Sunday, August 1, 2010

Under the watchful eyes of a white-coated doctor, two orderlies in scrubs sedate the patient on a paper-covered stainless steel table, then begin the procedure - trimming her vital hunting tools.

One of the orderlies carefully snips the brown and white falcon’s wicked, 2cm talons then files them back to points.

Twenty-one other falcons, their heads covered in small leather hoods, sit across the room on perches that are covered with green artificial turf, waiting to undergo treatment.

These falcons are just a few of the 5,000 birds which are treated each year at the Abu Dhabi Falcon Hospital (ADFH), which is located just a few kilometres outside of the capital.

“This hospital is the largest falcon hospital in the whole world,” its director, German veterinarian Margit Muller, says.
“It was the first public falcon hospital,” she adds.

“The original idea behind the hospital was to provide the best possible medical care for the falcons of the Abu Dhabi emirate,” she says.

But “now we treat falcons of all the UAE, plus the adjacent Gulf countries”.

Hunting with falcons is a longstanding tradition in Arab Gulf states.

The late UAE founder Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan was a notable devotee.

However most Emirati falconers now hunt in Pakistan or north Africa, as hunting with falcons is banned in the UAE.

Traditionally, the Gulf’s nomadic bedouin tribes used to use wild falcons, but today, hunting falcons are captive-bred.

They are generally sold for between $800 and $4,000.

Falconry “is part of my life and my family’s life in the past”, says Mubarak Saeed Obaid Al-Mansouri, a falconer and resident of Abu Dhabi who brought all eight of his falcons to the ADFH for them to get check-ups.

Falconry “means too much to me”, he says, adding that his falcons are “like one of my sons”.

“My father was my first teacher, who taught me how to hunt with falcons and how to treat it like a good friend,” Al-Mansouri says.

The ADFH’s director says such devotion is widespread among the population.

“Falconry is not a sport. It is a part of the culture, a part of the tradition,” Muller says. “Falcons are regarded... like part of the family.”

But treating them, Muller says, can pose its difficulties.

“Falcons are usually only showing symptoms of diseases when they are extremely sick,” she says.

“Sometimes you have a falcon that is really sick, but it’s almost impossible for the owner to detect.”

For this reason, the hospital conducts routine checkups on falcons, which usually include blood work, an X-ray, a faecal sample and checking the falcon’s internal organs for problems.

Falconers bring in their birds for checkups, which usually take a few hours, two to four times a year.

Sick or injured falcons can also be hospitalised at the ADFH, which, Muller says, is an official Abu Dhabi government institution.

“We can, at the moment, keep more than 150 falcons here for treatment,” says Mohammed Nafeez, a research associate
at the ADFH, adding that between 60 and 70 are being treated in the hospital. And birds can be boarded at the ADFH when their owners are on holiday.

The hospital also has two large aviaries to hold falcons while they are moulting, or changing their feathers.

One aviary currently holds 12 falcons, which periodically wing their way across the enclosure.

When not in the mood for flying, the birds can sit in one of the air-conditioned rooms at each end.

Muller emphasises that the ADFH is more than just a hospital for falcons. “We are not only treating falcons, we are doing research work on falcons,” she said.

As there is no specific course of study on falcon medicine, “we have set up a special training programme for falcon medicine here in the Abu Dhabi Falcon Hospital”, she says.

“We have a lot of veterinarians and students coming to us from all over the world to study here.”

In 2006, seven years after the ADFH’s foundation, it began treating other species of birds as well.

Now, the hospital treats “everything that has wings”, Muller says, “from canaries until ostriches”.