Reach For The Sky

A falcon diving on its prey at more than 150mph must be the finest sporting spectacle, says Jamie Blackett

- D. Ireland

Like the hero of the film Kes, Greg Hutchings was bitten by the falconry bug as a teenager. “I must have been 12 years old when I climbed a tree to see a sparrowhawk’s nest with five chicks in it. Not long afterwards there was a TV programme about falconry and I was hooked,” he says.

Greg and I are sitting in my kitchen drinking coffee while outside on his block, hooded and raring to go, is Kenzie, Greg’s fifth-season peregrine falcon named after one of Greg’s heroes, the wildlife artist and Lincolnshire wildfowler Mackenzie Thorpe.

I am are struck by Greg’s enthusiasm as he talks about how he bred Kenzie from a wild female that had been handed into a wildlife reserve with a broken wing.

Outside, the wind is shaking the autumn leaves from the sycamores along the shore and we watch anxiously for it to drop. The maximum wind speed Greg will fly his bird in is 25mph — beyond that it struggles to keep position.

English are better

Today’s expedition has been months in the planning. For two years Greg has been putting down grey partridges here in the hope that one day he will see Kenzie hurtle out of the sky and take one. In contrast to the thousands of redlegs released in Dumfries and Galloway, the native bird is all but extinct. Greg’s conservation efforts have been a happy by-product of his falconry. English partridges are better for falconry because redlegs run rather than clamp down to a point.

The partridges that Greg puts down are bantam-reared. He buys them at five weeks and they are then grown on in Greg’s garden on a diet of wild bird seed to accustom them to foraging in the wild. Then, at eight to 10 weeks, they are gradually released from a pen on the edge of a stubble where there is a thick beetle bank of white grass, in such a way that a covey is then hefted on to part of the farm that has the best possible habitat for them.