Peregrine spring A master falconer's extraordinary life with birds of prey

Review by Booklist Review

The ancient art of falconry requires a highly trained partnership between human and raptor. Even a captive-bred hawk or falcon is not a domestic animal, and learning to trust and work with the falconer requires a delicate balance of instinct and training. Master falconer Cowan introduces us to this arcane world in a series of vignettes featuring different members of her raptor family (and, occasionally, her husband and dogs). She acquired a passion for falconry from her husband, and the first bird she worked with was his red-tailed hawk. She moved on to her own Harris's hawk, peregrine falcons, and gyrfalcons, along with her husband's goshawks. Each species, not to mention each individual, has a different personality, and tales of Tabasco, N-Z, Mosby, Injun and K.C. demonstrate fully that hawks and falcons are not machines and that falconry is as much an art as it is a science. The bond between person and raptor is one most readers will never experience, but Cowan's memoir, like Helen Macdonald's award-winning H Is for Hawk (2015), offers a marvelous glimpse of it.--Bent, Nancy Copyright 2016 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Wildlife rehabilitator and master falconer Cowan chronicles 30 years immersed in the sport of falconry, conveying the challenges, triumphs, and occasional heartbreaks of an activity requiring hard-won skill and a willingness to see nature from a different perspective. The author certainly educates, providing minute detail that will be fascinating to fellow falconers. Others may be less enthused, however: for all their nuances, Cowan's accounts of her relationships with various hawks and falcons begin to get repetitious after a time. Raptors in the wild are beautiful and inspiring. In captivity, these creatures are more, and less. Rescuing abandoned raptors and rehabilitating injured ones is admirable and may, as Cowan asserts, benefit wild populations. Helping others appreciate the behaviors and ecological niches of these predators also may help ensure their survival. But the sport of falconry is primarily a sport for human diversion. This does not make it wrong, but it does cast some of the author's "romantic" notions, anthropomorphisms, and questionable assertions in a more realistic light. Still, Cowan does explode myths about the benign existence of the wild and shows how the reintroduction of rehabbed raptors to freedom may do more to imperil than save them. The author and her falconer husband's dedication to the varying species and to training and teaching is undeniably impressive. Yet the narrative is filled with eye-rolling passagese.g., "we often function in complete unity; my mind is her mind, her body is my body. The bond between us is mystical." Working with raptors may make a wider world visible to humans, yet the author so inundates us with terms (a glossary would have been useful) that the text sometimes feels more confusing than clear. Falconry sets Cowan's heart free to fly, but many readers may feel moored to the perch. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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