Recently the Guardian had a news report about a prize budgerigar breeder whose birds were killed or nicked in an act of industrial (sport? Hobby?) sabotage, and now they have a follow-up (with pictures!) of a budgie fanciers show in the UK.
See any parallels?
I’ve.. never even heard of this before. I would wager most people in the states probably have not as well.
Parallels… seems to be mainly to be enjoyed by a select group. Obscure. Hard to sell. I would imagine the entry barrior to this however is much higher than RPG’s to even be on a semi competetive level with it.
Eh, if I get involved with birds it will be falconry~
Also the hobby is ageing and the numbers declining, with a lot of the new entrants being related to the previous generation. And I noticed from the pictures it was overwhelmingly white, and quite male…
I tried falconry in the UK on a day-long trial visit, and it was a bit disappointing actually. I imagined some kind of semi-spiritual relationship between the owner and their bird, but they portrayed it in really negative tones – as a really materialistic arrangement where the falcon will bugger off if you ever let it feed to completion during a hunting run. The birds were beautiful, though.
I was going to say white and male as well, but really I’m not sure the number is declining. Role playing is just expanding in a vast number of directions and is spreading its base out with it.
And yes on the falconry, very mechanical arrangement. Bird wants food and you use that to hunt. It just seems like a very neat way to take small game is all. That and it’s such an ancient tradition
For declining numbers and inheritance I was thinking of the OSR especially…
I wanted falconry to be romantic and noble, none of this mechanical crap. Watching the bird fly and swoop to your wrist is a fine sight, and I would like to think it was more Kes than it really was. This may have been slightly spoilt by the character of the guys showing me the falconry – they were a bunch of British rural rights activists, with a real distaste for people from the cities and a somewhat unpleasant demeanour. One of them had a very large bird that was obviously in the land of Falconry the equivalent of a pitbull. If you’ve spent much time in England you’ll be familiar with the special place in British culture held by the combat-gear wearing thug with his pitbull, poorly trained and uncontrolled and acting like a penis extension. Seeing the same character in falconry was depressing.
The boss of the falconry place told me a funny story though. He does pigeon-removal work in the city, because apparently a visit from a bird of prey just once a month will scare off the pigeons for a month. Sometimes he would take a barn owl, and he said that walking around town (from the car park to the building of interest, one presumes) with a barn owl on your wrist is a guaranteed chick magnet.
Compromise and Conceit 
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