EXTRAORDINARY PEOPLE: The Master Falconer

SHALLOTTE, NC (WWAY) — Our Extraordinary Person of the Week uses birds for a variety of purposes.  They are used for education, hunting, and even to deal with nuisance animals in a natural way. Nuisance animals and over-population that can bring down airplanes. Chip Gentry is a Master Falconer who has quite the wild life as we found out in Shallotte.

“They get an up close, intimate look at birds of prey,” Chip Gentry said of his educational programs. “They learn about history and ecology and physiology and environmental science.”

Gentry has always had a love for the wild side. It started with a pet shop. His life would change when a ‘falconer’ walked in his doors.

“Now, I had all kinds of parrots and trained birds,” Gentry said of his life running an exotic pet store, “but I had never messed with raptors and he took me outside and showed me this bird and said, you want to go hunting? And I said, yeah!”

After a lengthy process, Gentry would become a Master Falconer, too.

He uses the birds of prey to educate the public on what role they play and how vital they are to us.

“If you think about the most common bird of prey in North America, the red tail(hawk), she’s eating 3000 rodents a year. If you take them all away tomorrow, how devastating would it be to our environment. The crop destruction, sickness and disease,” Gentry said.

Gentry also uses his birds of prey to scare off nuisance birds through a process called abatement.

“Instead of using loud noises and poisons and different things that are not environmentally green,” Gentry said, “we just put predator against prey. So we work these birds at manufacturing facilities, farming outfits that ship overseas, golf courses, shopping centers.”

He says they aren’t necessarily hunting, but scaring. “They all know that the predator is there and they don’t want to be anywhere close. As you do that for any period of time, those birds will set up shop someplace else.”

Some place else. Like away from an airport and airplanes landing and taking off.

It’s those kind of educational and environmental techniques that makes you, Chip Gentry, extraordinary.

Chip also works at times with the Cape Fear Raptor Center.
You can read more about what Hawk Manor Falconry does with birds of prey here.