The Malcolm/White Wing line

Contact: Toby Bradshaw <baywingdb@comcast.net>

Malcolm and White Wing produced offspring of the most consistently high quality I had ever seen at that time (the late 1980s).  The outstanding traits of the Malcolm/White Wing line continue to be tameness, trainability, and an unbelievably insatiable appetite.  Birds from this line will eat until they can't see their feet, and will continue to hunt with enthusiasm.  Because they are naturally tame and always hungry, they can be flown relatively heavy.  The young birds can be taken afield safely as soon as they will come back to a whole dead rabbit.  By taking them hunting early on, the hawks do not develop a dependency on the falconer and never go through the 'butterfly' stage of flying around looking for a handout.  They chase game hard from Day One.  The physical characteristics of these birds are also interesting.  They have wide bodies, thick legs and toes, and often have a pale brown iris instead of the more typical dark brown.  Offspring of Malcolm and White Wing were average sized, from 850-975g flying weight for females and 620-650g for males.

Tom and Jennifer Coulson sent offspring from Malcolm and White Wing to a number of falconers, and I have seen many of these birds fly.  They all have the same easygoing attitude towards humans, and the same deadly intent on game.  Most falconers who have flown a White Wing bird are reluctant to try anything else!  The Coulsons, who have bred more Harris's hawks than anyone in the U.S., had a Malcolm/White Wing offspring or descendant as part of every one of the six breeding pairs they kept, until their breeding program was wiped out by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Malcolm and White Wing produced 32 offspring between 1986 and 1989 (see BaywingDB).  Malcolm escaped from the Coulsons's breeding chamber in 1989, but his genes were passed on to his well-known progeny, including birds such as Alpha, Chainsaw, Fleetwood, and Zeke (see stories below).  Two of Malcolm's and White Wing's offspring figure prominently in the breeding that we are doing now: Lola (killed by Katrina) and WD-40 (paired with Foxtrot in Dan Pike's breeding program), both hatched in 1988.

The Coulsons tell me that Lola is the best bird that they have ever flown.  Since they have flown more than a hundred Harris's hawks, I take their opinion very seriously.  Lola is rather famous for ripping her throat open on a barbed wire fence while in pursuit of a jackrabbit, then, while having her throat stitched in the field without anesthesia, breaking free to chase yet another jack as it ran by.  I have seen Lola in her breeding chamber, and she is completely at ease.  Total strangers (like me) can walk right up to the nest at chest height and reach under her to check an egg, just as if she were a broody bantam hen.  My current breeding female, Q, is Lola's daughter, and behaves exactly the same way.

Lola's offspring are wonderful falconry birds.  In 1998 I flew Lola's son Jupiter.  I paired Jupiter with Lola's sister, WD-40, to produce the first line-bred Harris' hawks from Malcolm/White Wing stock in 2000-2002.  Since I wouldn't have Jupiter to fly in 1999, I wanted to select a tame, hungry young female Harris's hawk from the Coulsons's vast pool of raw talent.  I visited Tom and Jenn in New Orleans in June 1999, and spent a few days looking over the 40+ young Harris' hawks they had bred that year.  One bird really caught my eye for her remarkably calm temperament and relentless enthusiasm for killing the live mice I dropped in the breeding chamber.  I checked her band number and was not a bit surprised to find that she was Jupiter's sister -- another typical Lola offspring.  It is incredible how the personality traits of a particular pair of Harris's hawks stand out against the background of birds from five other breeding pairs!  My daughter named the new female 'Killer,' which in retrospect is perfect.  Killer arrived at the Seattle airport on 3 September at the age of 20 weeks, just like Jupiter had the previous year.  Killer is without a doubt as tame and friendly as any Harris's hawk I have ever had or seen.  Right out of the Sky Kennel she was cast and jessed, then immediately stood up on my gloved fist and began preening without a care in the world.  She has literally never bated once out of fear or boredom.  She adores people and will fly to anyone, despite the fact that I have never given her tidbits in the field at all.  The day after she arrived she was flying across the motel room to me, and less than three weeks later had caught her first rabbit at a flying weight of 895g.  A day later, she caught two cottontails, and within a week was catching one or more jackrabbits on every hawking trip.  Like all of the best birds from the Malcolm/White Wing line she never crabs with other Harris's hawks, and despite never having seen a dog before she arrived at my house, she quickly accepted them as hunting partners.  Killer caught the first pygmy rabbit (Brachylagus idahoensis) I've ever bagged, but her real specialty is long, hard flights on jackrabbits.  Every time I hunt with her I marvel at her fantastic disposition and headlong plunges into tough cover.  Killer will be the mother of the next generation of Harris's hawks in the Coulsons's breeding program, since I sent her to them in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina.

After flying Jupiter and Killer, I was anxious to add another Lola offspring to my hunting and breeding programs.  In 2003 I again got the 'pick of the litter' from Tom and Jenn Coulson -- a female out of Lola that I named 'Q'.  Q caught her first head of game 10 days out of the breeding chamber, and on her first jackrabbit hunt she caught 3 black-tailed jacks before her castmate (Killer!) could catch one!  Q has matured into a really outstanding gamehawk, catching 81 jackrabbits in 35 days in the summer of 2005.

The first bird I flew out of Malcolm and White Wing was Alpha.  Alpha was the sweetest Harris's hawk I had owned until Killer arrived in 1999.  Let me relate a story about Alpha's tameness.  I asked my wife, who is not a falconer, to take care of Alpha while I was away.  She put Alpha on the bow perch in the yard, then went to work.  When my wife came home in the evening, she opened Alpha's hawk box and went to get her from the perch.  Alpha saw the open box and flew across the yard to land in it.  She had spent the whole day without being leashed to the perch!  When Alpha reached the box, she turned around, roused, pulled up her foot, and waited for the door to be closed.  She was having a great first season until she was attacked by another Harris's hawk on the roof of a building while we were group hawking.  Her wing was perforated between the radius and ulna and never regained full strength.  I liked her so much that I flew her for a couple of months the next season, in spite of her dysfunctional wing.  She loved to hunt, even with the pain in her wing.  Alpha would slowly work her way from rock to rock as she climbed up the side of a bluff to get into a proper position that she could have achieved in one hard pumping flight before her wing was hurt.  Once she made it to the top, she would thunder down on rabbits in the sage.  Eventually I couldn't bear to watch her struggle with her flying, so I returned her to the Coulsons for breeding.

Once the word got out about the fine qualities of the Malcolm/White Wing line, the Coulsons were kept busy supplying their friends with offspring from this pair.  Jerry Fraulini received Chainsaw in 1988, the same year that her sisters Lola and WD-40 were hatched.  Chainsaw is one of the most splendid falconry birds I have seen.  She got her name because of her habit of crashing through trees and brush, sending branches flying in all directions.  Now we know that this is normal for the Malcolm/White Wing line, but at the time it seemed unique.  She is the only Harris's hawk I have seen catch a deer, but even though she was aggressive on game of any size she would gladly let small dogs lick blood off her toes while she was perched.  She broke her jesses one summer and spent a couple of months cruising around Jerry's neighborhood.  She came home every night and slept in the giant Douglas-fir in Jerry's back yard.  Jerry called her down a few times, but decided that there was no need to leash her anymore.  He left her at hack during the molt from then on.  One of the neighbor kids came around one day to tell Jerry that a big black hawk had been visiting his family's picnic table every evening and liked to eat bologna sandwiches.  He wanted to know if Jerry could tell him what kind of bird it was ...

Unfortunately, Chainsaw died from unknown causes before she could be bred.  Her genes live on in her sisters WD-40, and in her nieces Killer and Q.

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For more information on the Baywing Database, contact Toby Bradshaw.
Last revised: 28-May-06