Where are all the feminine falconers? Lauren Maccabee pictures the women selecting bird-rearing over social media

Ken Loach’s Kes is broadly seen as one of many twentieth century’s masterpieces of social realist cinema. The movie, which relies on Barry Hines’ novel A Kestrel for a Knave, follows Billy, a boy from Barnsley who finds solace from bullies (each in school and inside his own residence) by means of his tender relationship with an injured kestrel who he heals, trains, befriends and christens Kes. It’s a movie that proves the resonance of interspecies relationships, and it’s one which additionally struck a chord with the photographer Lauren Maccabee when she first watched it as a young person. It’s stayed along with her ever since, fuelling her personal curiosity in falcons, falconry and birds generally. But, within the midst of this intrigue, there was one niggling query that the photographer simply couldn’t shake: Where had been all the feminine falconers?

Lauren got down to reply the query herself and commenced looking for the ladies who had been bucking the development and “subverting this traditionally male practice”, the photographer tells It’s Nice That. At the tip of an extended rabbit gap of analysis, Lauren got here throughout a household in Dorset, the place two sisters, Connie and Elsie, had been studying the artwork of falconry from a really younger age, taught by their father, himself an skilled falconer. Together, the trio work arduous for the welfare of the birds they hold, primarily housing rescues, breeding critically endangered species and taking part in initiatives to re-release birds into the wild.

As effectively as capturing the women with the birds, Lauren wished to doc the day-to-day wants of caring for birds (one shot reveals Connie sat at a workshop desk with numerous leatherwork instruments for making and sustaining gloves, anklets, leashes and extra), and upon seeing the lengthy record, she realised a number of journeys could be obligatory to actually get to the guts of their dedication. On the shoots, Lauren says, “I was expecting more unpredictability from the birds – but it felt like the girls could almost tell what mood each bird was in before I photographed them. This was something I found particularly fascinating; their knowledge and understanding of the birds was much deeper than I could have imagined.” The depth of this bond shines in Lauren’s pictures.