Larry Barnes with his gyrfalcon, which was lost on Jan. 15 after being chased out of sight by a bald eagle. Barnes, who hunts for ducks with the help of his birds, has practiced falconry since the 1990s. Luna Soley / The Times Record
When Larry Barnes saw his falcon swerve west toward Sagadahoc Bay, he worried that it might be the last time he saw him.
It was late morning Monday, Jan. 15, warm and quiet after a big storm wreaked havoc along the Maine coast. Barnes was hunting, using his falcon to flush ducks along the Little River in Georgetown. Three ducks in, Barnes noticed something was off. The gyrfalcon, clear-eyed from 500 feet up, wasn’t “stooping” — the word for when a bird of prey tucks its wings to fall out of the sky upon its quarry.
When the falcon swerved away and sped toward the horizon, a mature bad eagle giving chase, Barnes lost sight.
The gyrfalcon perched on a ladder near the Phippsburg Fire Department last Monday afternoon shortly before Larry Barnes recovered him. Courtesy of Phippsburg Fire and Rescue
Barnes, who has kept falcons since the 1990s, uses telemetry to track his birds. The gyrfalcon flies with a needle-thin transmitter banded to its leg. Barnes spent the day tracing the bird before zeroing in on a signal from Parker’s Head Road in Phippsburg. By then, the sun was setting. Barnes parked his car near the fire department, where locals had spotted and photographed the wayward falcon.
After Barnes arrived, the gyrfalcon dove from the crown of a big pine and settled on his owner’s glove.
“The day ended well,” Barnes said during an interview at his Wiscasset home.
It’s the first time Barnes has lost this bird, which he got in Massachusetts last fall, but he has had the same thing happen many times over since he started hunting with falcons 25 years ago.
“It’s just part of falconry,” he said. “Eagles are hunting the same ducks as we are and they’re part of this environment.”
There are about 800 nesting pairs of bald eagles in Maine, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Since the state Legislature added an amendment to the Maine Endangered Species Act defining eagle nests as “essential habitat” in 1988, the population has surged.
The eagles tend to move toward the coast in the winter, when inland waterways freeze over. Barnes has seen them pick ducks right off the water in Phippsburg’s Atkins Bay. But recent years have been different, he said. There’s open, unfrozen water all season long.
Barnes calls falconry, which he first took an interest in as a boy, “extreme bird watching.” It’s complicated, he said. Moon cycles, atmospheric pressure systems and the whim of the ducks, which come down from The Maritimes in Eastern Canada, all impact the hunt.
Falconry has been legal in Maine since 1974, but you still need a license to practice it — not to mention indoor and outdoor facilities that meet the Department of Inland Fisheries Wildlife standards, a two-year apprenticeship, and time to care for and train the bird.
“Mostly, it’s having a wild bird trust you and accept you as a hunting partner, and then the experience of being in nature,” he said. “It’s something you can do for a lifetime and never master it.”
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