Birds of prey have been working at the side of humans for millennia and into the 21st-century travel space, their keen eyes helping secure skies, patios and pools, and keeping ancient cultures thriving around the world. Claudia Laroye finds out more.
It’s the man with the bird who catches my eye. Peering out from my oceanside cabana while sipping a tropical drink festooned with a miniature pink umbrella, I spot him strolling the pool deck of the hotel. He stands in sharp contrast to the dozens of hotel guests lounging poolside, supine under the bright Mexican sunshine.
A large bird of prey is perched on his forearm, protected by a thick leather glove, yellow talons curling over the man’s covered fingers. Francisco Javier Cisneros Novoa (“Just call me Paco”) introduces me to his companion, Itzae, a lanky brown Harris’s hawk, known in Latin America as a peuco.
Novoa has been Itzae’s handler for the past three years. He walks the grounds of the Marriott Puerto Vallarta Resort & Spa with the sharp-eyed seven-year-old female hawk six days a week as part of the hotel’s bird abatement program.
Itzae spends about four hours a day in the air and “keeps the grackles away from the pool deck and restaurants,” says Novoa. The smart and gregarious blackbirds have a canny way of finding diners’ plates of fish tacos and French fries and can be an aggressive nuisance in search of their next meal.
This successful and non-lethal effort to help control the overpopulation—and opportunistic freeloading—of grackles and pigeons has been operating on the property for six years. Itzae and Novoa may look like an odd couple, but theirs is just one of many organizations in the tourism and travel industries using predator power to manage wildlife for human benefit.
Whether perched on the arm of the eagle hunters of Mongolia, working at a family-friendly resort on Mexico’s Pacific coast, in Arizona’s Sonoran desert, or as part of wildlife management programs at airports around the world, our feathered friends help keep skies safe and patios and pool sides pest-free, even if we’re unaware of it.
While the act of viewing birds, aka birding and birdwatching, is a thriving sector unto itself, employing avian assistants in human endeavors is less well known. But it is nothing new; in fact, the roots of this collaboration are ancient.
The nomadic Kazakh people in Mongolia have been working with raptors to find food in their mountainous high desert homeland for centuries. The unique form of ‘interspecies collaboration’ with golden eagles was adopted in the 12th century, from the time of Kublai Khan (who is reported to have gone hunting with thousands of birds and falconers), in the Altai Mountains. Venetian merchant Marco Polo wrote about the eagle hunters during his time at Khan’s court.
Many of the world’s airports are located along traditional migratory flyways, which presents a unique and hazardous challenge to the safety of the aviation and travel sectors. Ever since aircraft and birds have shared the skies, there have been bird strikes
Burkitshi, or eagle hunters, use golden eagles to capture prey and provide food and fur during the harsh winter season. Burkitshi train their avian assistants from an early age, capturing them as eaglets (around four years old) from nests in the ‘crags’ of mountain peaks—easily done with so few trees—and raising and training them to hunt game, such as rabbits, foxes, and hares. The eagles live with their trainer for nearly a decade, after which they’re released back into the wild.
While men and women do not need to hunt to survive in Mongolia now, the traditional cultural practice of hunting with eagles remains alive and is celebrated during annual Golden Eagle Festivals which showcase displays of hunting prowess, pageantry and horsemanship in a colorful carnival-esque atmosphere. These events are extremely popular with travelers, and a major factor in Mongolia’s tourism economy.
Safeguarding the guests, properties and patios of Arizona and California’s valuable tourism sector has been part of Vahé Alaverdian’s life’s work for 16 years. The founder of US-based Falcon Force, Alaverdian and his team of falconers—equipped with an avian ‘staff’ of Gyrs, Harris’s hawks and Peregrine falcons—work on a daily basis to manage nuisance birds and animals at hotels, resort properties and vineyards in 11 states.
Matching the right raptor with the right prey is important. “In resort-type settings, primarily we use Harris’s hawk,” says Alaverdian, to counter grackles and swallows swooping tables and patios. For larger birds like seagulls on the California coast, a large Peregrine falcon is the predator of choice.
In addition to being effective wildlife managers, raptors are popular with guests; they’re almost natural ambassadors for the resorts where they work. “At the JW Marriott Scottsdale Camelback Inn Resort & Spa, the staff and the guests know the names of the birds better than they know the names of the handlers,” says Erik Nygren, the hotel’s director of food & beverage.
Alaverdian tells me that his company practices sustainable pest management: “It’s the most eco-friendly solution,” he says as the program avoids any kind of poisoning, killing or trapping of other birds. His abatement team uses a ‘predator-prey relationship’ in the wildlife management program, where trained raptors will fly in the targeted area to haze and keep other wildlife at bay. All of Falcon Force’s raptors are captive bred by law.
“Not only do the falcons keep the peskier birds away, they also love to meet our guests and take pictures with them,” adds Nygren of the Camelback Inn. “We have return guests who can’t wait to see their favorite feathered friend again.”
Many of the world’s airports are located along traditional migratory flyways, which presents a unique and hazardous challenge to the safety of the aviation and travel sectors.
Ever since aircraft and birds have shared the skies, there have been bird strikes. The first one reportedly dates to Orville Wright in 1905, while the most famous is likely the 2009 US Airways Flight 1549 that resulted in an emergency water landing (and zero human fatalities) on the Hudson River in New York City.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) reports that 53 percent of the 225,000 wildlife strikes with civil aircrafts in the United States between 1990 and 2019 took place between July and October, aligning with fall migration patterns and young birds fledging from their nests.
The goal of all airports is to operate safely and as such, wildlife management programs strive to reduce the risk of bird strikes on the ground and in the air. This requires in-depth analysis of wildlife populations on a seasonal basis in addition to evaluating aircraft risks based on types, frequency of movement and flight paths.
Pairing the right raptor to the right prey is key to the success of airport wildlife management programs. According to Transport Canada, seagulls are the number one nuisance birds at Canadian airports, requiring the use of large raptors like female peregrine falcons or Harris’s hawks to mitigate their threat.
With 280,000 movements a year operating on three runways, Vancouver International Airport (YVR) is Canada’s second busiest airport after Toronto Pearson Airport (YYZ). YVR’s on-site active wildlife management operates 24-7 and includes the dispersal of more than one million birds every year by way of various abatement methods, including falconry, dogs, boats and hovercraft.
“YVR Airport has the largest integrated wildlife program in North America, probably one of the biggest in the world,” says Sean Baynton, Wildlife Management Program Coordinator at The Raptors, a wildlife management company based in Duncan on Vancouver Island.
The airport’s location is a big reason why its abatement and habitat control programs are as robust as they are. YVR is located on Sea Island in the mouth of the Fraser River, one of the largest estuaries on the west coast of North America. The foreshores, marshes and upland agricultural habitats of the Fraser delta are part of a major Pacific Flyway.
The region is an important staging and wintering area for millions of migratory and non-migratory birds, including snow geese, bald eagles, great blue herons and barn swallows. If one were planning to site a new airport today, Sea Island would not be an ideal choice. As a result, as part of its long-standing wildlife management program, YVR Airport has employed a falconry program and used 8-10 trained raptors including a bald eagle, Harris’ hawks and peregrine falcons to keep other birds away from the airfield.
Pairing the right raptor to the right prey is key to the success of airport wildlife management programs. According to Transport Canada, seagulls are the number one nuisance birds at Canadian airports, requiring the use of large raptors like female peregrine falcons or Harris’s hawks to mitigate their threat.
“We had a team of eight to 10 birds, out there eight hours a day,” says Baynton recalling his eight years as a falconer patrolling YVR Airport, he estimated successfully deploying birds at least “10,000 times without incident.”
Canada’s busiest airport, Toronto Pearson International, counts more than 400,000 annual movements operating on five runways. Pietra Sjoen of Falcon Enviromental has been a site manager at Toronto Pearson International Airport for 25 years, managing a team of 20 wildlife control officers who work on a variety of management strategies. The company also operates at a dozen other major Canadian civilian and military airports.
“We have about 28 birds of prey on site; Harris’s hawks, falcons and a bald eagle,” Sjoen tells me. The birds of prey are flown regularly from an hour before dawn to an hour after sundown, employed proactively based on season and local conditions and reactively to wildlife sightings of seagulls, swallows and Canada geese.
Pearson Airport occupies more than 4,600 acres of land that includes swathes of grassy areas and the Etobicoke Creek waterway. The site is an attractive landscape for varied bird and animal species, depending on the seasons and migration patterns: In 2023, the company managed 400,000 individual wildlife, from birds to large mammals.
In addition to the hurdles posed by flora and fauna, climate change’s influence on seasonal weather patterns is altering wildlife behaviour near the airport, presenting new challenges to abatement protocols.
“This year we had a (unusually) wet summer with some significant rainfall here at Pearson,” recalls Sjoen. “With rainfall, we have water retention, which in turn means a lot of seagull activity, a lot of waterfowl activity.”
The ‘known unknown’ impacts of climate change mean that airport wildlife management programs will need to remain focused on robust abatement practices where avian assistants will continue to have an important role to play.
Our fine feathered friends have been ruling the skies for 65 million years. And even today, the 21st century aviation and tourism sectors are tapping into the power of predators in managing wildlife for human benefit and safety in an important relationship where the bird is the word in interspecies collaboration.
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Claudia Laroye is an award-winning freelance writer, author and content creator living in Vancouver, British Columbia. She writes about adventure, family, wellness and sustainable travel for publications including the Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, AFAR, TIME magazine, Air Canada enRoute, Lonely Planet, Saturday Evening Post, Canadian Traveller, and the Vacay Canada network. Her travel anthology, 'A Gelato a Day’ was published in fall 2022.
