The Week in Falconry: paperwork, a last flight, and a very expensive gyr
Fish and Wildlife is rewriting the 3-186A and wants to hear from us before October 13. ZooAmerica flies its falconry program for the last time on Monday. And a two-kilo gyr went for Dh255,000 in Abu Dhabi.
The Fish and Wildlife Service wants to hear about the 3-186A. Not filed in triplicate inside ten days, the way they usually want to hear about it. Actually hear about it, in writing, until October 13.
Two other things this week, one of them sad.
The forms are finally on the table
August 13, 2026 — USFWS Federal Register
You know this form whether or not the number comes to mind. It follows a bird in and it follows a bird out, ten days either direction, and if you have transferred a hawk you have filled one in with the truck still ticking in the driveway.
On August 13 the Service asked OMB to reorganize the whole migratory-bird permit filing apparatus. Two existing collections revised, two created, four control numbers folded together. Out of that shuffle falconry comes away with something it has never had: a collection of its own, titled "Falconry Standards and Permitting," with the 3-186A moved underneath it. The filing proposes simplifying that form and discontinuing six other report forms outright.
It also counts us. By the Service's own estimate the falconry collection covers 9,443 respondents filing 23,123 responses a year, at 167,665 burden hours.
Divide that out. Eighteen hours a year, per falconer, on paperwork.
Whatever those eighteen hours are measuring, it is not a general-class falconer at the kitchen table with a pen and a band number. Either the estimate is generous in a way that flatters a future "we reduced burden" press release, or it is counting something we are not seeing. Both are worth a comment. So is the question of whether six retired forms means six retired obligations, or the same obligations wearing the surviving forms' clothes.
Comment periods on eagle-take paperwork come around every few years and falconry is usually a parenthesis inside them. This one is not a parenthesis. It is the forms, ours, by name, and the window closes October 13. If the split between federal and state permits is still fuzzy for you, we mapped it here.
Eighteen years, and then Monday
August 2026 — local21news.com, also covered by ABC27
ZooAmerica, in Hershey, ends its Falconry Experience on August 31. That is Monday. Master falconer Jack Hubley ran the program for eighteen years and puts the number of people who came through it at close to seventeen thousand.
The stated reason, per the park's parent company: traditional falconry and husbandry techniques are "no longer in keeping with modern zoo standards."
I have read that line several times now and it still lands wrong. Falconry husbandry is not casual or unexamined. It is the most heavily inspected bird-keeping most people will ever encounter, and the reporting obligation described three paragraphs up is a piece of it. A federal permit, a state permit, a facility inspection, and a legal duty to account for every bird that changes hands. Whatever standard is being invoked here, "modern" is doing work that "different" would do more honestly.
Zoos answer to accreditation bodies and I am not going to referee that from here. The part I will not be talked out of is what closes on Monday. Programs like this one are where most people in this country stand within arm's reach of a working raptor for the first and only time in their lives. Seventeen thousand of them, in one county, over eighteen years. That is a lot of first impressions of the craft, and there is now one fewer place making them. The case for how falconers keep their birds is a strong case. It is also one that has always traveled best in person, at the glove, in front of somebody who came in skeptical.
Dh255,000 for two kilos of gyrfalcon
August 23, 2026 — The National
Sunday, at the Abu Dhabi National Exhibition Centre, Bahraini falconer Salman Albalooshi took lot 3219 for Dh255,000, roughly $69,500. A locally bred pure gyr, over two kilograms. The selection committee had worked dozens of candidates down to about seven before anyone raised a paddle, with online bidders running against the room. This is the warm-up. ADIHEX itself opens August 28, and the auctions have gone far higher in other years, past a million dirhams in 2022.
Two kilos of gyrfalcon. It is worth sitting with the distance between that sale and the rest of the craft, because both ends are falconry and neither is pretending otherwise. A few weeks from now a fair number of us will drive out before dawn with a bal-chatri and a pigeon we have grown fond of, and take a passage red-tail out of a fence line for the cost of the gas. She will not weigh two kilograms. She will not have a lot number. She will, if we do our part, put rabbits in the bag by November, and nobody flying one has ever felt undergunned. The gyr is its own argument, and it is a good one. It is just not the only one.
The molt is winding down. Passage season is weeks out, not months, and the birds are already moving somewhere north of you. Vendor sign-up is open for this year's NAFA field meet in Des Moines, with the details on NAFA's site. Stock the freezer before you need it rather than after, which is a whole subject of its own. And if this will be your first trapping season, the part nobody warns you about is not the trap, it is the first seventy-two hours after.
Get the paperwork in. Then go look at the sky.
Robert