A bird in the hand

Think of a bird of prey flying towards you, its exceptionally keen eyesight focused on you, taloned feet preparing to land on your raised gloved hand. How would you feel about it? Exhilarated? Terrified? Apprehensive? "I've been left holding a glove with no hand in it, when the person ran at the last moment," admits Deborah Knight, who co-runs Ireland's only school of falconry with her husband, James, in the grounds of Ashford Castle, Co Mayo.

The British-born Knights came to Ashford last October, having run their own school of falconry in Scotland for six years. They have been falconers for 10 years - what started out as an interest became so consuming that they decided to make it their livelihood. They now have 19 birds at Ashford; sparrowhawks, harris hawks, an owl, tawny eagle, buzzard and falcons.

Falconry is an ancient sport and one that is still practised in many countries, including our own. It is the art of hunting wild quarry in its natural environment, with trained birds of prey. "There is falconry in Ireland, but you don't see it," Deborah Knight explains. "It's practised at unusual hours, in rural locations, and it's all private."

It's possible to get a sense of how long falconry has been around by the way so much of its vocabulary has entered common parlance. "Larking about" takes its meaning from the tradition of female falconers flying the small merlin falcons at larks - not considered real hunting work by the predictably macho male falconers. "One fell swoop" comes from the divelike plummet of a bird descending on its prey. "Mantelpiece" has its origins in "mantling", the word that describes a bird of prey protectively hunching its wings over its food as it eats.

In a secluded and picturesque part of the Ashford estate, the Knights have set up their falconry school, which is open to the general public as well as to guests at the hotel. When Deborah Knight opens the gate into the small walled garden and converted outhouses, the sight of several birds of prey, tethered to hoops on the ground around the perimeter of the wall, does make me stare.

The eagle immediately starts up a noisy gabbling racket, flapping his wings, flexing his talons, and eyeballing us with interest. "Eagles love to talk," Knight explains with affection. I am already trying to imagine one of these large and eager-looking birds alighting on my hand. It is not easy.

There are a number of options available at the falconry school, from watching a falconry demonstration, to going hunting with a hawk. I've chosen the introductory lesson (£35), followed by a hawk walk (£60) through part of Ashford's grounds. "It's very difficult to give an example of the kind of person who enjoys falconry," Knight says. "It really does cross a range of ages and backgrounds, and children are often less nervous than adults because they have less fear and more curiosity."

Knight herself is a superb instructor. She is patient and always interesting, clearly loves her unusual profession and knows it inside out. All of their birds have been with them since birth, and while they have been trained, they are most certainly not pets. The birds tolerate the falconers, since they aid them with food sources, and while the falconers love their birds, they know that they can never expect a like response.

In one of the converted buildings, which acts as a hawk dormitory at night, Knight takes one of the harris hawks, and ties on jesses. These are the leather straps that are wrapped between thumb and fingers, which will restrain a bird on your gloved hand - provided you don't let go when they try to catch you off guard.

When the bird is put on my hand, the first surprise is how light it is, compared to its size. Their skeletons are hollow. It is, frankly, an odd, unsettling sensation to see a hawk shirring its wings so close to you, like some dark exotic flower that keeps opening and closing on your hand. However, Knight has explained it all so well that I almost stop having the old primal fear that the hawk is going to peck my eyes out if it takes the notion.

I walk around outside for a while, getting used to the sensation. The bird does try to scarper, but I don't let go, so I must be doing something right. In the small field in the woods, it's time to try letting the bird fly and return. There is a wooden perch at the end of the field. The bird will fly to this or somewhere else - wherever it wants - and then back to my glove, lured there by a small piece of meat.

Birds of prey, explains Knight, are functional flyers. They don't often fly off for what we would think of as pleasure; they nearly always fly for the function of gathering food, often low to the ground where they expend least energy.

To let the bird go, or to "cast off", you raise your arm, keeping your hand high, let the jesses go, and literally launch the bird forwards like you launched dozens of paper aeroplanes in your younger days. For most people, the big thrill is having the bird come back to you, but the sensation of a large bird taking flight from your hand is strange and marvellous, a sense of sudden lightness and absence.

A piece of food on the glove and the hawk swoops back so swiftly there is hardly time to flinch. Again, for the size of the bird, the landing is gentle and graceful. At this point, I notice some of the guests from the hotel watching open-mouthed from the adjoining laneway and realise I would have been doing the same only an hour earlier. No matter how little you think you're doing, to an observer, it does make an impressive spectacle.

When I'd become more used to the hawk returning to my hand, we went walking through the grounds. At intervals, I let the hawk off and he would fly into the distance, or into the treetops, and watch us. Hawk eyesight is legendary - they can see some eight times more clearly than we can. There's no point thinking they're flying back to your glove because they've made a connection with you - try calling the bird when there is no tiny bit of meat on the glove, and he will simply fly over and past you, to settle in some other tree until you lure him back.

By the end of the two sessions, all images of birds in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds have left my head, and I'm back somewhere medieval instead, in a wood like Ashford's, simply marvelling at the sight of a hawk in flight, and trying to remember what year, what century it is.

For information on lessons, tel: 092- 46820; e-mail falconry@eircom.net or www.irelands-falconry.co.uk