A bird on a plane. There is something inherently redundant, if not absurd, about the image. Especially when the animal is a large, powerful bird of prey whose natural migration pattern crosses continents. And especially today, when flying – once a symbol of humans’ Icarus-like ambition to transcend their pedestrian lot – has become the dimension of modern life in which our personal freedoms are most humiliatingly curtailed.

And yet this is a routine image around the Abu Dhabi airport come January, when wealthy Arabs take their falcons to the reserves of Pakistan to hunt the houbara bustard.

The predators, some capable of reaching speeds of up to 300 kph and carrying off a baby gazelle six times their weight, perch hooded on the arm of their owners, who, despite being the elite class of the richest city-state on earth, have to wait in the security line like everyone else. When the time comes to present documents to the officer, the owner will present two passports: one for himself, and one for the bird.

Should this latter document not be in order, the animal will be confiscated and sent just down the dusty road from the airport to the Abu Dhabi Falcon Hospital. According to Dr. Margit Muller, director of the facility, this happens about 20 times per year. That may not sound like much until you realize that the birds can be worth millions. Such prices create the great temptation for poaching and smuggling that make the passports necessary. One Washington, D.C.-based conservation nonprofit estimates that the black market falcon trade is a $300-million industry.

Considering what the birds are worth, it’s a bit surprising that an overnight stay at the hospital costs less than $10, or that the facilities, though clean and well landscaped, aren’t particularly ostentatious. It’s even stranger once you factor in that every bird returning from a hunting trip abroad must be quarantined here for a few days as a precaution against avian flu, which, according to Muller, has been documented in falcons as nearby as bordering Saudi Arabia. The single-story complex can house up to 900 falcons and is the largest bird hospital in the country, but, as she shows a group of visitors and journalists around the grounds, it’s clear that’s not Muller is most proud of. She is practically beaming as she shows us the falcon passports.

“It’s not a vaccination passport like for dogs and cats,” she said, passing it around. “It’s really a pure travel document. It has information about the owner, and at the same time information about the bird. And we are the first ones to have even thought about introducing something like this.”

Once, not so long ago, the birds crossed continents quite unaided and untracked by man. Though each species has its own distinct homeland and migration pattern, the saker falcon, most popular for desert hunting, flew over Arabia on its annual autumn trip south from its home in the steppes of Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Russia, China and Mongolia. The Bedouin would trap them, tame them and teach them to hunt. Throughout the winter, the birds and other small mammals killed by the falcons provided a welcome, and at times essential, addition to the desert tribes’ otherwise meager diet. Then, in the spring, when the sand began to bake, the birds were released to return to their breeding grounds. Thus falconry remained a sustainable practice. B

ut overtrapping led to declining populations, and today, the three species most popular in falconry (Saker, Gyr and Peregrine) are increasingly rare in the wild. This rarity has landed them on the restricted list of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, or CITES, an agreement originally created in the 1960s. Trade in animals on the list is either banned or allowed only with a CITES permit.

Because the UAE is a CITES signatory, wild falcons can’t be sold there. Instead, Muller explains, falcons today must come from captive breeding centers in Europe, France, Germany and the UK, as well as the US. This new state of affairs also means the birds are kept by their owners year-round.

“So they are not released anymore, like the wild ones, because the birds no longer have natural breeding grounds anymore,” Muller said. “They just have a breeding center.”

As it gets too hot for the birds to hunt, instead of heading north, the animals are placed in “free-flight aviaries” – big cages — with air conditioned boxes on either end. Early in the morning, before the worst of the heat begins, the hospital staff lay out plucked quail parts on an Astroturf-covered table for the birds to eat. If laid out too late in the day, the heat will dry out the moist flesh too quickly, and the falcons – being hunters, not scavengers — won’t touch them.

As I watched the birds swoop back and forth across the aviary, I couldn’t help but think they’d gotten a terrible deal from their interactions with humans. Once, most of the planet had been their dominion. Now, as a result of humans’ obsession with them, they were relegated to this hot cage, with numbered rings around their legs and microchips in under their skin. I wondered if just once, on their trips to the airport, they’d managed to spy with their hunters’ eyes the commercial jetliners on the runway, almost all of which have a stylized versions of the feathered predator painted on their tails. Would any part of the animals’ consciousness register that these great metal birds now dominate the skies that are no longer open to them?

Copyright 2008 Last Exit