falconspace

Face to face: a child killer and its prey
From Jonathan Clayton in Johannesburg, Times Online, 13.01.06

THE African crowned eagle was found guilty yesterday of the murder about two to three million years ago of arguably the most important human ancestor found.

The mystery of how the Taung child, the continent’s first hominid discovery, met its end, aged 3½, has puzzled scientists for decades and could throw important new light on the theory of human evolution.

“This is the end of an 80-year-old murder mystery . . . We have proved conclusively and beyond a reasonable doubt, which would be accepted in a court of law, that the African crowned eagle was the killer,” Lee Berger, an American palaeontologist, said.

The end of the mystery “gives us real insight into the past lives of these human ancestors,” he said. “It shows it was not only big cats, but also these creatures from the air — aerial bombardment if you will — that our ancestors had to be afraid of. These were the stressors and stresses that grew and shaped the human mind and formed our behaviour today.”

In 1924 the discovery of the half-ape, half-man fossilised skull about 300 miles (480 kilometres) northwest of Johannesburg overturned the view that humans originated in Eurasia and focused the search for the “cradle of humanity” on Africa.

Announcing the verdict, Professor Berger, a reader in palaeoanthropology at Wits University in Johannesburg, said new evidence showed that the child was not killed by leopards or sabre-toothed cats, the previous suspects.

He said “small punctures and keyhole slots” inside the eye sockets and brain area could not have been made by such large predators.

“Carnivores cannot create that sort of damage,” he told a press conference in the margins of an international conference on the origins of man. “This child was killed by a single blow of a 14cm long talon into the brain . . . It was later disembowelled. The eagle would have used its beak to eat out the eyes and the brain — some of the most nutritious parts — and created these marks.”

The Taung child was discovered by Raymond Dart, a British professor who had recently arrived to take up a new post in South Africa. He published a paper in Nature saying that the child, a specimen of the human ancestor species Australopithecus africanus, was the famed “missing link” between man and ape.

The bold claim was widely dismissed at the time, but subsequently other, older hominids, such as Lucy, believed to be more than three million years old, were found in the Great Rift Valley that snakes across the continent from South Africa through Kenya and Tanzania to Ethiopia.

Professor Berger and Ron Clarke, a fellow palaeontologist, first mooted the theory that the killer was a predatory bird similar to today’s African crowned eagle about ten years ago.

“The one big problem was the lack of multiple areas of damage that could be linked to a bird of prey,” Professor Berger said. “We had one little flap of bone on the top of the skull that looked like some of the damage we see made by eagles and nothing else. It was the ultimate two-million-year-old cold case!”

Five months ago researchers from Ohio State University submitted what Professor Berger called the most comprehensive study to date of eagle damage on bones. Asked to review the paper for the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Professor Berger realised that he had stumbled upon his own missing link.

The study on primate remains from modern-day crowned eagle nests in the Tai forest in Ivory Coast showed that raptors routinely hunt primates much larger than themselves by swooping down at speed and piercing their skulls with their back talons.

The Ohio State paper also identified key features that distinguished damage caused by eagles from that of other predators. They include the flaps of depressed bone on top of the skull caused by the birds’ talons and keyhole-shaped cuts on the side made by their beaks.

They also identified puncture marks and ragged incisions in the base of the eye sockets, made when eagles rip out the eyes of dead monkeys with their talons and beaks.

Professor Berger returned to the skull of the Taung child and noticed a tiny hole and jagged tears at the base of the eye sockets. “I couldn’t believe my eyes, as thousands of scientists, including myself, had overlooked this critical damage. I felt a little bit of an idiot,” he said.

Professor Berger’s research, which has already been reviewed and accepted by experts in the field, is due to be published in the February edition of the prestigious American Journal of Physical Anthropology.

ORIGIN OF MAN
# Human remains from 3.2 million years ago were discovered in Ethiopia in 1974. The early human, or Australopithecus afarensis, Lucy, was named after the Beatles song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds

# Last year Ethiopian and US scientists claimed to have discovered fossils of human ancestors from about 3.8 to 4 million years ago. The ankle bone seemed to show that the individual walked upright

# The Laetoli footprints, discovered in 1978 in Tanzania, are estimated to be 3.7 million years old. The footprints are almost identical to those of modern humans

# In 1959 a British the British paleoanthropologist Mary Leakey discovered a 1.8 million-year-old skull in the Olduvai Gorge, northern Tanzania. It was the first Australopithecus boisei skull found

# In 1984 a skeleton of a boy — homo erectus — who died 1.6 million years ago was discovered near Lake Turkana in Kenya

# posted by Unknown : 10:51 PM

January 12, 2006

Falconers a rare breed in Santa Cruz County
By JULIE JAG
Sentinel Staff Writer

SANTA CRUZ — Glenn Stewart doesn't so much own his falcon, Sophie, as he does keep her.

Stewart is a falconer. Sophie, a 5-year-old peregrine, is his hunting partner, his responsibility and maybe even his friend. Yet she is far from being his pet.

"It's a partnership," Stewart says. "They are not working for you. If anything, you are working for them. They don't have to come back."

That becomes clear the moment Stewart raises his leather-glove-covered hand in an open pasture and sets Sophie free. Once she's begun her rapid ascent into the sky, his only connection with her is the tiny transmitter she wears around her right leg. But the chirping transmitter will only point the direction in which Sophie has flown; it won't bring her back. For that, he needs a lure — and her cooperation.

Stewart, 55, has gotten pretty good at getting his birds to cooperate. He's been a falconer for 30 years and has studied the birds for more than two decades as a staff research associate working with the Santa Cruz Predatory Bird Research Group, which is credited for helping bring the peregrine falcon back from the edge of extinction.

Yet in Santa Cruz County, Stewart and Sophie are both still rare birds.

While California counts the most falconers in the nation with about 630 — more than 200 of whom are expected to show up at the California Hawking Club's 35th annual field meet this week in Sacramento — Stewart estimates only a handful live in the county.

A big reason is falconry — which can be traced back to 2000 B.C. — is a hunting sport. Stewart and Sophie hunt ducks. Other falconers might concentrate on rabbits, squirrels or starlings depending on their environment and their birds. But in Santa Cruz, hunting grounds where dogs and birds can roam free are scarce at best. So, too, are houses with enough backyard space to house the birds.

Plus, falconry requires a full-time, lifetime commitment.

"It changes everything," said Stewart, who said he spends between 11/2 and eight hours daily training Sophie. "It affects where you live, what kind of car you drive, the job you have. People start working at night so they can fly during the day. ... It affects the way you take vacation because you can't get people to take care of a falcon the way they take care of a dog.

"They require more or less constant attention."

Stewart's wife and children have accepted his devotion to falconry as part of him, and so he considers himself lucky.

The commitment hasn't deterred Matisse Selmas, a 29-year-old Santa Cruz chef who has just dipped his beak into falconry.

Selmas has been Stewart's apprentice for one year and is looking forward to graduating to a general falconer after another. In five years, he'll be considered on par with Stewart as a master falconer. Just getting his apprenticeship has been time-consuming. The sport is closely regulated by the federal and state governments. So, burgeoning falconers like Selmas must spend months studying falconry and then pass a standardized test before they are allowed to take on a bird.

"From beginning to end it was seven to eight months of research and the test before I could even meet Glenn, who is a master falconer, and before I could even think about trapping a bird," Selmas said.

Falconers must also follow strict rules on how they can obtain their birds from a breeder or through trapping and even what types of birds they can train. In most states, apprentices like Selmas are limited to either the redtail hawk or the kestrel falcon. Master falconers like Stewart have their choice of at least a dozen different types of birds, but even they have to ask for permission to hunt with eagles, which can be dangerous to themselves and the falconer.

Most falconers abide by the regulations because, Stewart said, they are there to protect the populations of wild birds. With the regulations, he said, "there's almost no impact on the wild population. It's almost like buying a Labrador retriever."

Once Selmas had finally trapped a kestrel falcon, which hunt mostly starlings, he spent most of his free time training it. He stayed up one entire night holding the falcon on his wrist to teach her to perch there, and he kept her on a long leash as he taught her to chase his lure. After several weeks, she was ready to fly off the leash.

"It's scary," he said. "You're ready to either lose her or have her come back."

To Selmas' delight, she came back. If he wasn't hooked on the sport before, he was when she returned.

"The first time she's sitting on that post over there and looking for food and you call her and she comes back to you, it's an amazing feeling," he said.

But after several months of training and hunting with his bird, Selmas learned first-hand that she still wasn't his. One day during a training session, Selmas lost sight of the bird for a moment and it disappeared. Selmas searched everywhere for his kestrel, a breed too small and light to easily carry a transmitter, but never found her.

Now he's looking forward to trapping and training another falcon. In the meantime, he's enjoying joining Stewart, Sophie and Stewart's hound Riley on their duck hunts.

The hunts work like this: The whole crew will load up in Stewart's green Jeep Cherokee and head out toward Davenport to one of the few open spaces where Stewart has permission to hunt. When they find a pond with ducks on it, Stewart will release Sophie. She'll climb high in the air and circle around as Riley the dog points out the ducks. On Stewart's command, Riley will flush the ducks into the air. Sophie will dive toward one, reaching speeds of up to 200 mph as she bears down on it.

"They will come down at an amazing speed," Selmas said. "You're just flabbergasted."

If Sophie is on target, the impact of the collision is enough to knock the duck out. She then applies her razor-sharp notched beak to its neck to finish the job. Then, while Sophie sets to work plucking the duck so she can eat it, Stewart uses the transmitter to track her down. Once he reaches her, she will climb onto his wrist, ready to receive her reward, which is usually a portion of the bird she successfully attacked.

Stewart can take the duck home and have it for dinner, or keep it to feed Sophie for a few days. But the spoils of the hunt aren't as much of a reward to him as the hunt itself.

"It's been described as an extreme form of bird watching," Stewart said. "If you want to kill a duck, you get a shotgun, to be honest. I don't kill many ducks, but for me it's seeing my falcons go up a couple hundred feet and come down at 200 mph. That's the big thrill, and if she happens to kill something, that's an extra bonus."

When Stewart finally fits a blinding hood over Sophie's gray and rust head and gets her settled back onto his wrist, he breathes a sigh of relief. He doesn't say as much, but he's happy to have his hunting partner back. She has made the choice to stay, at least for one more day. There's a saying that if you love something, set it free. If it comes back to you, it's yours. Stewart knows Sophie isn't his. But she comes back, and that's what matters.

"This is what lasts," Stuart says. "The marriages, the jobs, they don't."

"But this," he said, looking at the proud falcon perched on his wrist, "this lasts."

Contact Julie Jag at jjag@santacruzsentinel.com.
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# posted by Unknown : 10:36 PM