Wyoming Falconer Has 40 Birds That Can Nosedive 240 MPH, As Fast As A Ferrari

LARAMIE — Vahe Alaverdian might not drive a Ferrari, but he does fly something as fast, if not faster. 

The Boulder, Wyoming, man owns about 40 falcons of varying species, speedy little birds that he likens to little sports cars in the sky. 

These Ferraris of winged hunters are Alaverdian's peregrine falcons.

“When they dive out of the sky, they have been clocked at up to 242 mph in a vertical stoop, when they dive down to kill their prey,” Alaverdian told Cowboy State Daily. “So, in reality, there’s nothing — no organism on this planet can move that fast.”

That speed is also faster than most any Ferrari sports car. The track-focused FXX Evoluzione, for example, boasts a top speed of 249 mph, while the LaFerrari has a top speed of 218.

Alaverdian loves to watch peregrine falcons dive and marvels at how controlled they are at those top speeds.

“They just become this tiny little teardrop coming down and usually attacking prey that’s much larger than they are,” Alaverdian told a crowd of onlookers at the recent C.J. Box Law Symposium on the University of Wyoming campus. “The kinetic energy of that bird coming down at 200-plus mph and hitting that … much larger bird, it can crack its neck.”

While they’ll dive-bomb larger animals, Alaverdian said wild falcons will prefer to catch prey smaller than themselves.

That falcons can incapacitate, or even outright kill, a much larger bird simply by nosediving into it fires Alaverdian’s imagination, and has for as long as he can remember.

A Real-World Nate Romanowski

Alaverdian is a nationally prominent falconer. 

He's also one of the real-world falconers that C.J. Box consulted with when he was creating Joe Pickett pal and falconer Nate Romanowski in his best-selling series of Wyoming-based mystery novels.

TV host Mike Rowe also came and did a segment on Alaverdian in 2016 for his show “Somebody’s Gotta Do It.”

Real-world birds don’t necessarily behave the same way as they are depicted in Joe Pickett's fictional world, Alaverdian is quick to say when asked about consulting for Box. 

Like that time when Romanowski went to prison and his favorite falcon somehow came and found him. That’s not what would happen in the real world, Alaverdian said. 

While it made for a good story, falcons are wild creatures at heart. Left to their own devices, they become wild again very quickly. 

In Alaverdian’s experience, they would forget an owner in less than 48 hours and would not keep searching for him or her. 

That's just the nature of these extraordinary winged hunters, Alaverdian said. 

Drones Beat Kites And Helium Balloons

One thing Alaverdian does share with the fictional Romanowksi is a lifelong passion for falconry.  

Alaverdian was just 7 years old when he and his brother bought a falcon and loosed a live sparrow in their parents’ home to feed it — much to his mother’s dismay.

These days, Alaverdian's training methods are much more sophisticated.

“We’re flying birds on a daily basis, and so we wake up in the morning and load the birds on a truck, and we drive out here to the BLM (land) to do our training,” he said. “We have a drone, a large drone, that carries a bait that’s attached to a line and a parachute. 

"And these birds go, and we put this drone at a set altitude, and this bait is hanging underneath there.”

The birds are trained to go up and grab the bait, which triggers a release mechanism. 

“The parachute will slowly bring the bird down, hopefully within a 100-yard radius of us, and then basically, that’s the bird’s daily exercise.”

The training method mimics how young birds learn to hunt.

“The parents will catch a small prey, like a dove, and they’ll start doing flybys by the cliff enticing the young chick, which is basically at this point, anywhere between 48 to 55 days old,” Alaverdian said. “They kind of tease them as they start not feeding them anymore, they tease them to get them to fly.”

Once the young birds finally do take wing, there’s a ballet of food exchanges in the air. 

As the babies put on more muscle mass and become more confident and capable in their abilities, the parents make the task more and more difficult.

Before drones, Alaverdian used things like helium balloons or kites on windy days to train his birds.

“But the cost of helium has gone through the roof, and you don’t always have a good, stiff wind for the kite to remain up,” he said. “So, the drone itself has become an incredible training tool for us because you can move the drone in every direction you want. 

"You can go up, down, left, right. You can release the bait with a servo and have the bird dive down on it.”

Making The World’s Blueberries Safe

Those who enjoy blueberries and cherries might want to thank can thank Alaverdian for helping to keep their snacks safe.

That’s because Alaverdian’s main business is using his falcons to scare away nuisance birds that eat berries all over the West.

Called bird abatement, the approach uses the natural instincts of prey species to keep them away from berry crops. 

The falcons can also help minimize pests like pigeons that congregate at locations like golf courses, amusement parks and airports; or seagulls, which seem to gravitate toward landfills and can carry contaminants like salmonella into places that feed into a community’s water supplies.

Alaverdian's small army of falcons fly in a dozen or so states, but not Wyoming yet, even though he lives here.

“Nothing grows here,” he said. “So, we’re doing that in places like California, Arizona, and Washington for the most part.”

There are also teams working in Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, Minnesota, Indiana, Idaho, Oregon, and Florida. 

Vineyards and fruit orchards have become very aware of how effective falcons can be, Alaverdian said, and his birds have lots of work at such locations. 

Here Comes The Horde

Picture a beautiful and lush vineyard with plump, juicy grapes ripening in the sun. They’re not quite ready for mankind to pluck just yet, but they are already mighty tasty by a starving bird’s standards.

The problem is that the birds coming for this crop won’t show up by ones and twos every now and then. They will come as one huge and hungry horde, like starlings, for example. 

They fly in as this giant cloud of fluttering black wings, moving as if one creature. Called a murmuration, it is both fascinating and unsettling. 

The black cloud swells and contracts as if it is some kind of living, breathing leviathan in the sky with one purpose in mind — to eat every last grape it can. 

Farmers have tried all kinds of things to stop pest species like starlings from stealing their harvests — scarecrows, loud music, the recorded calls of distressed birds, and even children racing down the crop rows in four-wheelers making as much noise as they can.

“All these methods, mylar tapes and audio tapes that they play and stuff, they are only good for about 48 hours,” Alaverdian said. “After that, they are ineffective because they are not something that is a life-threatening situation for the bird.”

Netting, meanwhile, which attempts to block access to the tempting fruits beneath them, costs thousands per acre. Even then, pest birds will still find ways to poke right past the barrier, getting their fill of fruit.

Poisons have been tried, too, Alaverdian said. 

But these days many people question such use on food intended for human consumption.

Falcons are much more effective without poisoning the food supply.

“We don’t have to kill anything,” Alaverdian said. “We don’t have to poison anything. We don’t have to run cannons, noise makers, or hang Mylar tape and stuff.”

A Place In The World

Falconry is an ancient art that began at least 4,500 years ago in China and Mongolia. Eagles were tamed and taught to put food on the table.

These days, the art of falconry is not at all simple. 

“These birds are highly regulated,” Alaverdian said. “We have signed away our constitutional rights. Game Wardens can come in at any ‘reasonable’ time and check, from our freezers to personal files to taxes and everything else. 

"It’s like an ongoing search warrant that you sign onto.”

The birds are still worth the trouble to Alaverdian, though, and he’s grateful to have a profession that keeps him in the great Wyoming outdoors and the sagebrush country he loves.

“I grew up in Los Angeles,” he said. “And the falconry lifestyle in a place like Los Angeles — I had to drive two hours in one direction just to get away from Greater Los Angels into the high desert, where I had enough open area where I could fly a bird just to train it.”

Alaverdian ran a successful commercial photography business in California for 14 years before deciding that he should just move to a place like Wyoming, where falconry could be a much more natural activity. 

“I also came to this part of the world because my favorite quarry to hunt with falcons is sage grouse,” Alaverdian said. “I fell in love with sage grouse. They’re almost a sacred species to me.”

That doesn’t mean he harvests one of those birds every year. He didn’t take one last year and isn’t sure he will this year either. It’s really more tied into an appreciation of the Cowboy State in general. 

“It’s about my love of the open country and the sagebrush, and the sage grouse is a native bird, too, and so I just love the West basically,” he said. “Everything about it.”

Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.