by Greenleaf, Wis. (AP) Stephanie Stevens has a good reason to love the bone-based cold of a winter of Wisconsin. Every weekend she loads her minivan with a large green box and drives to rural areas, usually on the edges of the friends of the Farm fields.
After you get out of the box on a thick leather glove and on your wrist her unconventional hunt Buddy, Echo-Hawk Echo, briefly: a youthful red-tailed falcon.
“She is intense,” says Stevens and slightly caresses with her stacked feathers.
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Falkner dedicate large pieces of the coldest season of the year to spend time outdoors and work with their birds to hunt a little game like rabbits and Auerhahn. Many falcons say it is obvious that climate change, the development of rural areas as well as the agricultural and forestry practices shape the landscapes and prey on which they rely. The signs are everywhere, from the range of snowshoe bunnies to the stained snow cover, which does not last so long to new subdivisions in rural areas. This means that falcons have to hunt other prey than they are used to, start their seasons later or end up earlier and expect emotions to observe natural world change.
Falconry also gives the practitioners additional motivation, the countries in which they and their birds hunt – and a greater feeling of loss than climate change and other human drivers change these places forever.
“My empathy is just as much to what I am looking for in my hand,” said Tom Doolittle, a biologist for retirement and wild animals in retirement and a lifelong falconer in North Wiscons. Falconry, he says, is “a sport of observation and participation. And it changed dramatically. “
An intimate connection to nature
As an echo flight and seat in the trees, Stevens and her son and daughter are tied through the snow down and mainly search for Cottontail rabbits.
Ideal “rabbitat” looks like brush piles or thicket of blackberries and thorns. Stevens Wadet directly and hits the brush with a stick or jump directly onto it, hoping to rinse something.
Then it happens – a rabbit arrow. The HAWK dives. Faster than blinking and the bells on their foot chains, the ringing, their claws reach.
It comes with a fur bush. One almost miss.
“Even if the falcon misses it, it is always so close,” said Stevens’ son Daniel. “This moment really wakes you up.”
Falknerry has existed for thousands of years, but in North America, where sport is neither indifferent nor accessible to the average person, he is ruled for the federal and state laws and an ethics code developed by Falconry Associations.
Falker usually captures a wild bird after he has learned to hunt himself and finally return him to the wilderness, so it is a temporary and practical relationship. If the birds wanted to fly and never come back. They return because people essentially act as the version of a falcon hunting dog and appear prey. And if you don’t catch anything, you still get a meal.
In return, people can “see a lot of nature that we would normally not see,” said Stevens.
This gives Falconers a greater feeling of responsibility to observe and preserve nature, said Hillary Neff, President of the Wisconsin Falconers Association. She said that she was more careful about the weather and the change of population from animals than ever before. Some Falconers record their observations.
Neff said she was frustrated that the falconry season began a late start this year thanks to an unusually warm fall.
“If you hunt with a raptor, you can really get involved in the whole way into the life circle,” she said. “You are the mercy of the mood of nature.”
Changed populations of small animals
As a Doolittle, the retired biologist, hunts at home in the forests, about an hour south of Lake Superior, he uses bags and gray birds with orange eyes.
Goshawks naturally hunt snowshoe bunnies, and Doolittle saw first -hand on his homestead, like these small mammals that move from Brown to Snow White in winter disappear from his area.
Last year, when the floor was exposed in the middle of winter, he watched a rabbit and looked for a camouflage that ran and hidden in front of his Hawk house – the only thing that was around for miles with a white background.
“I was so sad for him,” said Doolittle.
The snow cover is very different from year to year, but the constant trend for decades was that the snow cover does not last so long. Average warmer temperatures mean that the snow change faster when falling and its physical properties.
Animals that rely on snow are in trouble.
When Doolittle is seen by the ideal rabbit habitat and only a soft lane of snowshoe pressureprints among the pines, “somehow they have lost something,” he says. “You have lost the puzzle piece that is the Nordland to me.”
This is something that Jonathan Pauli, professor of wild animal ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, observed by systematically capturing, breaks down and monitoring and comparing her prey throughout the state and comparing its historical figures. He said his team observed a “relatively fast range” of snowshoe bunnies that moved north because climate change increasingly turns them into “white light bulbs”, which are very visible to their predators in winter.
“This is sad for me that a species that has been on for thousands of years will no longer be plentiful or finally in our state,” said Pauli.
Pauli said studies have shown that concerted forest efforts can counteract the pressure of climate change on rabbits – although the rabbits of rabbits could benefit from other species such as Martens. He believes that the challenge for forest managers, tribes and scientists from the federal government and state forests exists to join together in order to strategically save several winter species at the same time.
Climate change between many factors, influence the falconry
Falkner know that every hunting is different and the reasons why is in abundance.
Less snow cover makes it easier to move, but the advantage of slowing down the flight after prey or to the animals and their traces more visible. Birds do not necessarily love to hunt in polar temperatures like the United States that the United States has seen repeatedly this winter. Localized extreme weather events such as floods can also temporarily change game populations.
The insects, which are eaten by Raptors, can kill too generous agricultural pesticides. Human development such as new subdivisions can shape entire landscapes in rural areas. Everything, from the number of cojots to the decision -making, matters.
Doolittle said that the changes he has observed for decades all refer to human footprint, often to the disadvantage of other species.
“We have to recognize that, as a species, we are the largest changing environmental effect on the planet,” he said.
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