Each story I write starts from an idea or two that hum with possibility. In the case of Rufus and Reenie’s story, it began with my daughter and her love of owls. The more we learned together about owls, and visited captive owls, and watched YouTube videos about owls, the more I fell in love with these strange and silent night dwellers. Around the same time, I also happened to read a book about falconry, H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald, which led me to The Once and Future King by T. H. White, both of which got me excited about writing a story with falconry in it. But these two ideas seemed to be singing different tunes, until I brought them together with my work in the foster care system.
When I was a child, I had no idea what happened to children who couldn’t live with their families or who didn’t have families. I was privileged enough that this didn’t even seem like something that happened in the present day; it was an idea reserved for The Secret Garden or Oliver Twist. After college, I worked for a year in the residential treatment center of a foster agency in New York and learned that I was very much mistaken. Based on the most recent numbers I have, there are 442,995 children in foster care in the United States, 1,864 of whom are in Vermont. I now work in the family courts here in Vermont and see these families’ stories every day.
But this is merely how Rufus and Reenie’s story got its start; to turn these ideas into a novel, I had to do research—a lot of research! Researching is not just about hunting down information in books or on the Internet. For this book, in addition to going to bird rehabilitation facilities and talking to rehabilitators about their work (so interesting!) and seeking out live owls both in captivity and online through nest cameras and other videos (so cute!), I took a falconry lesson so that I could experience what the sport was like firsthand.
Even something as mundane as a chickadee on my bird feeder sets me smiling, so imagine the Fourth of July fireworks going on inside my chest when the falconer held his fist beside mine and a Harris’s hawk named Monty hopped onto my glove mere inches from my face. At first, I was afraid to even look at him—he was so fierce with his sharp eyes and even sharper talons. But Monty was a friendly guy, as was my instructor, and we got to flying.
It amazed me how I could barely feel Monty’s physical weight on my arm and yet was overwhelmed by his physical presence on my glove. Monty is much lighter than a great horned owl like Rufus would be—Monty’s flying weight is around 1.5 pounds, and a great horned owl weighs around 3 pounds. Even so, being this close to a real hawk felt like a gravitational force on par with a small planet; I can only imagine what having a big bird like Rufus that close would be like. When Monty glided over the grass and then swooped up to my fist, I was nearly blown over by the magic of his wings beating and how he could land on my glove with such precision, his talons positioning him perfectly to gobble down his tidbit of meat.
As this was a lesson, we weren’t hunting, but even if we had been, I was struck by how little my desires played into Monty’s behavior. Monty flew where he wanted to fly: if I cast him off toward a tree, he might fly there; or he might change course and disappear among the reeds fringing a pond in search of frogs. He was not like a trained dog, loping happily beside me, and I didn’t feel as though he was interested in my affection or cared to please me. Rather, he looked at me as an equal, as if I was expected to pull my weight on this outing and I should not take his presence for granted. This experience helped me in thinking not only about how falconry fit into the book, but how it related to both Rufus and Reenie and what it meant for them together.
Even this is just a tiny fragment of all the information and experiences I dug into to help craft this story. For more information about falconry and bird rehabilitation, please enjoy the following conversations with the experts who helped me!