‘A strong eagle can crush the skull of a monkey with just one foot,” says Dominic King, the falconer at Tayto Park, as he introduces me to an eagle called Storm. Although she’s not yet a year old, Storm looks like a very strong eagle, and the quizzical expression on her face as she eyeballs me suggests she is considering the merits of crushing my skull with her mighty feet.
Suddenly the thick leather glove – gauntlet is probably a better word – I’m wearing on my left hand for protection seems woefully inadequate. And King hasn’t even finished with his terrifying talk.
“We can produce about 20lb of pressure in our hands as we squeeze,” he says. By contrast, an eagle can produce the same power in its feet as a Rottweiler’s jaws. Storm, with her two feet, is sitting on the power of two Rottweilers. And soon she will be sitting on me.
At a pinch, I might be able to muster 40lb of pressure with my puny human hands, while a Verreaux’s eagle such as the one staring at me has 700lb at her disposable. And, unlike me, Storm will not let go if she panics. Quite the opposite, in fact. If she takes fright she will latch on to me until the death.
My death, that is. Up against her powerful grip, serrated knife-like talons and flesh-ripping beak, I am unlikely to come out on top if we get into a fight.
King is on the same page. “My money would be on the eagle, for sure. You have to remember, that a lot of this bird’s prey – such as wolves – are very robust, so she needs to be able to take a lot of beating.
“Her weapons aren’t just her feet. She could also hit you with the points of her wings – and I can tell you from personal experience that a wing to the side of the head will quite easily daze you, if not knock you out.
“And can you see the beak, the way it is hooked? That can give you a nasty bite and has evolved to be great at tearing flesh. Storm also sees movement about three or four times faster than we do, so by the time you move your hand towards you she will have seen it and will be ready to grab it.
“And of course her eyesight is phenomenal. She can see a rabbit from two or three miles without any problem. She’s a superhero compared to us.”
All the while Storm has been perching on King’s arm. Now it is my turn.
“Feel safe and confident,” he tells me.
Confident? Right.
The first important thing is the approach. I need to hunker down. If I walk straight up to Storm then I will tower above her and she will think I am staking a claim to be the dominant one. After all I have just heard, that seems foolish. So I crouch as I come close to her.
“Imagine you are holding a glass of wine as you hold your arm out,” King says.
I wish I were holding a glass of wine.
I hold out my gloved arm as if I am raising a toast and Storm hops aboard. At almost 10lb she would be a grand weight for a newborn baby, but not so good for a turkey. She’s heavy enough for an eagle – the sixth heaviest on the planet, in fact. My arm starts to droop.
“If you drop your arm down then she will want to wander up it to get to the highest point,” King says. “Then she will be off the glove.”
I look alarmed. He calms me. “If something goes terribly wrong, the only thing you can do is relax. The more you struggle the tighter she will grip.”
Brilliant.
But actually, it is brilliant. Storm is brilliant and the experience of being up so close and personal with a superhero bird is special. So special, in fact, that I don’t even mind that munch when she pecks at my skin.
“She’s not biting you, she’s just curious and she’s checking to see if there’s any food on you.”
There isn’t, so she stops pecking and goes back to staring at me. It is like she is looking into my soul.
All around us in the compound are other birds of prey, including owls, falcons and hawks. They are all magnificent. And King’s knowledge of them is encyclopaedic, and he effortlessly teaches me about his world.
I learn that owls are not wise. “That is a lie,” he says. “ Their brain is smaller than their eye. That takes up three-quarters of the space in the head, so there isn’t much room for a brain. I wouldn’t necessarily call them stupid, because they have their moments of brilliance, but they can just be a little bit slow.”
I also learn about some of the words that the world of falconry has gifted the English language. When a bird of prey is feasting on a kill, it shields it from the view of rival predators with its wings in an action called mantling. It is, apparently, where the world mantelpiece comes from.
In medieval times, the man who ferried hunting birds from A to B was called the cadge man, which is why we cadge a lift. The cadge man used to ferry the birds in a cab, which is why we still catch a cab. Even our habit of going to a boozer comes from medieval falconry.
There are nine types of birds of prey at Tayto Park. Some are rare. They are all beautiful. There is a Steller’s sea eagle, the largest and heaviest sea eagle on the planet. It has the biggest wingspan of all the eagles, and the only place you will get to see one on this island is at Tayto Park.
Over the course of the winter, King will oversee the building a full-size flying area and continue to train the birds so that they can be used to delight and inform visitors to the park.
“People like to be entertained, but I think there is more to it. It is almost impossible to see a bird of prey up close in the wild, and when they are in zoos they are in pens. This way people can learn more about them while getting closer to them, and then there are the conservation reasons, too.”
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But why don't they fly away? Or spend their days swooping over people on the terrifyingly brilliant wooden rollercoaster nearby? Mostly it is because they are lazy and know where their next meal is coming from.
“Food is the primary reason they don’t fly away,” King says. “If they fly away, we have food and we can call them back to the glove. There are occasions when they will fly off, but only if they are too fat and not really interested in the food. Or it may be something spooked them or maybe a really big gust of wind they weren’t able to handle took them away.
“But 90 per cent of the time they stay close. They don’t want to just fly for no reason, because then they waste energy, and the more energy they waste the more food they have to find, and in the wild the best reaction to that is to do nothing.”
Fair enough. Plenty of humans think the same way.
