This opportunity to comment…

This opportunity to comment on the above noted reference is most appreciated.

The Archives of Falconry was established in 1986 as a part of The Peregrine Fund which, as you are certainly aware, played a significant role in the restoration of populations of the then-endangered Peregrine Falcon in the latter half of the 1900s. When established, The Archives of Falconry was the first organization in the world devoted to the collection and preservation of the physical evidence of the practice of the sport of falconry. Since its establishment The Archives has achieved worldwide recognition, substantially supported materially and financially by thousands of falconers from all the globe's continents save Antarctica. The Archives is now housed in a multi-million-dollar facility of its own construction, located at The Peregrine Fund's World Center for Birds of Prey in Boise, Idaho, U.S.A.

We have had the opportunity to review the comments on the referenced proposal as submitted to your office by the North American Falconers' Association. We concur whole heartedly with those comments and, particularly, urge to your attention to their reference to the substantial, scientifically based, peer-reviewed paper on the impact of wild take of raptors as written by the former head of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service's Office of Migratory Bird Management (Millsap & Allen, 2006).

Additionally, in a more historic connotation, the following would seem particularly apt in this instance. Aldo Leopold, the greatly respected Guru of the American conservation awakening in the 1960s, wrote in his essay On Man's Leisure Time:

"The most glorious hobby I know of today is the revival of falconry. It has few
addicts in America, and perhaps a dozen in England – a minority indeed. For two and a
half cents one can buy and shoot a cartridge that will kill the heron whose capture by
hawking requires months or years of laborious training of both the hawk and the
hawker. The cartridge, as a lethal agent, is a perfect product of industrial chemistry.
One can write a formula for its lethal reaction. The hawk, as a lethal agent, is the
perfect flower of that still utterly mysterious alchemy – evolution. No living man can, or
possibly ever will, understand the instinct of predation that we share with our raptorial
servant. No man-made machine can, or ever will, synthesize that perfect coordination of
eye, muscle, and pinion as he stoops to his kill. The heron, if bagged, is inedible and
hence useless (although the old falconers seem to have eaten him, just as a Boy Scout
smokes and eats a flea-bitten summer cottontail that has fallen victim to his sling, club,
or bow). Moreover the hawk, at the slightest error in technique of handling, may 'go
tame' like Homo sapiens or fly away into the blue. All in all, falconry is the perfect
hobby.

Falconry as Leopold knew it predated falconers' captive breeding efforts, i.e. what he described was all with wild-taken raptors. More recently, falconry has received UNESCO recognition as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. That heritage was similarly all based on falconry practiced with wild-taken raptors, then as now an integral part of the sport's practice.

We trust that the above may assist in determining more realistic wild-take regulations there in Ontario. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Respectfully submitted,