Kyra perched on my laptop
There’s the old cliché that if you love something, you let it go.
This spring I am readying myself to release my friend and hunting companion Kyra back to the wild.
Kyra is an American Kestrel the smallest North American falcon. The experience of working in partnership with such a personable and beautiful wild animal has changed my life forever. We have had some exciting, humorous, terrifying, and inspirational moments together.
I trapped Kyra in October 2009 and I spent one amazing winter with her. She, by far, has had more personality than any other bird I have worked with. It is amazing to watch her fly; it is like watching a jet plane.
As I look back on the time we spent together this past winter, I have many fond memories – her first starling we caught, her first free flight, and seeing her interact with a wild male kestrel.
Perhaps the funniest was the day she caught a starling and flew with it into a cow pasture. I had to roll under an electrified fence to catch her at which point the cows began to follow me, convinced I was about to feed them. As I tried to recover her, she fled, four feet at a time, me following her and the cows following me. I finally got a hold of her and her starling and had to walk a few hundred yards to find a gate to get back out, and was trailed by the cows the whole way. By then, I was in a residential area, walking back down the road and ran into a group of kids. They stared curiously at Kyra and began asking question, seeing the blood on my gauntlet and dead starling Kyra was eating. They were utterly grossed out and I spent the next hour educating the children on predator prey relationships and falconry, and subsequently their parents who came out to find who was this strange person their children were talking to.
More than anything, Kyra has taught me to be more patient, to open my eyes and my ears, and to be present in the moment with her. It’s going to be difficult to release Kyra but my falconry sponsor, Don Adams, told me when I released my first red-tailed hawk, Artemus, to think of it as releasing a spirit. I never want to keep a wild thing forever, and as much as I love Kyra, she belongs to the wild and not to me.
