- Flying hawks while sitting on a horse
is just not something I ever imagined I would do,
but I definitely feel like I could be some kind of,
like, medieval badass princess, just, like,
galloping through the hills with a hawk on my arm.
I'm very much a horse girl.
I grew up in a barn, pretty much,
so it's kind of my element.
- Martin. - Hi, Kerry.
- Nice to meet you, love. - Nice to meet you.
Falconry from horseback was a sport
that was popular across medieval Europe,
but today it's incredibly rare
unless you're in Central Asia.
I kind of stumbled upon Dartmoor Hawking
and thought it would just be an incredible opportunity
to learn how to fly a hawk or a falcon
while sitting on a horse.
It's just not something many people get to do.
- Where I come from, doing falconry from a horse
is very much from a hunting-with-them background.
And I'm from Dartmoor, we've got big, open spaces
and the horse really enhances your falconry.
1,560 grams, she's about spot-on.
If the birds are too fat they're going to have no motivation
to fly to you.
So we're relying on the hunting instinct now.
I need stresses. Not starvation,
but you've got to have an appetite.
Eyesight is what she lives through.
So take away the eyesight, nothing's happening.
Actually, there, a really tight grip, because
if you let her go at this moment in time she will die.
- It's when the birds have the hood on,
like Martin said, if they fly away then they could die,
because they effectively can't see.
So my biggest fear is that I'm going
to accidentally let a bird loose while it has its hood on
and like, kill one of these birds.
- Okay, just keep your hand still. Hold on, hold on!
You see, and then they come back up. Well done.
- Yeah!
- Now, I probably should've warned you,
before I put him there, if he wanted to
he could put those talons through your glove.
- Oh, lovely.
- He's not going to, he's not going to, just so you're aware
of the capabilities of what you're dealing with.
If you're not a stable perch,
he's not going to want anything to do with you.
- That makes sense.
- Because you're breaking
your side of the relationship, which is a safe place to be.
- He seems like someone who is in it
because he loves what he's doing.
It's very much not for show,
which is something I was looking for.
And just hearing him talk about the horses
and talk about the birds,
it's kind of like he's talking about an old friend.
- Man up.
She's a bit wet.
She's not Miss Biggie Brave. And yet she will quite happily,
at hunting time, she will take down deer,
roe deer, which is about a 50-pound deer.
- She can kill one? - Yeah.
- A little lower down. Put her lower down.
- It just feels really cool,
and just weirdly natural.
I'm a huge animal person so I think that's why.
I went into this knowing that I wanted
to get close to the birds,
and I'm fine with the dogs running around,
and like, meeting the horses.
Oh, no. I know; you can't itch on me, I'm sorry.
The horses Martin uses for falconry are all thoroughbreds.
So these are horses that are bred and designed for speed.
And so not only is he using thoroughbreds,
but he uses retired ex-racehorses.
So these are horses that have been trained
to go fast, trained to win races,
but then once their racing career is over,
he works to re-home them
and train them how to be falconry horses.
- Okay, open your hand.
All right, are you feeling brave?
- Yeah.
And I think it was really cool
that the eagle has never flown from a horse before,
so I was the first person to ever
introduce him to a new thing,
so it's kind of like we were getting to learn together,
which I never expected.
It's kind of the thing you see in a nature documentary,
not in real life, a bird that's just flown
from like, around you.
So it was just absolutely beautiful
to see him just soaring toward the horizon,
even though he wasn't supposed to go that way.
- That wasn't supposed to happen, but wow!
- It was amazing.
I mean, I would love to do this again,
it's just, I'm kind of far from home
and I don't think my horse would be okay
with a hawk landing on his head.
But it's not something you do every day.