[Tweeters] Falcons at Play (was Re: Tweeters] Wednesday Walk at Billy Frank Jr)

[Michael Price]

Hi tweets

What makes the idea of raptors engaging in interspecies play seems
incongruous with general raptor behavior which, it's got to be said, seems
to me on the whole to be rather dourly, even calvinistically singleminded.
But falcons are different in that they have a capacity for play which all
other raptors seem to lack. How come?

Then the of-course moment. Falcons are not even closely related to other
raptors; they're related most closely to *parrots. *And parrots *love* to
play. There's even two geographically widely-separated species that are so
similar in ecology, psychology and behavior you'd swear they'd been
separated at birth: New Zealand/Aotearoa's mountain parrot, the Kea (*Nestor
notabilis*), notorious for its (sometimes) destructive playfulness, and the
Striated Caracara (*Phalcoboenus australis*) or 'Johnny Rook', a falcon of
extreme southern Patagonia and the Falkland Islands/Malvinas.
Parenthetically, there's a marvelously informative and very well written
book on Johnny Rook, *A Most Remarkable Creature*, by Brad Meiburg (who's a
pretty remarkable guy in his own right), published in 2021, in which the
close, almost identical behavioral and ecological similarities between the
two birds is simply stunning.

Common to both is that they have replaced both inner hierarchy and
within-species aggression with playfulness and curiosity. Granted that both
species are probably at the far end of the behavioral spectrum, our own
observed falcon behaviors (eg, Merlins fooling around with crows and
swallows, peregrines with ravens) suggest our own falcons as somewhere not
too distant on that same spectrum. What fun.

Now, since it's been established that parrots and falcons are so closely
related, if I could only get my peregrine to duet with my African Gray on
the opening bars of 'Up in the Air, Junior Birdman....'

best, m
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