I was born in Idaho, but was whisked off to Seattle when I was two. Over the next twenty years I heard a steady drumbeat of stories about fishing and hunting in Idaho. My decision to return in the late 1970s was based in part on a desire to reclaim some of the family history I had been raised on. Of course, I came back with my own history by that time including a family, a dog and a California Red Tailed Hawk.
We didn't have much of a plan in place when we arrived in Idaho. An uncle, retired from the Air Force, was living in Glenns Ferry beside the Snake River half way between Boise and Twin Falls, so we went there first. Not long after we got to Glenns Ferry I flipped over our Econoline van into a deep ditch. Luckily no one in the van was badly hurt, but it was going to take some time to repair the vehicle. So the plan became finding a place to live in town. We found a small rental belonging to the proprietor of the general store and moved in.
Although I have spent a couple days going through boxes of photos from our years in Idaho I did not find a lot that I was expecting to find. I also had only vague memories to go along with many of the pictures I did come across. Luckily, Margaret has a high-resolution memory that stretches easily back into the '70s and '80s. For instance, I said to her that I did not recognize the white cat in this picture.
"That's Pinky", she said, "the stray that adopted us."
"Was that the one that got trapped in the storage shed?", I asked.
"No, that was our cat."
"We had a cat?"
...and so on.
I found some places in the hills near Glenns Ferry to hunt jackrabbits with my Red Tail, just as I had done in California. There were great cliffs beside the River to both east and west of town where all kinds of raptors nested including hawks, falcons and eagles. When the next nesting season arrived I decided to free the Red Tail and take a couple young falcons to train. The house in town was not very convenient as a training base, so we ultimately moved up river about five miles to a house located on an old dairy farm, now converted to raising grains. The house was surrounded by fields irrigated with ditches, and it was an easy walk to the river. I could walk out of the house, step off the porch and send up a falcon to hunt.
Raptor populations world-wide were starting to recover in the 1980s from a DDT-induced low. Falconry traditions and practitioners were vital to that recovery and a large number of the best falconers in the world lived in Idaho. At gatherings of the Idaho Falconers Association I met some of the greats who were champions of habitat restoration and captive breeding projects including Morley Nelson and Charles Schwartz. The guidance I got from them and other members of the group were key to my own achievement of becoming a competent falconer.
I also tried to pass along some of my own experience to my older daughter. We started her, as is the tradition, with a kestrel. Then she moved on to handling a tiercel (male) Prairie Falcon. I don't think I was a very good teacher, but Selena has always been an excellent student, and it seemed she gained something of value from that experience. The falcon -- we called him Mizar -- was a good flyer who mounted very high overhead and he became very expert at bagging Hungarian Partridges, Chukar and quail.
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| The Journal - Idaho Falconers Association, 1982 |
I did not do a lot of photography in Idaho. Falconry is a very demanding discipline, and along with that and making a gesture toward bringing in some income to support the family there was little time to devote to documenting my hobbies and obsessions. I worked at a variety of manual labor jobs which allowed me time for my birds. Those included working in a Grand View greenhouse, driving a cement truck, bucking hay bales , caretaking the Elmore County fairgrounds and working on commercial trout farms just downstream from Twin Falls. My birds shared their kills with us, and my rifle also brought us venison and a lot of rabbits.
Luckily, again, Margaret took on the task of making family pictures with the Pentax and she made many fine ones of our daughters and their friends. She also put the Pentax to good use while working as a reporter for the Glenns Ferry Pilot.
I do have a few more pictures of our time in Idaho and I'll share them in another installment of the story.
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