By Robert DeWitt
John Ortino cranes his neck and runs his eyes over the bare limbs of the big hardwood. The squirrel is nowhere to be found. Ortino is hunting, but he doesn’t have a gun or archery equipment.
“Come on, Pep, get him, get him,” he calls to Pepe, his 2-and-one-half-year-old red-tailed hawk, as one of Ortino’s companions beats on the tree trunk with a heavy walking stick.
Falconry is a sport that dates back to ancient times. It was the favorite sport of nobility and royalty in medieval Europe. And it’s still practiced by a small group of dedicated hunters.Pepe sits, nearly motionless, in another tree a few feet away, seemingly disinterested in what is going on around her. In a few minutes, she hops nonchalantly to the tree Ortino is watching. Pepe shows no signs of urgency before suddenly taking a short hop into a squirrel nest, talons down, wings spread. A buzz spreads through the men and women on the ground.
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