Hunting with Eagles
- Arts & Culture
Written by Matthew Teller // Photos and video by Steve Shelton
“That’s an advantage for a falconer,” Hidetoshi Matsubara, 66, tells me, gazing out from Tamugimata village to the snowy peak of Mount Gassan.
An eagle’s prey is small animals like rabbits or squirrels. They can easily run into long grass or under bushes. But snowfall over two meters means all the bushes are covered. There’s no place to hide.
Tamugimata forms a tight cluster of fifteen houses perched on thickly wooded upland slopes. Up a roughly concreted track, a rickety farmhouse of wood and tile, built 120 years ago for silkworm-rearing, is Matsubara’s home.
Inside, a kettle hisses on a kerosene stove as a huge, tethered bird of prey – a golden eagle/tawny eagle hybrid – adjust its position on a branch propped across one corner of the dim living room. The bird, staring from its perch, stands perhaps 70 centimeters high. When it opens its wings, they reach almost two meters across the room.
This small, wiry man, with a distant fierceness in his clouded eyes, claims he is the last falconer in Japan to follow a traditional hawking lifestyle. He spends eight or nine months of the year, from fall through to the end of spring, training and hunting with big raptors – leaving his wife and son for weeks at a time over winter to live in the mountain forests with his eagles, hunting to eat and sleeping in a self-made snow cave.
He is eloquent about his passion.
“There are two types of falconry. I’ve never had any interest in flying goshawks and falcons down in the fields, near where people live. Since I was very small I always wanted to live in the mountains and be a falconer in great nature, with nobody else around, just the eagle and me. It’s more difficult – these big birds have strong characters and can be violent – but I’ve never given up. This is my unique way, this is what I wanted to do with my life. I make a very small income, helping out on farms in summer, but I can live with it. I have no regrets. My last dream is that, even when I become old and weak, I can still go out into the snowy mountains to walk with the eagle on my arm.
About the Author
Matthew Teller
Matthew Teller is a UK-based writer and journalist. His latest book, Nine Quarters of Jerusalem: A New Biography of the Old City, was published last year. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @matthewteller and at matthewteller.com.Steve Shelton
Seattle-based multimedia journalist Steve Shelton has covered stories in the US, Middle East, Balkans, Central America and Sudan for a wide variety of news publications as well as nonprofits and commercial clients.
You may also be interested in...
2025 Calendar - Textiles from the Islamic World
Arts & Culture
A simple strand of cotton or wool becomes a woven treasure by the hands of a textile artist. This calendar shares 12 months of forms, designs and shapes that reflect the artists' interest and culture.
The Rise of Contemporary Art in the Arabian Gulf
Arts & Culture
From installations in the desert to abstract sculptures by the sea, the Arabian Gulf is flourishing as a multicultural hub for contemporary art. Part of a cultural revolution marked by the expansion of galleries and exhibitions, the surge of interest has helped artists from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates rise to the global scene. The growth of this art ecosystem is being hailed as a seminal moment in that cultural transformation.
Finding Structure: A Conversation with Eric Broug
Arts & Culture
As a boy living in Jakarta, where his Dutch father worked as a civil engineer in the early 1970s, Eric Broug grew fascinated with Islamic culture. By the 1990s, after having begun studies in Middle Eastern politics at the University of Amsterdam, Broug turned his interest to Islamic geometric design and joined the master’s program at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies in Islamic art and archeology.