How I Came to Upland and Dogs

My favorite Harris Hawk, Angus, with a Jack Rabbit we had caught.

I didn’t grow up in a hunting family.

But I did grow up as a meat eater. I have never been opposed to hunting. We often raised our own meat, or raised animals to sell through 4-H and FFA, so I had zero delusions about where my meat came from. My best friend’s father was a hunter though, and after a successful hunt, we would often see his deer hung in the garage or back yard for processing. I was always pretty fascinated by this process, but never got any closer to it than watching him skin and cut his harvest.

In my late 20s, I scored a job with one of the largest, most desired employers in the area where I grew up. They are a large producer, grower and supporter of wine grapes and wines, and also big into employee development. One of my “development” opportunities was to attend a huge trade show, where hundreds of grape-industry supporting businesses were in attendance, showing whatever revolutionary contraption or service they had to offer. One of those business was a falconer.

I was absolutely transfixed. I spend the large majority of my day standing in the background of the crowd surrounding this booth so that I could watch the falcons (professional development at it’s finest…). They weren’t doing anything impressive, just sitting on their perches admiring their admirers back, and I remember one was exceedingly noisy (I learned that she was an “imprint”. Note to self: don’t ever have an imprint). I knew I HAD to have one of these birds. That evening was a whirlwind of Googling and emailing random people I found on the internet to try to gather as much information as I could.

I soon learned that falconry was the ancient art of training and hunting in cooperation with a raptor. The man at the expo also used his falcons for pest bird abatement at the vineyards, but abatement is not actually the traditional practice of falconry, because you are not actively hunting. Your birds are simply flying with and around you and their presence scares the destructive smaller birds away from the ripening grapes.

I knew I wanted to be a “real” falconer, and wanted the true experience of hunting with a bird of prey. So I started the lengthy process of becoming a falconer, which includes finding a mentor who you will study under for 2 years, passing licensing tests, taking hunter education (falconers have the same rules as gun hunters in that regard), having your raptor housing facilities inspected by and signed off on by the government, as well as a list of other requirements in order to keep a raptor. I passed, received my licenses, and my sponsor and I set out to trap my first bird.

Falconers are allowed to acquire their birds in the US in a few different ways; you can trap juveniles from the wild, you can take nestlings from the wild, or you can purchase captive bred birds. I felt a little uneasy about trapping a wild thing and making it my own, but I quickly learned that one of the reasons we are allowed to do so is because around 80% of young raptors die before they reach 1 year of age. The culprits are most often starvation, vehicles, predation by other predators, failure to learn to hunt, 2nd hand poisoning by eating a poisoned rodent, or lack of suitable habitat. The birds who are hungry enough to come down to a foreign looking trap are often part of the 80%, because the truly healthy ones have already learned to hunt and aren’t interested in the foreign food and steel contraption we have to offer.

We trapped my first red tail hawk, and began the process of “training” (it is really just acclimatizing) the hawk to hunting with me. Over the course of the season, we hunted and learned together, and generally had a great experience. But at the end of the season, I had my first true experience with how hunters and their environment give and take from each other; I released my hawk back to the wild. Earlier in the year, I had trapped a young, awkward, likely going to die red tail. Over the course of the season, we learned from each other, and I helped to make that hawk a strong, successful hunter, as well as curing the diseases it came with such as worms and aspergillosis (a lung disease) that likely would have killed it in the wild. Together, we took rabbits from the wild, and used them to feed feed my hawk. When it was all said and done the next spring, I gave the wild back a strong, healthy, self-sufficient hawk that would enter the breeding population and raise more babies in the coming years.

And so began my falconry adventure. For the next 7 years, I flew a variety of raptors from red tails to harris hawks to peregrines, and even some of the smaller ones such as kestrels and merlins. We took a variety of game, but it primarily always came back down to rabbits. All of my wild trapped birds were always released back to the wild after a season with me, and I learned to really love this process of taking from the wild, and then also sending it back a small piece of you as you release that bird back to its home territory. I also learned a lot about our natural world, and conservation through these years. Spending hundreds of hours walking through habitat, and then watching that habitat be destroyed by development got me really passionate and involved in a lot of the conservation agencies around here. But despite the hunting and consistent taking of rabbits, I still did not consider myself a “hunter”. Perhaps because rabbits aren’t really a hunted game around here? Or perhaps because I wasn’t the one actually taking them, rather my bird was and I was just the facilitator? Or perhaps because most of what we caught went to feeding my birds, and not myself? Either way, I didn’t consider myself a “hunter”. I considered myself an extreme bird watcher, who just happened to also have to buy a hunting license to participate in my hobby.

In 2020, that all changed.

There wasn’t one event, but rather, a confluence of many events.

Over the years, I had been watching a fellow falconer named Tyler consistently take quail with his raptor. The rabbit populations have been slowly dying off where I am at, and I’ve had nearly every field I loved taken by development. With rabbits becoming increasingly hard to find, I started to notice that on my bike rides and hikes, I would see quail everywhere. I couldn’t imagine someone could possibly catch them with a hawk given how fast they are, and how dense their cover is. But Tyler was doing it, so I wanted to give it a try.

I purchased a goshawk, and started scouting fields. One thing I had noticed about Tyler’s hunting was that he always used dogs (and sometime a really big pack of them!). I decided I needed a pointing dog… enter stage right: Thelma the Small Munsterlander.

The goshawk didn’t work out so well. Turns out, he only wanted to hunt rabbits. But around the same time as I was discovering this, another friend of mine and her boyfriend had a coopers hawk they needed to rehome due to some life changes, so I jumped on the opportunity. Enter stage left: Arizona the coopers hawk.

Arizona, the coopers hawk. Photo from Lindsey Benger.

I had also been watching one of my female friends start upland hunting on her Facebook page (also with a dog), and had an itch to see what that was about. I already had a trained dog (I just didn’t know it) named Ellie, the English Springer Spaniel, and so I put in for an apprentice hunt with the department of fish and game.

Arizona and I were continually pursuing quail throughout the season. She got closer and closer to catching one, as I slowly learned more and more about chasing these crazy little darts with wings. Then, I learned that I had won an apprentice hunt!

A few weeks later, I showed up to this guided pheasant hunt, with planted pheasants. Having never owned a shot gun, my dad let me borrow an old wooden 12ga that he had. The hunt said you could bring your own dog if you had one, so I threw Ellie in the car. She had previously been trained for this… I just had no idea what it looked like or that she had it in her (that story in a future blog post).

So Ellie and I show up to this hunt, and I left her in the car to start the hunt. I wasn’t sure what to expect, and didn’t know how she would do. Our designated “guide” for the day had brought his two dogs as well, and I didn’t want her getting in the way of the “real” working dogs. We did our first round of hunting the planted pheasants. The dogs were not super impressive, but did their job. The lab mostly just picked the planted birds up and brought them back, and the pointer was too old to beat the lab to most of the birds. So round one was mostly spent getting birds from the lab’s mouth, and then the handler throwing them back in the field for us to find again. After seeing how mellow the whole thing was, I was feeling less anxious about seeing what Ellie would do. Our guide was super encouraging, and asked if I wanted to run my dog for round 2. So I did.

I was in for one heck of a surprise. I had sent Ellie away for formal training 5 years prior as a young dog (more on this in a future blog post). When I got her back, I had no idea what that actually looked like, and since I wasn’t a hunter, I had no application for the skills she had learned. None the less, she had great recall, and a hup/whoa I could use in any situation in life. We turned Ellie lose, and I watched in amazement as my dog started working like we were filming a “How to hunt with a Flusher” video. She ranged super close, she quartered like a dream, when she found a bird, she got super birdy and obvious, she hupped at the flush, and was steady to both with and shot. Once the bird was down, I released her, and she retrieved it to hand. What the heck had I been missing all of these years?! I couldn’t believe it. We kept her in the field the rest of the day with us because she was so amazing to work over. I also learned that day that I’d have had better luck hitting pheasants if I had thrown my gun at them rather than try to shoot them. I’d have to work on that… or buy a few more guns so I had plenty of throwing power.

That was it. I was sold. The gimmicky nature of the planted pheasant hunt had me a little turned off, but the absolute joy my dog hunted with told me that I had to figure out this hunting thing. I had to learn to shoot so that I didn’t disappoint my dog. I had to get this dog out hunting so she could continue to experience this love she’d shown me. And I had to do this fast, because I’d already wasted 6 years of her precious life with me being clueless.

I came home, I downloaded every dog and hunting podcast I could find, I joined NAVHDA, I bought a shot gun, and I subscribed to every upland conservation group I could. Let the games begin…

Arizona and my first ever (and only for the first season) California Quail.

Ellie: The Dog Who Owns My Soul