0 Foreword

JEAN CRAIGHEAD GEORGE Newbery Medal-winning author of Julie of the Wolex Frightful' Mountain The sequel to Me Side of the Montain and On the Far Side of the Mounacin

Foreword In 1986, I met Jean Craighead George at a friend's home in the upstate New York town where we all live. I grew up admiring the Craigheads, a family of naturalists, whose adventures I followed in National Geographic magazine, where they always seemed to be attaching transmitters to grizzly bears, banding bald eagles, or paddling canoes and fiberglass kayaks on first descents down the best western white waters. Always, there were flocks of children participating in every adventure and experiment. I thought the Craigheads might be the only family in America that was having more fun than the Kennedys. Obsessed with falcons as I was from birth, I read My Side of the Mountain in 1964. When I met Jean Craighead George that day in New York, she reminded me about the letter that I had written her, at age eleven, politely inquiring if she knew where I could find an occupied kestrel nest. The following year, my father finally bought me a petstore red-tailed hawk. I manned her to my fist

although I still lacked the tutelage to train or hunt her. But in the autumn of 1968, I entered Millbrook School in upstate New York, drawn by its informal falconry program. At Millbrook, just across the Hudson from Delhi—where Sam and Frightful had had their adventures—I found a small cadre of students who not only shared my devotion to the birds, they had mastered the sport of falconry. That autumn, we captured and trained red-tails and kestrels, immature birds on their first migration. We used bow nets, bal chartris or harness pigeons, and contraptions that bristled with monofilament snares and nooses which we found diagrammed in Beebe & Webster's North American Falconry and Hunting Hawks or described in the classic writings of Frederick the Great. By the time the leaves fell in the third week of October, we had trained the birds to come when we called and to follow like dogs, but high in the canopy flying from tree to tree over our heads. We beat the bush below them for cottontail and pheasant, worked the corn stubble for giant Belgian hare and the forests for red and gray

squirrels. We flew falcons and goshawks but mostly wild red-tails, pioneering many of the game-hawking techniques still used by American falconers. I don't think any of us realized how unusual our success in training red-tailed hawks to hunt was until we all made a pilgrimage to see Al Nye the following Thanksgiving in Falls Church, Virginia. Nye, one of the fathers of modern game hawking, flew peregrines and goshawks, the classic choices of traditional Asian and European falconry. Nye showed us his prized European goshawk, Suzie, and boasted that the bird had already taken a dozen cottontails that season. When we told him we'd taken around the same number with our redtails, he reacted sceptically. Convention considered the North American red-tail to be at best an inferior hunting tool. European falconers dismissed them contemptuously as "buzzards." We told Nye, "We have the pelts to prove it." We talked about hawks every spare moment—at meals, between classes, and after chapel. At night, we fashioned hardware, hoods, jesses, and gauntlets and bewits out of tough, pliant kangaroo hide. We marked in our memories the raptor nests

we found during our daily winter hunting excursions when no leaves obstructed our view of the upper canopy. In the spring, we climbed up to those nests to band baby red-tails, crows, and owls. We learned to use ropes and climbing spurs to scale the tall oak and ash trees where the large raptors nested. I also learned taxidermy and basic veterinary skills, how to determine disease, check for worms, give injections, and diagnose a range of illnesses and parasites that afflict raptors and other animals. We even began a raptor breeding project, one of the first in history, and were partially successful, persuading a golden eagle and a red-tailed hawk to lay eggs in captivity. Since my years at Millbrook, I have flown hawks nearly every autumn. These days, I am flying a pair of Harris hawks. I have flown my hen, Cuchin (a superb hunter), for fourteen years. I continue to trap, band, and release hawks every migration on Orange County's Schunnemunk Ridge—a vantage from which, on a clear morning, I can glimpse the Catskill peaks around Delhi. On a good day with a south wind, we trap upwards of fifty hawks: peregrines, Cooper's hawks, sharp-shins, red-tails, goshawks, merlins, and golden eagles. I maintain

breeding aviaries for hawks and owls at my home in Mount Kisco, New York, a few miles from Jean George's home. I breed quail, pheasant, and occasionally turkeys, and I operate a wildlife rehabilitation center, with state and federal licenses that allow me to rehabilitate orphaned and injured raptors. My experience as a young falconer accounts in large part for my lifelong devotion to raptors and my continued interest in natural history. Our time as falconers left its mark on my schoolmates as well. All of them have chosen careers in the natural sciences or as environmental advocates with exceptional records. For each one of them, reading My Side of the Mountain was the formative inspiration of their falconry experience. My years as a falconer helped drive my own career choice as an environmental lawyer and advocate. The knowledge and experience I acquired from falconers have marked my life and made me a far more effective advocate on nature's behalf. I have to assume that thousands of other children outside my immediate circle were also inspired to varying degrees of ecological stewardship by their exposure to Sam Gribley's