We had a family outing to Medieval Times last night… Tons of fun. If you haven’t been, and you have a 10 and a 12 year old handy, definitely go. It’s knights and swordfighting and jousting and even a guy flying a falcon.<\/p>\n
The falconer came out\u00a0before the tournament got rolling.\u00a0While the announcer talked about the importance and beauty of falconry, he walked quietly to the middle of the arena,\u00a0launched his falcon and started spinning the lure.<\/p>\n
The falcon swooped and dove around the arena, banking over the heads of the audience and zooming back to the lure. The spotlight didn’t follow it, so the bird passed\u00a0in and out of shadow as it traveled.<\/p>\n
Every head in the place was focused on the bird,\u00a0tracking it as it zipped past, oohing and ahhing as it came close enough for us to see the details.<\/p>\n
Everyone was focused on the bird, I should say, except my youngest son.\u00a0He was staring at the falconer, his eyes narrow.<\/p>\n
“Is that a stick?” he asked.<\/p>\n
“It’s a lure,” I\u00a0whispered back. “It’s basically\u00a0a piece of meat on a rope. He whirls it around. The bird tries to catch it.”<\/p>\n
He relaxed a bit, but not completely. “That’s got to be frustrating for the bird.”<\/p>\n
“It’s good exercise, kind of like when we toss a frisbee to\u00a0the dogs.”<\/p>\n
He continued\u00a0glaring at the falconer.<\/p>\n
“Don’t worry,” I said. “The\u00a0falcon will get some food. This is play-time for the bird. Look at how it’s flying.”<\/p>\n
The falcon swooped down at the lure, then looped\u00a0back and\u00a0captured it. Sure enough, the man gave it some food. The audience applauded and the bird hopped onto the man’s fist in almost the exact same way that our parakeet hops onto my finger. My son relaxed.<\/p>\n
I was happy to see where he stands on animal acts.<\/p>\n
Pets playing with their humans? Okay. Animals forced to do tricks for money. . . not so much.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I love watching falconry. Whether it’s at ren fairs or theme parks or wherever, I just think it’s cool. Enjoy! <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[122],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2554","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-n"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DpYi-Fc","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2554","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2554"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2554\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}