As a 13-year-old boy, Dr Tom Bailey shot a kestrel, but fortunately the pellet only grazed its head. Shocked at the sight of this, he nursed the bird back to health and so began his career as a vet. The avian expert tells Shalaka Paradkar about his love for birds of prey.
It's a sport that started in Central Asia some 6,000 years ago and spread to neighbouring countries.
According to the book Zayed, the first Arab reported to have trained falcons and introduced falconry into Arabia was Al Harith bin Mu'awiyah bin Thawr bin Kindah, a prince of the Kinda tribe.
While watching a man setting a net to trap birds, he saw a falcon swoop down on the birds and become entangled in the mesh. He took the falcon and trained it for hunting, thereby starting a tradition that still endures.
Falconry has a rich heritage and a unique place in Arab culture. "We don't use the treatments they talked about in medieval treatises, but some of the falconry techniques have not changed at all," says Dr Tom Bailey.
With his right hand, he opens the door of the Dubai Falcon Hospital while the left hand, which is clad in a leather glove, acts as a perch for a kestrel.
The bird is a small beauty, dressed to the nines in a brown leather hood, which brings out the beauty of its tawny plumage and shields its eyes so it isn't stressed by the light and movement outside.
When Dr Bailey goes home at the end of the day, the glove is removed and placed on the backseat of his 4WD - with the bird still on it.
"Falconers still cover the bird with the burqa, the leather hood; they use the same equipment to train birds - gloves and jesses. (These days the sport has moved forward, as remote-controlled planes are also used to train the birds)," he says.
Dr Bailey has a special affinity for kestrels and, indeed, all birds of prey. He is one of the few falcon medicine specialists in the region and chief veterinarian at the Dubai Falcon Hospital.
Tucked away in the sylvan conclave of Zabeel, the hospital is one among a knot of low-rise whitewashed buildings grouped around a central courtyard, with fuchsia bougainvillea foaming over its parapet walls and a smell of disinfectant lingering in the corridors.
Within this spanking facility are state-of-the-art laboratories and a spacious enclosure for avian patients.
The 42-year-old falcon and wildlife veterinarian is a storehouse of anecdotes about the heritage of falconry.
Having worked on wildlife projects in Zimbabwe, Kenya, Hawaii, Mauritius, Mongolia, Pakistan and the UK, he arrived in the UAE and helped establish veterinary hospitals at the National Avian Research Centre (NARC) in 1993 and the Abu Dhabi Falcon Hospital in 1999.
He recently finished a book on bustard medicine, commissioned by the Environmental Agency, Abu Dhabi.
Dr Bailey has designed health and management-related programmes for captive and free-living wildlife species.
He is also the coordinator of IUCN (World Conservation Union) Middle East Veterinary Specialist Group and the UAE-based avian/wildlife group.
Right now he is flying high with Wildlife Middle East News (www.wmenews.com), a project he and some colleagues started to bring together conservationists working in the Middle East.
Today, it's thanks to people like Dr Bailey, who have dedicated their life to these birds, that falcons continue to conquer hearts and capture the imagination.
I
I get to tread on a lot of new ground as a vet here in terms of desert wildlife, biology and conservation. Some of the species I get to work with have been poorly studied. The region is also very interesting for the different diseases one gets to see, which would not have been seen back in the UK.
At the same time, I find it very humbling looking back at old medieval manuscripts about falconry, reading some of the descriptions of the diseases and realising that birds even today still suffer the same sickness from being mishandled or fed the wrong food. There is a universal wisdom there.
I am one of the editors of Falco, a magazine dedicated to falcons that was set up by a group of people in the early 1990s - among them my friend Nick Fox and my old boss Dr Jaime Samour.
He moved on and I became one of the editors of Falco, the Newsletter of the Middle East Falcon Research Group (www.falcons.co.uk).
I am frustrated by the issues plaguing wildlife conservation in the region.
Me
Me and my life-changing event:
I was born in a farm near Gatwick Airport in the UK. My father was a farmer and my mother sold antiques. My earliest childhood memories are of animals, we had a cow farm and there were always lots of them around as well as dogs and ferrets as pets.
When I was 13, I was out shooting in the woods near our home with my brother. We were shooting pigeons and I accidentally shot a kestrel, a small bird of prey. It was alive when I found it and the pellet had just grazed its eye, hit its head and stunned it. I took it to our vet.
He said he didn't know much about birds, but gave me some advice. I decided to nurse it back to good health. I took the kestrel to my room and kept it for a month and a half.
When it recovered, I released it. It was the first time I had close contact with a wild (creature). That was the last time I shot anything - and that's also how I fell in love with birds of prey.
I had an uncle who was a dairy farmer and a bird breeder in his spare time. He also had a strange life changing moment, when a stray budgerigar landed on his spade while he was digging up the garden.
He decided to look after it and that moment ignited his passion to breed rare exotic birds. He set up a business dealing in birds, bird feed and pet products and it was located on one side of the farm where I lived.
This happened around the same time that I was developing an interest in birds of prey. I was lucky to have grown up on a farm (where we) always had vets coming to see the cattle as well as vets who would come to treat my uncle's birds.
Becoming a vet seemed like the logical thing to do.
Me and becoming a vet:
When I was at veterinary college, there were just a few hours of study dedicated to what is now called 'exotic pet medicine' in the whole five-year course. In those days, veterinary medicine revolved around cattle, sheep, other farm animals, cats, dogs and poultry.
I was lucky to find interesting work almost as soon as I graduated. My girlfriend (now my wife) was the education officer at Bristol Zoo. I spent a lot of time visiting her, since I was studying at Bristol University.
In my final year of college, there was a group of us - veterinarians and biologists - who got together to form the Savannah Wildlife Project.
We raised funds in the last two years of our studies for a wildlife orphanage in Zimbabwe called the Chipangali Wildlife Trust. We did quite well, and managed to raise some £50,000; in 1993 that was quite a lot of money.
We had to set up a small veterinary clinic at the orphanage, while my wife and her team set up an environmental education unit. So one day we were in cold, damp England, and the next day, we were flying out to sunny Zimbabwe.
The evening we landed, we were told there was an injured hyena that needed treatment the next morning. None of us had treated anything bigger than a dog until then, so it was quite exciting.
The project was a great experience. It was a purely voluntary effort and all of us had contributed some money to help pay for our food and rent. We stayed for six months in Zimbabwe until our money ran out. And then it was back to reality!
I returned to the UK and needed a job. I joined a mixed practice in Devon, in southwest England. It was a beautiful locality, but veterinary medicine had moved on a lot since the time of James Herriot's stories. Like many other things, it has become more commercial and less romantic.
Me and arriving in the UAE:
My friend Nick Fox taught me falconry. He was a breeder in the UK. The year after I had tended to the injured kestrel, I found myself getting interested in falconry.
It was being taught as a course in Scotland by Nick. After that, I spent a number of summers going up there and helping him with his breeding projects. He had heard there was a problem of a lot of birds dying at the old Al Ain Zoo (this was in 1992).
So some six months after I returned to the UK from Zimbabwe, I got a call from Nick. He asked if I was interested in finding out what was happening to the birds in Al Ain. I jumped at the opportunity.
A week later, I had bid goodbye to my boss in Devon, packed a carrier bag with medicines and instruments and was on the plane.
In Al Ain, I checked into a hotel and visited the zoo every day to see the birds.
These were houbara bustards ...
they were dying from a combination of factors: inappropriate diet, disease, stressful living conditions and wrong vaccinations. At the end of three months, they asked me to stay on as a vet with the Al Ain Zoo.
I enjoyed my time in Al Ain. Weekends were spent camping in the desert. We lived in the zoo, in a house next to the gibbons cage and they would wake us up in the morning ... it was a wonderful seven months!
Me and avian medicine:
However, I couldn't stay on at that point as I had to go to Hawaii, to work on a project to save the Nene, the endangered Hawaiian goose.
The Hawaii project was also a volunteer effort, as I had saved some money working in Al Ain and could use it for the two months there. Theri joined me there, as her uncle lived in Hawaii. I proposed to her and we got married.
We returned to Abu Dhabi to help set up the NARC in 1993. I was lucky to have as my boss, Dr Jaime Samour ... he was my mentor and encouraged me to do my PhD on the houbara.
At that stage, the houbara breeding project was only the second of its kind (the first being in Saudi Arabia). As the NARC was then incorporated under the Environment Agency, Abu Dhabi, working there I also came to be involved with wildlife cases. I handled a range of wildlife: hares, foxes, gazelles and so on.
The Environment Agency then set up the Abu Dhabi Falcon Hospital. I was involved with ensuring that it was fully operational from day one. It is a public falcon hospital and a first for Abu Dhabi. Until it was set up, falcons from Abu Dhabi had to be treated at the Dubai Falcon Hospital.
The Abu Dhabi Falcon Hospital is the biggest hospital of its kind in the world. When it was set up, it could treat 60-70 birds at a time, a huge operation. I spent an incredibly busy two years there and it was a very big learning curve.
From Abu Dhabi, we moved back to the UK as I decided to train further in wildlife health. We moved back to my mother's house near London, and I did my MSc in wild animal health from London Zoo.
Halfway through the year I was contacted by the management of Dubai Falcon Hospital and was lucky to be offered the position on finishing my course. In 2002, I returned to the UAE to join the team at the hospital.
Seeing the hospital develop has been very gratifying ... we have a first-class lab and diagnostic facilities, allowing us to do some cutting-edge work.
Myself
Which are your most special patients?
Sometimes we have to treat animals that have been orphaned in a wildlife collection and there's always a special bond that forms with hand-reared animals.
Those are the cases that give the most satisfaction when we are successful. This week, we have treated sand foxes, oryx, gazelles and an 18 kg python atthe hospital.
My favourite patients, though, are always the small falcons, the kestrels. I spent six months on a kestrel project just before I went to university.
We used falconry techniques to catch the birds, implant them with microchips and track their movements through the forest. The kestrel was also the first bird I ever 'treated'. Working with these incredibly beautiful birds is a rewarding experience.
Which achievement are you most proud of?
One of the more rewarding things we have done in the last couple of years has been to set up a (project) called Wildlife Middle East News.
It's a newsletter distributed throughout the region. There's a lot of knowledge in the region and many people working in the field of wildlife conservation across several countries in the Middle East.
Our aim has been to connect the people working in these fields, who are often isolated in remote locations. Initially, we thought our audience was about 200 people, but it's now grown to 2,000 people.
RAK Bank has generously supported us with the newsletter. Hopefully, it will go some way towards increasing awareness of how wildlife should be kept.
