jojo
01-22-2007, 08:28 PM
As she wandered back to her booth with a strawberry smoothie, all eyes were on Heather Gast. Folks with quizzical looks on their faces stopped her to ask about one of two things — the tiny puppy under her right arm, or the hawk clinging to her left hand.
At a gathering of thousands of pheasant hunters in Des Moines, Gast, a licensed falconer from Brook Park, Minn., is something of an oddity. She hunts rabbits, not pheasants, and her weapon of choice is animal ingenuity.
Gast has one red-tailed hawk and two Harris’s hawks, a species native to southwestern states. The birds hunt alongside her wire-haired dachshunds, an unusual arrangement given that the Harris’s hawk’s only natural predators are coyotes. The dogs flush out rabbits and the hawks swoop in to catch them.
“The birds eventually learn to stay with the dogs,” Gast said.
Finding new ways to cook game is less of a concern for Gast than for other hunters.
“It’s not a sport you do to put food in the freezer,” she said. “We might hunt all day and come back with one rabbit.”
linky (http://www.desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070122/SPORTS10/70122031)
At a gathering of thousands of pheasant hunters in Des Moines, Gast, a licensed falconer from Brook Park, Minn., is something of an oddity. She hunts rabbits, not pheasants, and her weapon of choice is animal ingenuity.
Gast has one red-tailed hawk and two Harris’s hawks, a species native to southwestern states. The birds hunt alongside her wire-haired dachshunds, an unusual arrangement given that the Harris’s hawk’s only natural predators are coyotes. The dogs flush out rabbits and the hawks swoop in to catch them.
“The birds eventually learn to stay with the dogs,” Gast said.
Finding new ways to cook game is less of a concern for Gast than for other hunters.
“It’s not a sport you do to put food in the freezer,” she said. “We might hunt all day and come back with one rabbit.”
linky (http://www.desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070122/SPORTS10/70122031)