Hawks & Houses

This week we went to The Biltmore estate and property. On the Biltmore property we went Falconing. We got to hold, feed and fly a Harris’s Hawk named Sam Adams.

We got to hold a 3 year old Barn Owl named Oskar. They also had a Peregrine Falcon named Pisgah and another Harris’s Hawk named Hoppy Boy. Hoppy Boy was bird famous for his squirrel catching; he has caught 13 squirrels 🐿.

Falconing was first invented over 6,000 years ago as a way of getting more food 🥘.
As you might imagine, people started training and using birds more and more to get food quicker and easier and soon they had a whole system in place. The king 👑 was allowed to use a rare type of Eagle 🦅, but a peasant was only allowed to use a common Kestrel. I’m guessing that a Harris’s Hawk (if they were found there) would have been on the scale of a minor noble. A Harris’s Hawks natural habitat is the American southwest.

On our tour of the Biltmore estate (it was an audio tour) we saw over 30 rooms and we didn’t see all of them! The Biltmore estate even had a indoor swimming pool and bowling 🎳 alley. Unfortunately the pool had a leak💧 and could never be filled up again. They had a Halloween 🦇 room which actually besides the paintings 🎨 on the walls had nothing to do with Halloween 👻. The beds looked small compared to the rooms even though they were king and queen sized. We listened to our tour on a weird old timey phone like thing that you had to hold up to your ear👂🏻to hear👂🏻.

All for now…