On the Sunday after Christmas, two falconers I know well lead me onto a dirt road on the edge of Rutland, Vermont, through a large parking lot ringed with mountains of dirty snow and past a vast solar-panel field. We park our cars and get out into the frosty morning, all gray sky and patchy clouds with sunlight glistening through. A highway roars in the distance, and high wires lace a series of fields together. A flock of pigeons taunts us through the silver morning light, shimmering back and forth in synchronized flight, settling on the high wires, then settling down in the field and disappearing. This stretch of no-man’s-land barely passes for nature if you’re a stickler for ecotypes and native plants, but this is the most exciting adventure I’ve had in months. And they haven’t even taken the bird out yet.

We’re here to hunt rabbits. Or rather, we’re here to scare the rabbits out of hiding so that Zooey Zullo’s red-tailed hawk, Addison, can catch them. In the darkest time of year, in one of the darkest years we’ve known, this is something I can do with other people—scramble through brush seeking out rabbits, many feet apart from others. 

I met Zooey, 66, during her first year as a falconer in 2018, introduced by another falconer I knew. I was curious to see a novice bird and falconer learn together, and Zooey welcomed me in. Jessica Snyder, 33, (pictured, right, in rabbit territory) was her falconry sponsor, functioning as a hawking mentor. The women are polar opposites—Jess is a straight-laced science educator with an encyclopedic knowledge of birds and natural history, a true savant when it comes to understanding bird behavior. She’s built her life around falconry, having moved to Vermont to take a position with New England Falconry doing demonstrations with a collection of raptors. Zooey, who still sees herself as a beginner, spent 11 years as the director of Dartmouth College’s Elementary Teacher Education Program. She has traveled to the foothills of the Himalayas as the first pedagogy instructor for Teach for China, co-established a women’s cooperative in the Dominican Republic, and observed jaguars in Belize and beluga whales in the Canadian Arctic. But it’s falconry, she says, a sport that barely requires her to leave her neighborhood, that humbles her like nothing else. To Zooey, to be a falconer is to see like a bird. She doesn’t feel like she’s good at it yet, but her fascination overrides this anxiety; nearly every time her bird flies from a tree directly to her glove she says, “Look at that! Just look at that! It never ceases to amaze me.” 

Falconry, by definition, is the pursuit of game with a trained bird of prey. You can hunt with almost any kind of raptor—from the quintessential peregrine falcon with its dramatic stoops from great heights to the diminutive merlin—but most falconers I’ve known hunt with red-tailed hawks, as they are our most ubiquitous raptors. Most trap their birds from the wild, a first-year bird (because that’s when they are impressionable enough to be trapped and trained), and release their bird again come spring. It’s like borrowing the bird for a season. Or two, as Zooey is doing with Addison, whom she’ll release come March. When I first learned about the trapping of wild birds, it seemed wrong since there’s no real purpose to falconry besides fascination, but I reconsidered when I learned that 80 percent of  first-year red-tailed hawks don’t survive their first winter in the wild. When it comes to young birds, death outperforms survival. If anything, falconers seem to give birds a boost, feeding and helping them along during their most vulnerable time in life, and sending them off in spring with a better chance of survival—though, statistically speaking, falconers are considered to have “no impact” on wild populations. 

I’ve been following falconers for years, usually in the name of writing. But over time, my reasons for tagging along have become less journalistic and more personal. It’s not so much a story I’m trying to tell but an experience I want to have: the feeling of time dropping away as I become enveloped by the landscape, by the rhythm of the hunt, by the movements of a bird. The reason I come back to the sport again and again is to try to understand this odd privilege that falconry affords—to me, it’s unlike any other experience with wildlife. 

It’s Zooey’s third season as a falconer—her first as a general falconer, no longer an apprentice—but the awe is still there. I see it in her every movement, as she takes Addison from her box—her portable hood, it’s called—in the back of the car and situates the bird on her glove. Addison is regal. Her head is a pincushion of feathers, all raised slightly. Her breast is off-white with a ring of brown splotches, her back brown, her tail—since she is a second-year bird and Zooey has kept her through her first molt—the quintessential brownish-red that gives the species its name. Addison cranes her head around, seemingly calm, taking in the landscape, the light, the pigeons, me, all of it.

We head away from the highway, the agricultural fields and solar panels, and toward a swamp leading into a forest. Zooey tosses Addison up into the air, and Addison slowly, almost clumsily, takes flight, landing in a nearby maple. We walk into a sea of cattails and red osier dogwood and goldenrod, the crusted brown seed heads exploding into dust as we move through it. A light crust of snow covers the ground. We crack into the ice of a swamp, moving quickly so as not to get trapped by sucking mud. Occasionally, we hear popping noises from the swamp, which we at first think is an animal. I feel a small thrill at the possibility. But Jess tilts her head and listens: “That’s just ice melting and falling.”

Addison follows, but it often feels she is too far away. We cross a field, and she waits until we’re waist-deep in cattails before swooping low across the field and finding a nearby perch. Her being farther away means there’s less of an opportunity to see and hunt a rabbit, were we to flush one from the brush.

But she is alert, following, and for this alone Zooey is pleased. 

*

“Falconers don’t get the winter blues,” Jess told me once. We’d been hunting by a river on the Vermont–New Hampshire border. Down by the water’s edge, Jess pointed out bobcat tracks crusted in the snow. Another time, she pointed out the imprint of a deer’s body, reading where its legs had been, the direction it had been facing. Winter, she said, is when the natural world comes alive, the snow helping us read animals’ movements, the bare trees helping us see the game. “This is our time,” she said. 

In early December, I’d gone hunting for squirrels with Zooey and Addison in an old Victorian cemetery in Rutland. Zooey admitted she did not love being in the cold, but she loved the “mystery of tracking,” the process of trying to understand, of looking for rabbit signs, of asking, “what’s going on here, what happened, when did these come by?” Falconry gets you outside and watching, she said. You have to look up, not down. And you have to think like a bird—or try to. 

Because Vermont is not a game-rich state, hunting is hard here. Forests are predominantly maple, not particularly rich with mast, and 2020 was especially quiet. Predator numbers seem up too, there being signs of bobcat kills in nearly every rabbit territory she and Jess have hunted. It made her outings feel more intentional, her goal of getting game in front of her bird more imperative—especially if she were to be releasing a bird in the spring, giving it ample opportunity to practice going after game. That day, she explained how falconry had taught her just how difficult it is for animals in the wild to actually catch prey. She’d read somewhere that a young barred owl might make 40 attempts before being successful. I’d watched hawks go after prey—it’s called a “slip” in falconry—many times when out hunting, and it was clear how much energy it took out of the bird, how the bird always needed to sit, dazed, and come-to for a moment before “laddering up” the branches and preparing to hunt again. Whether they caught the game or not (and mostly, they didn’t) the same amount of energy was required. Oddly, this fact brings Zooey a great deal of solace: “It just gives me peace. Peace to see that life is carrying on.” Or trying to. 

When COVID-19 first paused life as we knew it in March, part of me welcomed the opportunity to take in the slow greening of our yard, of swollen acorns cracking and shooting out tentacle-like roots, of the gradual shading out of the forests, the world warming with birdsong. But when case numbers shot up again in November as the darkest days of the year were looming in New England, I needed something that would pull me out of my torpor, out of my benumbed winter blueshood. I needed … not exactly distraction but to fall in love with the world around me, as it was, in its least revered season: stark, leafless, brown, desiccated, steely, dark, and cold. The people I knew who did this best were the falconers. I needed to get lost in a small patch of land, to let the hours drift by without my notice, to let my mind empty of anxieties. I needed to remember that suffering and struggle are universal. Falconry didn’t negate the burdens and woes dumped on us by 2020, but it helped me tap into something larger than my own struggle. 

At the same time, hawking helped me to forget for a while. It provided purpose when I was in desperate need of it, structure when days staggered along, melding into one another, an opportunity to be mesmerized by a simple action—a hawk slipping after prey—when opportunities for awe are few and far between. And if the bird didn’t slip, there was the privilege of just getting to watch it, to see Addison’s sleek feathers and mottled markings up close. To think that she once hatched from an egg in some great nest, and one day, shortly after she’d trapped her, Zooey tossed Addison up in the air to fly free, of her own accord, and the bird didn’t choose to fly away, back into the wilderness—she decided to stay. 

All winter, the anxiety had been closing around my throat, but out here, in what I once might have considered a hell-hole of a property, I begin to remember that I am not separate from the natural world. That the hawks, by the very nature of how they hunt on these desolate outskirts of our activity, in our farm fields, on the edges of our shopping malls, in the medians of our highways—are inextricably linked with humans, whether we trap them or not. Whether we even notice them or not. 

*

We emerge from the sucking ground and sea of cattails into a lovely forest of birch trees and red osier dogwood. We see a structure, a dome-shaped house made of tarps, and I can see now that we’re near some kind of warehouse, on the forested edges just beyond the ring of a sprawling mall off Route 7 in downtown Rutland. We see the signs of bobcat, their soft, round tracks where they padded through the snow 12 or 24 hours before us, hunting for the same animals. Rabbit signs are everywhere. Their little prints, the soft round pellets in the nooks and crannies of the frost-heaved ground, in and around the thorn-engulfed piles of rusted metal. At one point, Jess looks around and states, in a science-educator voice: “This is what I would call an industrial wasteland,” as if she’s identifying an ecosystem. And in some ways, she is: The ideal falconry terrain, at least in the Northeast, is about where human and nature push up against each other, where they bleed over into one another’s territories; I’ve seen more moldering car seats out in the woods while hawking than I have wildlife, more rust and crumbling concrete. But that’s where the rabbits like it, in these places where it always seems I’m crossing a boundary, like I don’t quite belong yet feel compelled to go deeper. It’s fascinating and terrifying all at once. 

When I first started hunting with Zooey, she couldn’t take three steps without wondering where her bird was, but now she is relaxed. She trusts. Trusts so much that at one point she loses track of Addison and we later realize the hawk has found a dead, mangled rabbit on a set of nearby railroad tracks—she’s eating carrion, not something a falconer wants. Zooey regains her bird, but I see in her a relaxedness, an understanding of herself as a falconer, of her bird as a bird. She takes Addison on her fist as we walk back through the cattails and into the woods again. Once we’re through the cattail sea we take a little break, and Zooey stands, Addison still on her glove, talking about this season. It’s been a hard year for her, regardless of COVID. Along with her professional accomplishments, Zooey has had physical ones: At age 57, she set records in power-lifting. She’s survived acute viral attacks that mimic lymphoma. But in all of her discussions about falconry, her age, the very nature of how much her body can tolerate, consumes her. This season it’s been her knee, then a problem with her eyes. She laments that her senses aren’t sharp enough to hear the distant jingle of the bells on her bird, to see her perched figure in a faraway tree. “Don’t wait,” she says to me. “If you want to be a falconer, “then my biggest piece of advice is do it now, while your body is still capable.” 

We step our way around a mass of rusted machinery. 

She tosses Addison (pictured, right) back up. We’re far enough away now; she won’t return to the carrion on the railroad tracks. We cut a wide berth around the other side of the tarp house and come to a small opening in the woods. I’m surprised to find some overgrown arbor vitae trees and a row of trees that I can’t identify, tall, gnarled with burls, all in a line, a sign that this no-man’s-land was once landscaped. Someone’s land.

That day in early December when we hunted in the Rutland cemetery, Zooey, trying to articulate the experience of being out with her hawk, had noted how falconry forced her to notice the natural world beyond the bird and the hunt. She described a moment of noticing a tree that had grown over a river, all of its branches on one side leaning out, away from the shade of the other trees. “What it is is adjusted because it couldn’t grow left, so it grew right.” She found a certain kind of solace in witnessing the atypical in nature. “When I saw that tree bending over the river, I thought it was exquisite. I mean, how does it maintain its center? That’s what I wanted to know.” It feels to me a perfect way to envision what this year has done to all of us—our centers have been challenged. It’s been a hard winter for humans, but every winter is hard for a bird of prey, every season a lesson in how to adjust.

We’re coming back to the field. Jess points out a line of possum tracks, the funny little thumbs. We stumble over a desiccated black bear’s head that a hunter of another sort discarded here. Zooey stands on the head to keep Addison from trying to land on it. We come out through the cattails, find the hunter’s mangled camping chair, a hunting stand. “Ooh,” Zooey says. “I think I just won a door prize.” But the chair is too far gone. A resident red-tailed hawk sees Addison and circles overhead, screeching territorially. I’ve almost forgotten that we’re looking for rabbits. We finally emerge from the woods and out into the open field again. Addison is there, right behind us, bells jingling lightly as she alights from the branch she’s on and swoops low over the field, talons tucked up tight against her belly.