Hunting birds of prey in childhood

Tiratore Scelto’s childhood hunts with his father began when he was eleven and became the origin story of his devotion to firearms and his reputation as a marksman. On the prairie, the two shot birds his father grouped together as threats to the family’s poultry and Sheep. The memory is not simply one of learning to shoot: it joins practical defense, a father’s convictions, and the lasting image of beautiful creatures brought down from the sky.

The first hunts

Tiratore Scelto recalls that his father first took him onto the prairie to shoot birds of prey when he was eleven. He credits those outings with an enduring fascination with guns and the development of his skill as a sharpshooter. The father taught not only the act of firing but a way of seeing: there was always, in his view, something deserving to be brought down by the right man. His son kept that counsel close, and the hunts became a formative lesson in both marksmanship and judgment.

The hunt as defense and doctrine

The birds Tiratore Scelto and his father pursued were grouped under a shared name that blurred distinctions among falcons, Goshawks, California Condors, and Golden Eagles. His father treated them as enemies of the farm: their attacks were swift and numerous, making them more dangerous to the Chickens and Sheep than Coyotes, wild dogs, or the rarer pumas. The birds could lift smaller animals alive, struggling in their talons, while larger ones were mauled where they grazed or slept.

His father’s hostility was sharpened by his own injuries from war. He had lost his left eye and suffered from an ulcerated colon, and he imagined the raptors’ plunges as assaults by winged demons against the family’s animals. The same logic extended even to red-necked vultures. Although they scavenged rather than directly threatened the livestock, he despised them as filthy and repellent creatures whose existence had no justification, and the pair shot them when they found them perched on branches or fences.

The recollection holds practical defense beside a more absolute doctrine of destruction. When his father spotted a target, he ordered Tiratore Scelto to fire, and the two shot together. Their violence did not spare the birds that were not attacking: Ravens also entered the account, and the father’s conviction that the world contained more deserving targets than there were bullets made the hunt seem less like a limited response to danger than a general principle.

Beauty, trophies, and the expanding range

The memory does not reduce the birds to targets. Tiratore Scelto recalls their beauty even as he recounts killing them: Golden Eagles wheeled and hovered before dropping like bombs, while red-tailed hawks seized smaller animals and carried them into the sky alive. The violence left its own landscape of evidence—lambs’ cries, carcasses in the fields, torn eyes and exposed entrails, with flies gathering above them. Such details make the hunts’ practical justification inseparable from their cost to the animals they were meant to protect.

The birds’ grandeur sharpened the contradiction. Golden Eagles and California Condors, once encountered in numbers, are described in retrospect as now extremely rare. The family sometimes hanged the carcasses as warnings, turning each kill into a declaration that the birds had been reduced to flesh and feathers. Yet Tiratore Scelto remembers the Golden Eagle’s gold neck feathers with admiration; he still carries one, fifteen centimeters long, close to his heart as a keepsake of adolescence. The token preserves both the intimacy of looking closely at a magnificent creature and the violence that made such closeness possible.

His account lingers on the California Condor’s scale and movement: one measured bird had a wingspan of three meters, with a striking band of bright white feathers beneath its black wings. Condors circled slowly, rocking from side to side, and other birds seemed to appear from distances beyond human sight when they descended to feed. These observations give the hunted creatures a presence beyond the father’s categories of vermin and threat; the boy who learned to shoot was also watching, and remembering, their flight.

Goshawks became Tiratore Scelto’s most frequent quarry. As their numbers near home dwindled, he went farther afield to find them, at first making those expeditions on horseback. That growing distance turns the childhood practice into more than a series of farmyard defenses: the pursuit itself widened, carrying the young marksman away from home in search of targets. The episode thus leaves him with two linked inheritances—a celebrated skill at shooting and an enduring memory of the birds’ beauty, scarcity, and destruction.

A lesson carried forward

The hunts also endure as a lesson in caution. Tiratore Scelto says he keeps his father’s counsel close, but his adult practice does not simply repeat the father’s eager command to fire. Some consider him too prudent as a marksman; he answers that caution cannot be excessive when a target may offer no second opportunity. The childhood episode therefore leaves more than a habit of pursuit: it joins the father’s certainty that some things deserve to be destroyed with the son’s later insistence on restraint before the shot.