A Bird's-Eye View

To some sorts of sportsmen, Baton Rouge has been shrinking as it grows

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Baton Rouge, as I remember it, had more horses in it. 

It was 1997 when my wife and I settled into the Siegen Lane area. Bay horses still nickered in green pastures and trotted along the road behind wooden fences. A dirt track with shiny, black chickens on it lay roughly where you turn into Target now. And on the commute down Tiger Bend to LSU, you could count more cows and horses than cars and houses.

Part of the attraction of Baton Rouge, in fact, and how my wife sold me on the place, was all the open space. 

This was my main concern, and she knew it. We were newly married then and had no kids. Our household consisted of a few sticks of college-era furniture, my cat from high school, our first puppy purchased as a couple, and a trained falcon that lived in the spare room.   

To clarify that last bit, I am a licensed falconer, a practitioner of an ancient art that seeks to bond a predatory bird with a person and a place, but in a way that isn’t nearly as weird as that sounds.

There is little in the world that gives me such joy and satisfaction. When Shelly said there were big green fields in Baton Rouge, I knew I could make a home here.

[Read this: An app, a Kentucky farmer, and a squash overload start a revolution in this sprawling Baton Rouge neighborhood.]

Fast forward two decades, and our adopted hometown has virtually re-invented itself. Atop the planned expansions of any city, the flooding of neighboring New Orleans and other communities in 2005 greatly accelerated local growth. Almost overnight ours became the largest city in the state. With its two universities, major industrial port, and state capital status, Baton Rouge rose thereafter into the ranks of the fastest-growing metro areas of the South. 

The collateral damage from the perspective of a falconer—or of any active hunter who depends on acres of open space—is devastating. Baton Rouge has been shrinking as it grows, its green spaces winking out like tea lights beneath an expanding blanket of concrete. In the last few years of its three-century history, Louisiana’s capital has become home to more people than ever while less of a home each year to horses, hounds, and hunters like myself. 

But this is a familiar story, almost banal. Urban growth is everywhere.

As a writer of books and articles about falconry, much of the body of my published work amounts to a running commentary on the vanishing possibility of my sport in the face of local (and as other writers and hunters affirm, global) population growth. 

It is easy to document the gross effects of urban development on the natural world. For example, this spring a single building in Galveston, Texas, killed nearly four hundred native migratory birds in one night. But it’s harder to calculate the net effect of this process on the psyches of those who need to see something of the natural world every day: those who wish to feel it beneath their feet on a morning hike, or wet a line in the water, or wait beneath an oak for a squirrel to peek its head around the trunk.

For many like us, finding a field of wooden survey stakes where last week we hunted rabbits inflicts a sense of loss immediate and arresting. It’s a shock akin to losing a friend, or a lover. 

This stems, I think, from the intimacy with which we come to know these particular acres. Step by step, we learn the low places where the water collects after rain and the thorny patches of briar or stands of Johnson grass and how the cover changes over a season of regular visits. In this way a single field, uniform from a distance, expands in the mind’s eye to become a complicated matrix of shifting landmarks and lasting memories. 

As a falconer, this intimate sense of place is shared and amplified by my partners in the field, the hawk and the dog and whichever friends may join me. In recent years, my children have been old enough (and tall enough) to trek through the waist-high wet grass to help our animals in their hunting. Each trip we make impresses further in us the identity of a place that is absolutely unique; though a favored hunting spot may change dramatically year to year, its living nature is as unmistakable as the face of a sibling.

I’m describing here the process by which a place becomes a kind of person. 

And maybe Baton Rouge, this town I miss a little more each day even as I still live here, is like a child who’s grown. Her name is familiar, but her voice and the shape of her face have changed; she has become another thing entirely while I have not changed so much in the same span of years.

This September, after a summer’s rest and a little retraining, my hawk will be ready once again to do what his kind have always done: seek and find good things to eat in the semi-wild places near home. Where we find those special places—the fallow pastures and hay fields, the quiet stands of oak—and how far we have to go to reach them remain to be seen. Many more are gone than I expect to find.

Someday even a hawk’s eye might not be sharp enough to spot one.      

Matthew Mullenix is a writer and communications professional, consulting with clients in Louisiana and Mississippi through his company Mission Media (missionmedia.biz). He has been an active falconer for more than thirty years and has written two popular books on the subject and contributed chapters and articles to other sporting publications. He lives in Baton Rouge with his wife Shelly, their daughters Margaret and Briana, plus a cat and a dog and a hawk.