STEPHANIE SCHAEFFER isn’t just winging it with her hobby — a Mother Earth holism propels her to become a confident falconer.
“I’ve always felt like I’m in tune with nature,” she asserts matter-of-factly. “I’m a part of it. I think to understand all sorts of animals is to understand yourself.”
Her red-tail hawk, Isabo, alert and stoic, seems to carry herself with pride. But Schaeffer resists anthropomorphizing birds. They don’t “judge” their trainers, she observes — and they never consciously set out to be obstinate.
Schaeffer, 21, hopes to help save endangered raptors. A licensed falconry apprentice and a student of conservation biology, the San Jose State University senior trapped the ailing Isabo in Los Baños and is rehabilitating her for release.
At Schaeffer’s airy home in the Santa Cruz Mountains, the line between interior and exterior blurs. A 50-foot by 17-foot outdoor flight chamber, complete with waterfall and pond, rivals any exhibit at a small zoo. Schaeffer herself is a kind of Dr. Doolittle, comfortable among her eager dogs, horses and tiny kitten (which she usually keeps inside the house just in case Isabo gets the munchies).
When Schaeffer cracks open the door to the quail den, the nervous birds scuttle about like ants exposed under a rock. With an almost comic flair, the bungee-tethered Isabo tilts her head to cop a hungry peek inside — the voracious three-pound bird devours a quail every other day.
Later, as Schaeffer caresses Isabo’s chest to coax the hawk onto a round rotating perch, Isabo utters a small, friendly peep — unusual among taciturn red-tails. It reminds Schaeffer that Isabo is not inanimate. “When they don’t make noise, you sometimes forget there’s an animal in there,” she says, flashing her wide Meg Ryan smile. Schaeffer named Isabo after Michelle Pfeiffer’s metamorphosing human-to-hawk character in the movie Ladyhawke.
As a child, Schaeffer used to assist her raptorphile dad at Bambi’s Bird Sanctuary in Florida. But she didn’t go bird-crazy until she worked with the government-sponsored Peregrine Fund last summer, training and releasing peregrine falcons. At two sites in Montana, she spied 30-day-old peregrines through a peephole, reading Stephen King and Ayn Rand in the still heat between feeding times.
Schaeffer, who pines for her own wings, says her favorite part of falconry is watching the birds gliding on breezes and drifting on sunbeams: “You get to be a part of their world for a little bit.”
