In a country where falconers think they have seen it all, two friends are lifting the veil on some of the best-kept breeding secrets.
Although the International Festival of Falconry will be a great chance for international breeders to come together in Abu Dhabi in December and share ideas, breeding is still a business.
Like all businesses, knowledge means competitive advantage, says Mohammed Al Kamda, who runs a breeding project from his house in Dubai.
Although they run separate facilities, Mr Al Kamda and his friend, American breeder Jim Robison, both hope to impress the market with their pure white gyrfalcons.
One of the key processes they both use on their falcons is imprinting – which allows them to mentally programme their falcons from the time they are born.
“Among breeders, it’s a well-kept secret,” says Mr Al Kamda, an environmental specialist at Emirates Aluminium.
Putting birds in a chamber together is unpredictable, he says. “Maybe the male won’t copulate, maybe the female won’t lay an egg. You might wait seven to eight years before you can breed. But, if you do it with the imprint method and the correct way of raising these falcons early on, you can get them to breed at two or three years old.”
Mr Al Kamda was born into falconry, a passion he inherited from his father. However, the 34-year-old has always yearned for more.
He started by studying the anatomy, biology and chemistry of birds, so he could treat his sick falcons himself. He then bought a microscope and set up a small laboratory in his house, which eventually grew.
Simultaneously, he decided to follow up his business degree by studying environmental science in the US; focusing on forest preservation, the desert, water and air pollution.
His falconry further evolved at the turn of the millennium, as he introduced more modern training methods such as using electric aeroplanes, helicopters and drones.
“To push the envelope even further, my target was to be able to breed my own falcons to become hunters,” he says.
When he was in the United States, he met Dr Charles Schwartz, who “was the first one to come to this region in 1984 and breed falcons”, says Mr Al Kamda.
Dr Schwartz was able to rise to the challenge of replicating the sunlight patterns of the falcons’ natural breeding grounds – something he passed on to his disciple, along with other tricks.
“His forward way of thinking in regards to imprint is second to nobody on the planet,” says Mr Al Kamda.
Although UAE residents today import more than 3,500 captivity-bred falcons per year, the Peregrine Fund – of which Dr Schwartz was a key member – began captive breeding of falcons in North America in the 1970s, in response to the potential extinction of peregrine falcons.
Mr Al Kamda would spend his holidays with Dr Schwartz, learning his breeding methods.
When Dr Schwartz retired for a quiet life of fishing, he introduced Mr Al Kamda to Jim Robison, a fellow breeder from the US.
“Jim is a very ambitious man because he’s been breeding birds for maybe 12 years. He wants to bring his white gyrfalcons over to the UAE, and I’m introducing people to his breeding project.”
Mr Robison’s own journey began in 1980 when he became a hawk owner for the first time. Three years later he trapped his first gyrfalcon, the largest breed of falcon.
An established hawk breeder since 2008, his GyrFarm in Illinois has one of the largest flight pens in North America.
Having been successful in the US, Mr Robison is looking to spread his wings and bring his brand of white gyrfalcons to the UAE.
Gyrfalcons come in a wide spectrum of colours, depending on where they breed. White gyrfalcons breed in Arctic and subarctic habitats, such as Alaska, Greenland and Siberia, while those found in Iceland and Denmark are very dark, and Icelandic gyrfalcons are grey.
Mr Al Kamda says: “The white ones are the most prized gyrfalcons to everyone – to Europe, to America and even in this region.
“Everyone wants a white gyrfalcon. Although, to be honest, performance-wise they do not vary.”
It is these white gyrfalcons that Mr Robison hopes to sell in the UAE, once he gains approval from the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES).
Mr Al Kamda encouraged Mr Robison to attend the Abu Dhabi International Hunting and Equestrian Exhibition last month, to show him what the country had to offer and, more importantly, show the country what Mr Robison has to offer.
Mr Robison enthuses: “This is the hub; this is the nucleus of the world – every falcon breeder in the world comes here. The States is young compared to here, very young. This is where falconry was born. It’s been going on for thousands and thousands of years.”
On top of falcon breeding, Mr Robison does have another passion to attend to. It is one he began in the 7th grade at school – wood carving. This was a talent Mr Al Kamda discovered “by accident”, but was adamant Mr Robison had to share with visitors to the exhibition.
On first glance, Jim Robison’s art appears to be taxidermy. But, upon closer inspection, it becomes apparent that his sculptures are made of wood. Even the feathers.
The white-haired Mr Robison, father of a 12-year-old son, crafts lifelike dioramas and sculptures woodfowl; snapshots of nature in action.
From a pair of common pheasants fighting, to a falcon chasing after ducks, his work captures the ferocity, grace, fear and beauty of nature.
His basic 7th grade art project slowly evolved from duck decoys to the epic diorama pieces he does today – all of which are pre-commissioned and hosted in private or corporate art collections.
“Luckily it just kicked and I found a passion,” he reflects, then laughs: “Passions turn into obsession.”
And obsessions can take up a lot of time – sometimes Mr Robison works up to 20 hours a day, though an average day is six to 10 hours.
Crafting the pieces can take up to two years. However, it is well worth the effort. Even his smallest pieces sell for hundreds of thousands of US dollars. “It is a long process, but the neat thing about it is, it’s unique: no person in the world will have another one like this.
“The actual carving process goes fairly quick, a matter of months. But when you get it down to your final size, all these feathers are done individually, and inserted, sanded, bent and burnt to give the texture of a real feather.” With so many fine details to perfect, it is crucial that Mr Robison spends a lot of time “in the field”. Knowledge, he says, is 80 per cent of his craft.
“[Nature] can be cruel; it can be brutal actually,” he says. “But, like I say, on the other side of it, you see baby ducks or baby falcons hatch – and then you see the miracle of life.”
The UAE region is home to half of the world’s falconers, and when asked why people seem captivated by the birds of prey, Mr Robison explains: “I think they’re the ultimate creature. The powers of flight. They’re always intense, they’re driven, but still they can be gentle and passionate, and playful and fierce. They can be everything, and to be able to try to capture those milliseconds – that’s the art.”
What distinguishes the white gyrfalcons that both Mr Robison and Mr Al Kamda breed is that they are are “pure” – bred from two gyrfalcon parents. “When you’re doing hybrids you can produce more white falcons but they are not pure gyrfalcons,” says Mr Al Kamda.
He says the art of falcon breeding is well documented. “But, the reason the prices of these birds are so high is because people do not talk a lot about breeding, so they keep a lot to themselves.
“It’s competition, and people are starting to breed lighter or darker birds; and some colouration you will never find in the wild.”
However even among white gyrfalcons, Mr Al Kamda’s two falcons, born in June 2013, are unique because without hoods on they display Zen-like calmness. Hunting, for them, is not so much a hunt as a strategic military operation, as they swoop in as a team, sharing the spoils with one another.
This is the result of Mr Al Kamda’s use of imprinting. “The people out in the desert, when they see two white gyrfalcons hunting together, they are just mesmerised.”
Such behaviour, he adds, is not natural – falcons are solitary predators who hunt alone and drive one another from a kill.
“But the way these two have been raised, they actually work together, and the way to accomplish this is to make the falcons know that when they hunt, the other one gets fed as well, so the robbing process is eliminated from their whole growing-up cycle.”
The birds are bred through artificial insemination, which is more labour intensive than hoping chamber birds will breed naturally, but has a higher success rate.
However, it is difficult to simulate the ideal Arctic breeding conditions in the UAE, he says. Mr Al Kamda’s trick is to extend natural sunlight using artificial light for a few hours a day.
He will soon retire his two birds for the breeding project, which he hopes will grow in the next few years and introduce “something special” into the market.
Although this would technically make him and Mr Robison competitors, they are akin to Mr Al Kamda’s two falcons – happy to share the market.
[ halbustani@thenational.ae ]
