Portrait of Joe the Falcon

By KATE POSS

Special to The Record

Joe, a noble saker falcon, is the inspiration for a series of paintings by artist Claudia Pettis, whose work is being celebrated this month at the Museo Gallery in Langley.

Saker falcons are among the world’s fastest birds, achieving speeds of 93 mph in level flight, and when diving, can reach speeds of 190 mph. They hunt rodents and small birds. Saker falcons are the national bird of the United Arab Emirates, and the sport of falconry — often associated with wealth and royalty — is more than 9,000 years old.

Locally, falconer Steve Layman — also a raptor educator and rehabber — owns and trains Joe. He agreed to let Pettis photograph the aristocratic-looking falcon as a model for her paintings.

Pettis is known locally for her prolific works depicting sheep, whose woolly coats, spirit and personalities inspired her for years. Her art has graced galleries the past decades, and she has been commissioned by private collectors as well.

It was during the COVID pandemic while reading Helen MacDonald’s memoir, “H is for Hawk,” that Pettis found a new subject to dive into and explore. The book finds the author in deep grief over the sudden death of her father. It was by training a fierce goshawk, a close relative to the saker falcon, that MacDonald found the inspiration to feel alive again.

“They’re a very difficult hawk to train,” Pettis said of goshawks. “The hood became part of the training. While we were in COVID, when I put on my mask, I really thought about what a falcon goes through. I really felt safer.”

Layman agreed, saying the falcon’s hood “is a humane way to transport the bird from one place to the next. With this guy (Joe), I offer a hood and he knows it’s a nice, safe place.”

He recalled establishing a raptor rehabilitation program with Jim Foster, a Woodland Park Zoo veterinarian, where hoods were used to calm injured birds and prevent them from hurting themselves further with panicked movements.

“We were the first to use hoods in rehab,” Layman said. “The birds feel nice and closed in.”

All of Pettis’ paintings depict Joe wearing his leather hood. The images she paints and emotions they evoke are born from her immersion into her subject.

To deepen her connection with raptors and her painting, Layman recommended that Pettis read “Understanding Birds of Prey” by Nick Fox.

To convey the inspiration of Joe the saker falcon, Pettis read a passage from the book to Nancy Whittaker, co-owner of the Museo Gallery. Whittaker stopped by the artist’s studio to meet Joe and get a sense of which paintings would be part of the upcoming exhibit.

“Is this why we admire the falcon so much?” Pettis read. “She may be frightened of you, she may be angry at you, she may be pleased to see you. She will never lie to you, although you may not understand her. She has no self pity and, even on the point of death from some consuming disease, her spirit is unbroken. It is a privilege to be in the presence of such a spirit, to draw strength from it and to learn from it. The gaze of a dying falcon is the distillation of life and a denial of triviality.”

Layman believes this philosophy made its way into the artwork.

“Not to give idle compliments, in our conversation I could see your interpretation of what you feel show up in the painting,” he said. “It’s not artificial.”

Pettis described the delicious experience of focus — where time is gone and she’s in the the flow —experienced while painting Joe’s various moods.

“I do what is moving me at the time I’m experiencing it,” she said. “I kept looking at the hood, touching his feathers. Feathers are way different than wool. That’s what’s taken me so long, is to get the feel of the bird, not just what it looks like. The feel of the bird is magnificent, it has a mystery heritage.”

Joe inspired Pettis to research falcon history from England and North Africa, Japan and Arabic countries; in these places kings, knights, sheiks and shoguns competed in the sport.

“When you experience a saker falcon, you can’t help but go to those places,” she said. “Painting falcons came as a surprise. It’s all coming from that initial immersion in my subject that I couldn’t possibly paint a falcon as I did a sheep. It’s a whole different world.”

It’s easy to fall in love with Joe. There’s something about being with him that quiets the mind and inspires awe. Frankly, it is difficult to look away from him.

Layman found his avocation with raptors as a middle schooler living in Yakima. A cover of a 1930s National Geographic magazine depicting the life of an Indian prince and his skills with falconry set him on his course. As a hunter, he observed how raptors followed when dogs flushed rabbits out of the bushes. So connected was Layman to raptors that he began raising hawks as pets and hunting with them.

“Growing up I had pet magpies and ravens, and I wanted a hawk to replicate the image I had from National Geographic,” he recalled. “We ran around the Yakima River from dawn till dark in the 50s, early 60s. No one put a leash on you. We’d find red tail hawk and kestrel nests. We’d climb trees and big cottonwoods and get young ones. My mom was great, letting me raise the birds, an Iowa farm girl. I got from books from Europe that taught me how to figure out how to feed them and train them to come back.”

While falconry is typically practiced by royalty and the wealthy in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, North American falconry is most often based on natural history, Layman explained.

“Almost all the falconers I know have an interest in biology,” he said.

Layman was a biologist working in the Yakima area as an adult. When the economy turned sour during the ’80s, he started a new line of work which gave him freedom to continue working with birds of prey and earn a better living than that of a biologist.

“I figured out a service business — washing windows — which gave me time to pursue my interest and still be involved in research,” he said. “It was the best darn business.”

Washing windows took him to the Seattle area where he attracted hundreds of customers. One client asked him to clean windows on Whidbey back in the late ’80s. He liked the island and thought it would be a great place to raise his family and hunt with his birds. He noticed Whidbey had a lot of rabbits. The Layman family moved to Whidbey in 1989. He has since remained immersed in falconry, researching, teaching and rehabbing raptors.

Meanwhile, Pettis recalled a book she read, “The Peregrine,” by J.A. Baker.

“This sentence that Baker wrote so moved me, it left me breathless,” she wrote in an email.

Here is the sentence: “I will follow him till my predatory human shape no longer darkens in terror the shaken kaleidoscope of color that stains the deep fovea of his brilliant eye. My pagan head shall sink into the winter land, and there be purified.”