Hawks in the Hand: Adventures in Photography and Falconry

Hawks in the Hand is full of the boundless energy and charming honesty of boys becoming intelligent young men, discovering that the natural world that had been their playground could yield fascinating insights about animal behavior, particularly that of the noble birds of prey. While their discoveries are worthy of any budding scientist, their stories and breathtaking adventures are skillfully rendered and wonderfully entertaining.

These two ingenuous storytellers introduce a cast of unforgettable characters: their friends and partners in adventure - human, canine, and avian - including Comet, the Cooper's hawk, one of their first birds trained to the fist; Bad Boy, the friendly American kestrel; Ulysses, a peregrine falcon; Cactus, the adorable burrowing owl; and Handsome, the osprey, who takes up a surprising friendship with a little skimmer.

In this edition, the first since its original publication, the authors have included dozens of additional photographs as well as excerpts from the log notes that provided the material for their book. Today, Hawks in the Hand is as relevant as ever: an important reminder of how much there is to learn from all wild things and how vital is the connection to the natural world for people of all ages.

A must have.


This review appeared in LIVING BIRD magazine - Winter 1999   April 19, 1999
 13 out of 13 found this review helpful

HAWKS IN THE HAND

by John and Frank Craighead

First published in 1939, HAWKS IN THE HAND was one of my favorite books growing up. Reading it (again and again) definitely fueled my passion for birds of prey and inspired my interest in bird photography. It's good to see this fascinating book in print again, now that most copies of the original edition have long since vanished from libraries and used book stores.

Although twin brothers Frank and John Craighead are perhaps most renowned now for their work studying grizzly bears in the Yellowstone region, they began their scientific careers as ornithologists. Indeed, their 1956 book, HAWKS, OWLS, AND WILDLIFE was a seminal work in the fields of raptor ecology, examining in detail the intricate relationship between predatory birds and their prey. But long before they became professional biologists, the Craigheads were studying, photographing, and writing about birds of prey. They were audacious enough, while still in their teens, to submit an article and photographs to NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC magazine-and it was published. The recognition they received from the article led to commissions for more articles and eventually to the publication of HAWKS IN THE HAND.

It is interesting that HAWKS IN THE HAND was reissued in the same year that Kenn Kaufman's KINGBIRD HIGHWAY was published. In some ways, the books have a lot in common. They are both, in a sense, coming of age stories about young Americans who have an overriding passion for birds-a passion that they follow unbridled, crossing and recrossing the continent to study birds. And yet the birding travels that the Craigheads and Kaufman took occurred more than 30 years apart. It was a vastly different world in the 1930s. At that time, a native population of Peregrine Falcons still nested across the East, and the Craigheads visited many of their eyries, photographing the eggs, young, and adults-decades later this would provide vital documentation on numerous traditional falcon eyrie sites that had been lost due to DDT and other environmental contaminants. But all was certainly not well in those times. In a poignant 1933 entry in the boys' journal (which was added to this edition), they described an autumn day spent at Cape May, New Jersey. Unlike most fall days now, few bird watchers were present to witness the spectacular stream of migrating hawks passing over. Instead, scores of hunters stood shoulder to shoulder, shooting at every raptor that passed over. "Shells were piled all over the road and hawks were piled all over the running boards of cars and scattered throughout the woods, for no one bothered getting a hawk that fell anywhere but in the road," they wrote. "It seems a crime that they should be so slaughtered."

The equipment available for rock climbing and photography was also much different from what's available today. You won't see any helmets, carabiners, or fancy synthetic climbing ropes in this book. These guys rappelled down sheer cliff, dizzyingly high above the ground, using ordinary manila ropes to reach falcon nests or climbed massive tree trunks with telephone lineman spurs to reach Bald Eagle or hawk nests. One day some nervous spectators, who were viewing the boys climbing to a Peregrine Falcon nest on a lofty cliff, called an ambulance, which parked below them for the entire time they were there. Frank joked, "To heck with them. If we fall, a broom is what we'll need, not an ambulance." And for all their photography, they used 4x5 press cameras-which are about as heavy, awkward, and unwieldy as you can get-but the pictures they took were great.

When I read this book again recently-for the first time in 25 years-I was amazed how well it held up. I highly recommend it.