The Falconry Biz

Brad Felger has always had a love affair with the outdoors and with the animals that inhabit the wilderness. He was barely 11 years old when he went down to a pet store and bought himself a falcon. That was an unusual purchase for a couple of reasons. First how often does a kid get to buy a bird of prey? Secondly, it was only in that time around 1970 that pet stores could sell Falcons. All of that said, Brad developed a passion for falconry and quite by serendipity he fell into a very successful business. "I was flying my birds out there recreationally and we were noticing the response we were getting. I put my falcon up in the air, maybe hunting ducks or doves or whatever season it happened to be at the time and all of a sudden big spirals of starlings would get up and leave the vineyard. That's where it all started and some of the vintners approached me. I did experiments with it for many years and then finally there was an actual permit that was drawn in California making it legal to do as a profession and I was one of the first people to get the permit. Since that time, the US Fish and Wildlife Service came out with their permit for bird abatement using raptors and I was one of the first people to get that and that is the permit that everybody operates under nowadays."

As you can guess, Brad has gone on to develop a service business in which he uses his falcons and hawks to clear vineyards of all kinds of pesky birds that feed on ripened fruit. Good for him.