Eurasian eagle owl Katatsumuri takes off from a perch in a garden after given a signal from falconer Misato Ishibashi in Takeo, Saga Prefecture. Night-flying Eurasian eagle owls can effectively scare crows which cannot move around at night.
Takuo Fukumoto
The use of raptors is recently attracting attention as a new way to tackle crop damage by wild birds such as crows. Misato Ishibashi, a 19-year-old junior college student of Takeo, Saga Prefecture, is a falconer who helps farmers to protect their crops.
Misato Ishibashi releases a peregrine falcon, taking into account wind directions. She sometimes trains raptors for as long as six hours a day.
A Harris’s hawk which Misato Ishibashi says is the most reliable.
Ishibashi first had the opportunity to see trained falcons when she was a third-grader in elementary school, and learned by herself how to train raptors. When she was a fifth-grader, she noticed that when she flew raptors over farmlands, they drove away crows which do harm to crops. As she gained more experience in falconry, she began to receive requests to fight off harmful birds.
When she receives requests, she heads to farms and orchards with her Harris’s hawk Momotaro or goshawk Elsa, and drives away crows to where they originally inhabit. She has visited some 130 places with her 47-year-old father Hidetoshi.She believes one of the most important ways to tackle harmful birds is to find their nests. Sometimes at dusk, she releases her night-flying Eurasian eagle owl Katatsumuri to frighten crows and drive them away from their nests.
She changes the kind of raptors she uses according to the locations and the targeted wild birds. She sometimes uses peregrine falcons which chase harmful birds persistently. She is also training golden Harris’s eagle, a cross between an eagle and a falcon.
A goshawk which frightens crows by flying fast and making small turns.
While training raptors, Ishibashi is seeking more efficient and effective ways to drive away harmful birds depending on the situation. In orchards, she flies many falcons at the time of harvesting for more effective protection, and at rice warehouses where wild birds gather all year round, she tries combining the use of repellents with raptors.
“It is important to pinpoint the causes of crop damages and come up with effective measures in cooperation with farmers,” she says.
(April 6, 2014)