Birds – Stephen Bodio

–Two of the better known eagle falconers are coming to visit Casa Q next month. Lauren McGough, newly minted PHD anthropologist, is a long time protegee who first came here and on to Mongolia when she was sixteen. Novelist Rebecca O’Connor, who hails from California is also a longtime honorary Magdalenean. I’m trying to get her to publish a book somewhere other than Kindle (her wonderful memoir, Lift, is available in paperback if you can find it).

Curiously, both women are flying African eagles at the moment. Lauren has a huge female Crowned, which will take any quarry including small human beings. Rebecca’s is the exotic African hawk eagle, built like a big Sparrow hawk, long and slender. It is the same species as the European Bonelli’s though it looks different. They’re rumored to be hard to train, but are wonderful once they are. Rhodesian regiments in the Zimbabwe brush wars used to use them to hawk springhares at night from their half-tracks.

We’re going to have some fun. Coyotes and jackrabbits are nervous, and cowboys are excited.

A young Lauren with the late Aralbai

She became the Mother of Dragons…

Rebecca’s story is rather different. She is a biologist, and has worked for zoos and for Ducks Unlimited, usually in her native California, and for years seemed to specialize in flying native Peregrines at ducks. During this time she also wrote a parrot training manual, two novels and a memoir, Lift, which is included in my Sportsman’s Library, about the hundred best hunting and fishing books.