One man’s plan to make his bird of prey unflappable
▶ Take a falcon out for a drive and you’ll know what bad travellers they are. Now there’s a solution. Anna Zacharias reports from Adihex expo
Every time he drove to a big competition over bumpy roads and sand dunes, Mokhles Nejres would have problems with his falcon, Germousha. The male gyr falcon was one of his fastest but as soon as he started to flap, the other birds in his car would get excited.
“Once he’s flapping then the other 12 falcons all start flapping and it’s a problem,” says the Iraqi falconer, 47.
“I have to pull over, park the car, give them all water and make sure they all calm down. A fast falcon is good for competition but bad in the car.”
Fortunately, Mr Nejres is an inventor and for the past 10 years he has run a fulltime business from Dubai selling solutions to falconry problems.
The solution for a peaceful drive came to Mr Nejres six years ago. He calls it the Shaking Stick, a onemetre pole about 15 centimetres in diameter, that which rocks back and forth so the falcon becomes accustomed to a car’s movements.
Mr Nejres is a regular at the five-day Abu Dhabi International Hunting and Equestrian Exhibition, or Adihex, which started yesterday at the Abu Dhabi Exhibition Centre.
Any falconer can tell you that it is no easy feat to dune-bash with a flapping falcon or two, and every year falconers invent new solutions to perennial problems and show them at Adihex, with varying levels of success.
The exhibition got off to a slow start yesterday morning with most visitors gathered around the famed Zahran Al Harassi Halwa, a regular exhibitor from Al Ain, which gave out free samples olive oil, figs and saffron halwa.
This year’s show-stopper may be the Dubai Falcon Centre’s imaginative life-sized pirate ship, surrounded by 40 gyr falcons on fake piers. Priced at an average of Dh45,000, they were selling quickly.
Many falconers were drawn to Mr Nejre’s simple display of three Shaking Sticks. This is version 3.0, which is smaller than the original and can be split into five pieces for easy shipping, a necessity for his Saudi Arabian and Kuwaiti customers. It has eight speeds and can imitate the sound of a motor.
It also helps domestic wild falcons, which are usually rocked on the arm of trainers until they grow accustomed to being handled.
“New falcons move around a lot because it’s a change of life for him,” Mr Nejres says. “Old falconers do this and shake their arm up and down with the arm for a long time to train
the falcon. “Before, every falconer had one falcon. Two was a lot. But now, falconers have 12 or 20 falcons. They can’t do this with every new falcon.”
Mr Nejres learned falconry at the age of 13, east of Baghdad with a shaheen falcon named Wadiyan. He left his job in 2007 and opened Sinjar Falcon and Hunting and Camping Equipment and Trading in Dubai. He travels to China every year to develop his products.
His inventions include pigeon boxes with astroturf on top that double as falcon perches, a password-protected falcon caller (thievery can be a problem in the desert), and numbered gloves so each falcon can be fed with a different one to reduce disease transmission.
Sometimes, falcons disappear. Mr Nejres, who is known as Abu Radad, had thousands of falconers tag their birds and enrol in his database.
Now when any falcon goes missing, he sends out a text message giving the detail of the bird’s owner and hunting location.
“Why did I succeed? Because so many people saw me at competitions and if I tell them it’s good, people will believe me. They’ll say Abu Radad told them. Anything I make, I test with my own falcons first.”
Mr Nejres had two years of Shaking Stick prototypes before he came up with the right model.
“At first it was too small but very, very fast,” he says. “Because I made it too fast, it was not good for the falcons. After one week they had a problem with their wings. They got tired.”
Mubarak Mayouf, 26, bought one for his grey gyr falcon Samsoom, who always disturbs his other two birds on road trips.
“I bought her three weeks ago,” Mr Mayouf says. “Driving is always a problem in the first few months.”
What products can be expected from Abu Radad next year?
“This is a secret,” he says. “But I’m close. I have a good plan. It’s something for pigeons.”
Visitors to opening day of Adihex go for the figs, olive oil, halwa … and something to keep the birds quiet on a long drive