and introspection becomes a dry sterile plane.

I am always seeking to banish error, stay progressive, always seeking to sharpen my perception of the whole; how quarry and predator demand excellence from one another, how the lay of the land, the wind shapes every flight.

Ours is a sport of voluptuous extremes and heavy irony; those birds I have had that survive the greatest risks of pitch and distance and weather, where every flight from that razor's edge has the potential to put her down dangerously far from you with quarry are the birds that I have valued the most. I am continually urging myself to be bolder, to risk more when in the field; on that razor's edge is where the juice is, where the amps are the highest.

Falconry is the antidote to life as a bore. It is a revolt against ordinary standards seeing, rescue from the dead, fake landscapes of rampant urbanization.

Is Falconry an art? It may be just prententious enough an activity to be an art. I don't know. It is probably made even more pretentious by attempting to consider it an art. No, for me it is not an art.

In my falconry I am always caught between insisting on control and cultivating the unexpected, reaching for the highest levels of risk, the most reckless, brutal degrees of fun to be had, where the best flight sometimes happens so fast it is difficult for you to look back and recall what it is you have just seen, THE IMPORTANT THING IS NOT TO BLINK !!!