Learn Falconry

If you are completely new to falconry, start with the Getting Started section, which will help you understand what falconry involves and whether it is the right pursuit for you. From there, move to the Licensing section to understand the legal requirements in your state before investing time and money in preparation. Once you have a clear picture of the path ahead, explore the Training, Equipment, and Species sections in whatever order matches your immediate learning needs.

If you are already an apprentice or licensed falconer, use these guides as reference material for specific topics. The species profiles are particularly useful when considering a new bird, the equipment guides can help you evaluate gear options, and the training articles provide refreshers on techniques and troubleshooting advice for common challenges you may encounter in the field.

Unlike generic outdoor recreation sites that cover falconry as one topic among many, FalconryLab is built exclusively for the falconry community. Our educational content is detailed, accurate, and written with the specificity that serious falconers expect. We cover the nuances that general guides skip over, from the subtle behavioral differences between passage and haggard Red-tailed Hawks to the state-by-state variations in trapping season regulations that can trip up even experienced falconers relocating to a new area.

We also believe in transparency about the realities of falconry. These guides do not romanticize the sport or gloss over the significant time, financial, and emotional commitments involved. We want every reader to make an informed decision about whether to pursue falconry, and every practicing falconer to have access to the most reliable information available for making decisions about their birds’ care and training.

Falconry is the practice of hunting wild quarry in partnership with a trained bird of prey, and it stands apart from every other form of hunting because the falconer does not directly take the game. Instead, the falconer develops a working relationship with a raptor, a wild predator that chooses to cooperate because the partnership serves its own hunting instincts. This dynamic, built on mutual benefit rather than domestication or dominance, is what makes falconry unique among all human-animal partnerships. The bird is never truly tamed in the way a dog or horse is tamed. It remains a wild animal that returns to the falconer’s fist because the arrangement works, not because it has been broken or conditioned into obedience.

The history of falconry stretches back at least four thousand years to the steppes of Central Asia, where nomadic peoples first discovered that raptors could be trained to hunt cooperatively with humans. From there, the practice spread along trade routes to Persia, Arabia, Europe, China, and Japan, adapting to local cultures, landscapes, and quarry species along the way. In medieval Europe, falconry became deeply intertwined with aristocratic culture, and the species of bird a person flew indicated their social rank. Today, falconry is practiced in over eighty countries and was recognized by UNESCO in 2016 as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, one of the few hunting traditions to receive this distinction.

People pursue falconry for reasons that are difficult to articulate to anyone who has not experienced it. There is the raw thrill of watching a trained hawk fold its wings and stoop on quarry, a moment of predatory intensity that no video or photograph can capture. There is the deep satisfaction of building a partnership with an animal that owes you nothing and stays with you only because the relationship works. There is the daily discipline of weight management, training, and observation that sharpens your attention to the natural world in ways that transform how you see everything around you. And there is the community, a tight-knit network of practitioners who share knowledge, mentor newcomers, and carry forward a tradition that has survived for millennia.

Learning falconry is a journey measured in years, not weeks. You will need to study raptor biology, master specialized equipment, pass a written examination, build federally compliant housing for your bird, find an experienced sponsor willing to mentor you, and complete a mandatory two-year apprenticeship before you can practice independently. The process is rigorous by design, ensuring that every licensed falconer possesses the knowledge and commitment necessary to care for a wild raptor. These educational guides are designed to support you at every stage of that journey, from your first encounter with the idea of falconry through the advanced techniques that experienced practitioners refine over a lifetime of practice.