Prairie Falcon Story

One day Olivia and I were hanging around outside the hogan at the Hubbell Trading Post. This guy caught our eye. We are avid birders. My definition of "avid" means that we look for and try to identify birds everywhere we go. Sometimes we even go places just to look for birds. But, and this is a big but, we are not experts at identifying birds. So we spent a day or two checking this guy out and working on his/her identification. He/she liked this tree just beside our hogan so we had several opportunities to observes and photograph him/her.


The visitor center had several books about Arizona birds and after much debate about this birds size we eventually settled on the id of prairie falcon. Later some locals confirmed this for us.


On our last day at the Hubbell Trading Post I saw a commotion along the fence.


This prairie falcon was stuck between the two fence layers. It's actually an inner zig-zaggy (technical terms only here) fence and an outer squarey fence.


The squarish outer fence had large openings but some barbs on it. The inner fence's triangular openings were too small for the falcon to fit through. So OF COURSE the falcon was trying to fit through the triangles. (does this clear up the sex identification for anyone else? ok. I'm trying not to generalize so I won't say that this man bird was more or less beating his head against a brick wall.)


Along comes Jay and his friend to the rescue. They were innocently walking down the road when I dragged them over to come do something about the poor falcon. Jay managed to grab ahold of the falcon who then refused to let go of the fence. But finally Jay removed the bird from the fence. And then he said, "Now what do I do with it?" So I guess it's clear here that none of us really knew what we were doing. But Jay was much braver than I because I said, "Wait, let me take a picture." And then I said "O.k. now, wait and let me get out of the way."


Jay's friend suggested throwing the falcon up and letting him fly away. Jay gallantly waited for me to run away and then did just that. The prairie falcon flew off without incident although I was immediately mad at myself for not getting any inflight photos. But it's difficult to be a wimpy scaredy-cat and a good photographer simultaneously.


The prairie falcon flew off happily ever after. The End.