Tigan (the “i” is long) is the owner of Tactical Avian Predators (TAP), a company that got started when he was a Coast Guard aviator and learned about B.A.S.H. (bird air strike hazard) problems at Travis Air Force Base. TAP employs integrated pest management techniques (IPM) for the “environment-friendly abatement of pest wildlife by falconry."
Put yourself in the bird’s place: You’re sitting there, calmly minding your own business (your business being sating yourself on ripe, sugar-rich—fully one-quarter, by weight—Chardonnay grapes), when suddenly, out of the sky, there comes a keening sound that brings all those juicy grapes back up into your craw and you instinctively take flight in hopes that your razor-sharp reflexes are, once again, quick enough to keep you out of the equally razor-sharp talons of Strega, Jim Tigan’s 2-year-old Lanner falcon who’s hell-bent to keep you away from fruit destined to become wine.
Tigan (the “i” is long) is the owner of Tactical Avian Predators (TAP), a company that got started when he was a Coast Guard aviator and learned about B.A.S.H. (bird air strike hazard) problems at Travis Air Force Base. TAP employs integrated pest management techniques (IPM) for the “environment-friendly abatement of pest wildlife by falconry.” (Would that be EFAOPWBF? Just asking.)
“We were taking off from Travis Air Force Base in a fully loaded C-130 to go handle an oil spill in Alaska,” recalls Tigan. “A barn owl took out engine number two—ruining a $4 million engine—and we had to go around and dump fuel before we could land safely. I’d been flying birds since I was 16, and it dawned on me that there was a business opportunity there that would combine my love of falconry with my love of aviation.”
But his plan to use falcons to ward off native birds from military runways didn’t turn out exactly as planned. “You’d be amazed at the red tape and hoops you have to jump through to win government contracts,” he says. “I’ve bid on five contracts over the last three years—including one where I was the only bid, because it was only open to disabled vets—and I didn’t get any of them!” You don’t want to know.
So, after two stints in the Coast Guard and the three-year horror of working for the TSA in Reno (you really don’t want to know), Tigan decided to open a school for falconry and a pest control business that uses birds of prey (falcons, hawks and owls), does habitat manipulation, traps critters and employs pyrotechnics. Sounds like fun. This is a fellow, after all, who loves anything to do with flying: He has a 1939 Taylorcraft (a no-battery, no-radio tail dragger), is currently building a kit plane in his garage and lives on the Pacific Flyway, which means thousands of cranes, geese and swans flock to a nearby pond. (“They fly through here almost close enough to touch,” he says in wonder).
Teaching birds to fly
“It is fun,” agrees the six-foot-two-inch Tigan, who often wears a mid-calf-length khaki kilt when teaching (yes, he’s of Scottish descent, but the kilt still looks a bit discordant with Jim’s Bluetooth earpiece in place). “Falconry is an ancient and honorable art. I could stand next to Genghis Khan’s falconer—or one of King Henry’s men—and we would wholly understand one another without the need for language. That’s part of the attraction. It’s an art that’s totally timeless.”
Tigan lives in Browns Valley (northeast of Yuba City) with his wife Kate Marden, who’s also a master falconer. “Kate is more into education and loves to take the birds to schools to show children what they can do. I’m more interested in the commercial side of the business, but I help her and she helps me. One of our best clients is Huntington Wine Cellars [which gets fruit from Herrick Vineyard in Healdsburg].
“Starlings are a huge problem in vineyards, and they know when the fruit is getting ripe. We’ll go into a vineyard for about two weeks, when the sugar is becoming noticeable to the starlings, and fly one or two of our Lanner falcons about eight times a day; we do it mainly morning and evening when the starlings are feeding. The interesting thing is that starlings are remarkably bright, so you really have to think like a bird to outsmart them. They post sentries who actually know me and my car. Sometimes, I’ll have to switch cars or—get this—wear a wig to fool ’em!”
While some vineyards employ flashy metal strips, sound cannons or netting to drive the starlings away, those methods can be fairly expensive…and ineffective. “I know some have tried radio-controlled aircraft on the theory that these bigger, badder, noisier ‘birds’ will claim a territoriality and move the starlings off, but the starlings figure it out pretty quickly and acclimate themselves to the noise. Same thing with the sound cannons; they acclimate to the noise. But with falcons and hawks, there’s an instinctive fear to which they can’t acclimate. They’re scared of the falcons and hawks—it’s genetically built-in to their systems—and that’s why our birds are so effective.”
Huntington is, for Tigan, a good fit. “I’ve worked with them for the last two years, and I’m even learning a little bit about wine. I like the culture of the company and its approach to the problem. It doesn’t hurt that they have a hawk on their wine labels!”
Camille Pope, general manager at Huntington, says, “Jim usually brings three birds, two to work and one that’s in training. I think this last time, Strega and Nikita were the hunters.
“Our consulting winemaker, Kerry Damskey, comes out to watch as well, and we’re all very impressed. It’s a unique partnership between falconer and bird; it’s really quite something to watch. He’ll work the birds three times a day. Morning and evening are when the starlings are active and feeding, so that’s when the working birds do their job. The midday fly is mostly for training Jim’s younger birds.
“A really cool thing is, after the late afternoon flight when the birds are done for the day, Jim will often bring them down to the tasting room [53 Front Street in Healdsburg] and hang out for a while. It gives our customers the unique opportnity to meet the birds and talk with Jim about them.
“The main thing, of course, is that it saves our fruit. We pay our growers by the acre, and if the birds are eating out all the seeds, what little fruit is left has a solids-to-juice ratio that’s all out of whack, and you get phenol concentrations that are way too high. But we’re still obligated to pay the growers, even when there’s very little crop!”
Pope notes that company President Bill Legion just happened to meet Jim at an event. “I think the fact that our wine label has a hawk on it provided the beginning of the conversation, and one thing led to another.”
Uninvited dinner guests
Tigan recalls being called in by the renowned La Costa Resort in north San Diego County to handle starling problems at its outdoor restaurant. “These birds were attacking and intimidating the customers, literally taking food off their plates and drinking out of the coffee creamers!” he remembers.
“I noticed the restaurant had a thick topiary hedge along one side, where the birds could dive out of the way of our hawks. I also saw the busboys simply brushing crumbs off the tables onto the ground. We had them trim the hedge back to a third of its previous size, put tops on the creamers and gave the busboys little spray bottles of lemon juice to squirt the starlings in the eye and ‘crumb butlers’ to cleanly remove the crumbs from the tables. We also suggested they close off the ends of their tile roofline—the open ends were ideal nesting sites. Problem solved.”
Similarly, The Lodge at Pebble Beach had a problem with starlings hiding in hanging flower baskets and darting out to attack customers. “I just instructed their gardening crew to replace the flower baskets once a week and remove the nests the birds had built in them. You really do have to have a bird brain to out-think these guys.”
Tigan and Marden present three-day falconry courses at their home northeast of Sacramento (the fee is $565, including breakfast, lunch and books). “Only 1 percent of those who take our classes here at the West Coast Falconry Academy (westcoastfalconryacademy.com) go on to become falconers, but people really get something valuable when they make this primal connection to a bird of prey. I’m not much for hunting with a rifle. But forming that connection with a bird that remains, in many ways, wild—that’s something very special, very appealing.”
There are some 4,500 falconers licensed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service today, but those numbers are slowly growing. Most states require a two-year apprenticeship before obtaining the license.
Give a hoot
“Barn owls are extremely effective at dealing with rodents, like gophers and moles,” says Maggie Rufo, assistant director of the Hungry Owl Project, a small (there are only half a dozen volunteers) outgrowth of WildCare’s wildlife hospital in San Rafael. “For the last 10 years, we’ve stressed a holistic approach over poisons, and vineyard owners, who are focusing increasingly on sustainable and organic practices, love the results they can get from a few barn owl boxes strategically placed among their vines. The trouble with poisons is, you kill off both the rodents and their natural predators—which will eventually let the rodents redouble their numbers!”
The folks at Shafer Vineyards in Napa Valley learned that lesson years ago. “When we went to a cover crop to control erosion almost 20 years ago, our field mouse and gopher populations soared,” says company President Doug Shafer with a rueful laugh. “So we put up barn owl boxes and hawk perches. You should see the piles of gopher bones and fur balls at the bases of the barn owl boxes in our Carneros vineyard! Farmers have been doing this for decades in Europe, and I have a book that was published in Massachusetts in 1954 showing a farmer with an owl and nesting box.”
The good news is, attracting barn owls is pretty easy. Says Shafer, “You have to think of nesting first. Barn owls don’t build their own nests; they seek out cavities in trees or suitable man-made structures—that’s why they’re called ‘barn’ owls. Their nesting habits mean they’re relatively easy to attract with suitable nesting boxes. And barn owls are found over much of the world, so there aren’t many regions in California where you might put up a barn owl box that would never be inhabited. Also, barn owls are less aggressive and defend smaller territories than many other birds of prey, which means you’re likely to have more owls per farm or vineyard. We occasionally see great horned owls, which are great, because they’ll take out young jackrabbits as well as gophers.”
He also builds perches in the vineyard that offer hawks a vantage point for hunting. “I think growers tend to overlook perches, but they’re important for a couple of reasons: First, they provide an elevated spot from which any raptor can hunt, and second, they let the farmer take advantage of annual migrations, when hawk densities can be higher in some areas. Kestrels and both the red-tailed and red-shouldered hawks are of great benefit to growers in the Napa Valley.
“When you realize that each adult owl consumes the equivalent of two mice or one gopher each night, and the owl population grows in the spring when they’re hatching their young, it makes sense that the owls are very efficient in controlling our vineyard rodents. Barn owls are prolific and can lay from five to 11 eggs per clutch. One pair of barn owls successfully raising an average clutch can consume the equivalent of 1,000 gophers each year. People always ask if they’ll decimate the gophers, but that’s not the way it works. It seems that the predators are as controlled by their prey as is the reverse. If the prey population drops too low to sustain the predators, they’ll move elsewhere. It’s nature’s sense of balance.”
Just over the hill, Jim Bundschu’s family has been farming at Rhinefarm, on the eastern edge of Sonoma, since the 1850s. They’ve learned a few things over the years, including some things not to do. “In the interest of education,” Jim tells me earnestly (he’s among the most gracious men I know), “please tell your readers that killing rattlesnakes in your vineyard is not a good idea. We made that mistake in the early 1990s, and the gopher populations increased dramatically.”
The family winery, Gundlach-Bundschu, farms 350 acres today, and Bundschu is a big proponent of the benefits of barn owls. “We had three resident nests, and we’ve put up four more nesting boxes. Over a two-year period—between the owls and our supplemental traps—we’ve caught more than 300 gophers per acre in our younger vineyards. They’re not so hard on established vines, but they’ll gnaw the trunk off a young vine and wreak havoc with their root systems. The owls—and the native hawks—are also good at getting ground squirrels, which don’t fall into our traps.”
The late Joe Heitz once told me, “Mother Nature’s a mean old lady.” To be fair, she was raining on his Cabernet Sauvignon at the time. But in the long run, working with the old gal can pay off big time—especially when you can work hand-in-talon with a very smart bird to do it.
