‘You care for birds, and they heal you’: film profiles world of a Black falconer
Falconry is a profession with roots in the ancient Middle East and medieval Europe but one of its practitioners is making some history of his own.
Rodney Stotts is one of the few Black falconers in the US. He works with raptors such as red-tailed hawks and Harris hawks, as well as with an owl named Mr Hoots. He is now the subject of a new documentary directed by Annie Kaempfer, The Falconer, that screened at the Atlanta film festival ahead of the second annual Black Birders Week (an event created after a white woman called the police on a Black birdwatcher in Central Park in New York last year, prompting a national outcry).
Stotts has seen his work hit by the Covid pandemic and is relocating from his previous raptor sanctuary in Laurel,
Maryland, to Charlotte Courthouse, Virginia. The new site takes its name from his late mother’s nickname – Dippy’s Dream. Stotts spoke with the Guardian
about honoring his mother through his new project, the importance of exposure to falconry in inner-city DC, and mentoring the next generation of Black falconers.
How does someone become a master falconer?
To become a falconer, you have to find either someone who has been a general falconer for three years or a master falconer to sponsor you. Once you have a sponsor, you take a test. Your aviary is inspected and the sponsor takes you out to trap a bird. Then there’s a one-to-two-year apprenticeship, and the sponsor writes about whether you should be promoted to general falconer.
Once that’s done you can have different birds for a few months. You’re a general falconer for five years. After five years and some paperwork, you become a master falconer. It takes seven years to become a master falconer and then you are that for the rest of your life as long as you reapply each year.
What skills does a master falconer need to have? And what do you learn?
Being a falconer is going to teach you everything. It will break you. You can be the hardest person in the world, and yet it will break you down and rebuild you. The birds just look at you, and you have to learn patience, deal with difficult situations, critical thinking in difficult times. Everything about who you are is going to change.
Can you talk about what it is like to find the next generation of Black youth who are interested in becoming master falconers?
In the inner city, in DC, they don’t have falconers at all there. You never see a falconer because it’s not talked about, there’s no exposure. But once people see [a falconer], it’s not “there’s another Black guy.” They see a falconer, period. Then they see that it’s someone who looks like them. It’s not the opposite way around.
As for the birds, it doesn’t matter what color your skin to them.
Kids say, “I didn’t know there were red-tailed hawks.” They believe that every bird is an eagle. The kestrel, the smallest raptor in the Americas, they saw that as an eagle. But once they’re exposed to it, there’s encouragement, exposure, excitement. That’s when I get excited. In the documentary, I say, “you never know who’s the next raptor specialist” – you don’t have to be a falconer. You care for birds, and they heal you. It’s amazing.
How is the work going on your current project, Dippy’s Dream?
It’s coming along. I found about another three and a half acres, three wooded acres to finish cutting down, and a little three-acre campground. So we’re parceling out the actual camp, sealing a little bit of the trees around it so there’s a little privacy.
I was working at a job with a raptor program in a sanctuary at the Oak Hill youth detention center, a juvenile detention center for DC youth. When the Covid-19 pandemic came around, [it affected] all the jobs. I lost mine, the place closed down. It got me to this understanding of not always working for someone else. It was my opportunity to get Dippy’s Dream up and going. What I wanted was go on from there.
My mom had already passed away [when I made the purchase]. I really wanted to do something in her name; she always wanted a house with kids coming home to [it]. She grew up on a farm with animals. I knew how healing they could be. There would be a playground where people could come out. It would be free. You could donate, basically, whatever you can afford … Because you might think you could not afford it and not deserve it. You might not have $500 to pay to go experience horseback riding, dealing with birds, sitting in nature.
It sounds like the pandemic has caused you to make these changes.
Oh, yes. It shut everything down. Ninety-nine per cent of what I do is face-to-face, up close and personal, getting a child to see the birds, hold a bird. The pandemic stopped all of that. It shut me down for a whole year, pretty much.
What parts of the job do you enjoy the most?
Just showing people my birds to see them smile. I have a picture of my mom just holding one of my birds. Whenever I fly the bird that’s named after her, she’s just with me. It’s the healing side of it.
At the end of the day, my legacy, I want it to be that I helped. I did enough hurt. That’s the one thing I would like people to realize. It doesn’t matter how much money you have, who you are … it doesn’t matter where you started or what you’ve been through. You can always come out at the end if you believe.
TheFalconer willpremiere on PBSin the US on 1 June. Black Birders Week takes place from 30 Mayto 5 June
Big Bang Theory star Jim Parsons, the show has never shied away from what gay men do in bed, and the new series gets even more down and dirty. One sex scene in particular serves a radical function: Ryan behaves cruelly to his partner, and is cast as the shamer rather than the shamed. “I never wanted him to be this amazing virtuous figure. As marginalised people, we’re allowed to exist within very narrow slots, and I always like to challenge that. I set out to make the viewer feel annoyed at this gay guy with cerebral palsy. He doesn’t have to be perfect so that you can feel good about yourself. He doesn’t need to be your inspiration, honey. He can be a source of your ire.”
For all his elation over Special, he admits to feeling “disappointed” when Netflix told him the second season would be its last, but he feels ready to let it go. “This show has given me so much, but it’s never been easy. It has always been limping its way along, holding on for one more day by Wilson Phillips.” O’Connell, on the other hand, is speeding ahead. HBO Max is mulling over Accessible, a pilot he has written set at a disabled boarding school, while his first novel, Just By Looking At Him, is published next year. “The lead is a gay disabled television writer,” he says with a disarming grin. “Whaaat?Who’s that?”
If able-bodied people are permitted to plough the same furrow, why can’t he? “Sofia Coppola has wealthy malaise cornered. Sally Rooney writes the same book – they’re good but I’m sorry! – and no one’s like, ‘This again?’ As soon as the characters are marginalised people, they’re only allowed to exist thiiis much.” Perhaps there will come a time when he isn’t writing about cerebral palsy. “But as a writer, I’m naturally attracted to things that aren’t discussed or understood, or which are stigmatised. Unfortunately, disability checks all three boxes. It’s a giant well of interesting stories that we’ve never seen before.” Another big grin. “Why would I throw that out of bed?”
• now.
Special season two is on Netflix
of our members, rather than collaborating with the companies. I think that when members have the ability to directly elect the top leaders who represent them, it’s going to make a big difference.”
No date has been set for the referendum on whether to hold a direct election, although under a consent decree the UAW reached with federal prosecutors, the referendum is to be held in the next six months.
On 12 May, federal district court judge David Lawson in Detroit appointed Neil Barofsky as monitor; Barofsky is a lawyer with Jenner and Block who served as inspector general for the $700bn Troubled Asset Relief Program. The day before, Dennis Williams, a former UAW president, was sentenced to 21 months in prison for misappropriating union funds for personal expenses including private villas in Palm Springs, cigars, high-end liquor and golfing fees and apparel.
Erik Gordon, a professor at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business, criticized the consent decree for not requiring direct elections and for instead calling for a referendum.
“It gives the entrenched leadership the opportunity to stay entrenched,” he said, noting that the rank-and-file is very angry at the union’s leaders. “It’s real important that the UAW regain its credibility and moral standing with the rank-and-file, people who get up in the cold, drive in the midwest winter and go to work.”
Rory Gamble, the union’s current president, hasn’t endorsed direct elections, noting that many UAW board members believe it would let outsiders and outside donors interfere with the union’s politics and policymaking. When the union signed the consent decree in January, Gamble said: “We are committed to making the Monitor’s job a boring one, by doing everything we can to make sure there are no financial or ethical misconduct issues to monitor.”
Nelson Lichtenstein, a labor historian and author of the leading biography of Walter Reuther, vigorously supports direct elections.
“I don’t think direct elections are a panacea,” he said. “But given the actual nature of the beast – the endemic corruption, the collaboration with management, the lethargy of some UAW leaders – given that, direct elections is something that would shake things up. It would release new social forces and energy.” Pointing to the Teamsters, which agreed to direct elections in 1989 as part of an anti-corruption consent decree, Lichtenstein said direct elections create pressure on union leaders to police themselves.
The referendum has not yet been scheduled, and opponents of direct elections have not yet geared up. But the Unite All Workers for Democracy caucus has mobilized, scheduling a week of action the week of 24 May to promote direct elections. Eric Truss, a UAWD activist and a worker at Ford’s Rouge plant in Dearborn, Michigan, has been distributing flyers at several plants. “People are excited about being able to have them make the choice themselves,” he said.
Supporters of direct elections assert that such elections would lead to more rank-and-file involvement and more responsive union leadership, and that, they say, would ultimately help the UAW win more unionization drives. The union suffered stinging losses in unionization elections at Nissan in Mississippi in 2017 and at Volkswagen in Chattanooga in 2019 and 2014.
Rick Isaacson, a longtime auto worker who became president of his local in Michigan, opposes direct elections, warning that it would hurt small union locals.
“I came from a local with only 1,800 members – why would anyone pay attention to my union any more with one member, one vote?” he said. Isaacson, who once served as assistant to the UAW president on union constitutional matters, said the current delegates’ system makes it easier to assure diversity on the union’s 13-member executive board, which has four Black people, one Latina and two women.
“With one member, one vote,” Isaacson added, “outside money is going to become an influence in these elections, and that’s a problem. And then there’s dark money. We see it in our national elections all the time. Why would we think it would be different in our union elections?”