WINCHENDON — Several dozen people, families and other interested observers, showed up at Winchendon Community Park Thursday afternoon for a lesson in falconry. The event, billed as Falconry in the Park was sponsored by the Winchendon Cultural Council and Friends of the Beals Memorial Library and facilitated by the Beals Memorial Library.

Henry Walters of Monadnock Falconry in Temple, New Hampshire, brought two impressive birds, a red-tailed hawk and a Harris’s hawk, to Winchendon to provide a brief lesson into the lives of these and other raptors. Monadnock Falconry is a facility that provides rehabilitation for birds of prey that are orphaned, injured in the wild, or suffer some other misfortune. Most are then released into the wild. 

Pitch, the 8-year-old red-tailed hawk, Walters explained, was brought to the facility by a well-meaning police officer who spotted the bird at the side of the road and assumed it had been left an orphan. Because it was so young, he said, it imprinted on its human caretakers and is so dependent on them for food that she will not be released.

The Harris’s hawk, said Walters, is not native to New England, residing mainly in the Southwest. Mahood, as the two-year-old male is known, arrived in Temple following a brief stop at a rehab facility in New York State. His parents had both suffered broken wings and were unable to hunt and feed their offspring. Because he was older than Pitch when he found himself in the care of humans, he did not imprint on his caretakers and may one day return to the wild.

Walters not only exhibited the hawks, he also discussed what their lives are like in the wild, how they hunt, and how they differ from other raptors like owls, eagles, and falcons. Kids and adults alike paid close attention as he explained how evolution had equipped them – and other birds – with hollow bones, keen eyesight, and beaks made for tearing into the prey that makes up their diet. Pitch, according to Walters, has a preference for gray squirrels, while Mahood prefers a menu of chipmunks and voles.

Walters said he was first exposed to falconry through an undergraduate Latin course, during which, according to Monadnock Falconry’s website, he picked up “Frederick the Great’s 13th-century treatise, “De arte venandi cum avibus,” or “Concerning the Art of Hunting with Birds.” After graduating, a traveling fellowship brought him to Ireland’s School of Falconry, where he apprenticed with some of the finest falconers in Europe, flying raptors such as the peregrine falcon, sparrowhawk, Eurasian eagle-owl, ferruginous hawk, and northern goshawk. Before moving to New Hampshire, Walters earned a Massachusetts falconry license.

Monadnock Falconry was created when Walters teamed up with retired dairy farmer Martin Connolly, who is also a master falconer. The pair transformed the barn that once housed the farm’s cows into a habitat for the birds that are brought to them for rehabilitation.