Samson J. Falconry today

Second Edition. — New York, NY: H.Z. Walck, 1976. — 112 p. — ISBN13: 978-0809839261.In the mid-1930s, Jack Samson had charge of the live hawks, falcons, and owls at New York's Bear Mountain Srare Park outdoor wildlife
interpretive exhibitions operated by the American Museum of Natural History. Peregrine falcons still nested then — long before DDT spread its curse over the land — on nearby Storm King Mountain and on the Palisades of the Hudson River within sight of New York City.
Jack was not content to maintain his charges in cages. Happiness for him was to walk about with everything from red-shouldered hawks to great horned owls perched on his wrist. With great patience and skill in conditioning the birds, he devised a system of displaying them in the open by preparing soft leather jesses for their legs, and tethering them to padded perches or blocks, where they soon learned to be comfortable and ceased trting to escape. Thus, he was adapting an age-old method used by falconers to keep their trained birds in good shape. The birds were apt to break their feathers and otherwise injure themselves if kept behind wire Several zoos used this merhod in later years, not alone for the welfare of the birds, but because the public enjoyed seeing them without intervening wires or bars.
Leading falconers from rhe American Museum of Natural History visited the Bear Mountain bird exhibition and passed on their information to the young man in charge who soon became an authority in his own right, spending much of his time on the scientific study of raptorial species — their
behavior in and out of captivity, their food requirements, nesting and flight habits, and other details essential to a rounded and thorough knowledge of
the birds that had captivated him. His interest in falcons and falconry has persisted through the years, fostering a type of intimate relationship between bird and man that originated some two thousand years before Christ.