Excerpt From American Falconry Article

Dude, There IS an Answer to World Peace!

I was wrong About milkshakes. I thought milkshakes were the answer to world peace and even local distress. Milkshakes are happy food. They are cool and smooth and play well on the taste buds. People rarely get in fights after slurping one down, and they don’t impair driving, unless you use a plastic spoon on a concrete-thick shake. I thought if more people enjoyed more milkshakes we could end human strife. This may still be true, but I think the real hope to end human conflict is falconry.

The other day I was cruising down the freeway with my prairie falcon perched proudly in the back. He was perfectly visible to passing cars, trucks, and spaceships. I noticed in my peripheral that I was being noticed by a car starting to pass. You know what I’m talking about. The car speeds past, then suddenly slows way back until they are parallel with you. Then after a minute or two the car speeds off. This happens a lot, and not wanting to interrupt the hawk gawkers, I didn’t look over, but just let the faces press against windows and the fingers point in excited fashion. As I took my exit, I saw the car next to me also exit and come up beside me trying to get my attention.

I finally looked over to find it wasn’t a car; it was a truck, a garbage can truck. Not a garbage truck, which picks up garbage, but a garbage can truck which is a pickup that smashes garbage cans the night before the garbage truck comes. It was full of high school dudes who were surely on lunch break where they had just smoked a few homemade cigarettes. They looked like Wayne’s World groupies, and that dude was their favorite pronoun, noun, verb, adverb, and adjective. They gave me the universal signal for rolling down your window, which is to make a hopeful face and wave the arm in quick gyrating circles. I wasn’t sure if they wanted to offer me a hit on the home grown or if they were looking for someone with an unfake ID. As we stopped at the light and I rolled down my window, they said in scattered unison, “Dude, is that thing REAL?”

“Yeah, it’s real,” I said. “It’s a falcon.”

“Whoa! That’s … AWESOME!” And then they shook their heads and shoulders in violent agreement like the people on The Planet of the Apes. They just kept staring and saying Dude! and Awesome! as if I had a small three-headed alien from the planet Dorkton perched back there. Then the light changed and they said, “Dude, thanks for showing us the cool falcon bird dude. Have a nice day, dude!” And then they shifted through a few gears and were off.

©2008 American Falconry Magazine