Wayne Davis and his hawks have been scaring birds at the tennis championships and Canary Wharf for 15 years. But is his profession now under threat?
If humans thought like hawks, we would only be thinking of our next kill. If we could see like hawks, we would have eyes the size of tennis balls, scanning the Earth for a rabbit or a slow-moving pigeon. If we could fly like hawks, we would swoop close to the ground, barely skimming buildings in a muscular sprint. If we could live like hawks, there would be no worry or despair, just the pleasurable fatigue of a successful hunt, digestion in a quiet copse, rising hunger and the hunt once again.
But humans cannot think like hawks, so instead we project on to them our own characteristics. Which is how I come to find myself asking Wayne Davis of the Corby-based firm Avian Environmental Consultants whether he thinks he has a special bond with Rufus, his 15-year-old male Harris’s hawk. The 59-year-old Davis gives a creaky laugh at the thought. “The bond is just food, basically,” he says. “I’m beneficial to him. If he doesn’t actually catch anything, he still gets rewarded with food from me. He’s not coming back to me because he loves me or anything like that. It’s purely food.”
