Who I am and what I do

A side from my family, falconry is my passion. I have always been interested in wildlife for as long as I could remember. I became acquainted with falconry when I was in High School in 1984 when I first got my apprenticeship. I apprenticed under Dave Noble (the renowned bell maker), which at the time was over a two-hour trip for me to get to his house, but he was the closest falconer that would take an apprentice. My falconry journey has been a blast ever since.

My name is Tou Yang. I am married to my wonderful wife for 26 years now. We have four great kids (2 boys and 2 girls). I am a Project Manager Civil Engineer (registered Professional Engineer) for the State of Wisconsin Department of Transportation. I spent the first 22 years of my career at WisDOT designing & building state highways and bridges, but now I mainly manage and perform quality control for the Northwest Region's highway projects. The NW Region covers 20 counties, which ranges from Jackson County all the way to the City of Superior, Douglas County. I am currently serving on numerous statewide committees on developing policies and guidance on state highway design and construction standards. And I am also actively writing software applications to provide efficiency and promoting "lean" and responsible government.

How Modern Falconry came about

I made my first bownet in the fall of 1991 with the rotating hoop and springs attached to a 2x4 wooden "T" frame, which was crude but adequate for the job for the most part. But when I lost a nice passage goshawk that scrambled out from under the trap because it didn't have enough slack in the netting and spring tension to take the thrashing that only a goshawk could give after being trapped and upon seeing an excited falconer sprinting towards it. As a result, the goshawk slipped out from under the hoop when it got close to the edge. Since then I vowed to come up with a better design and materials to make my bownet as reliable as possible. I have made quite a few improvements to my original bownet concepts since (no more 2x4's) and have been using that design since 1997 and it's been performing flawlessly.

Well, I have to admit, there were times when I still missed trapping a hawk now a then, but they were due to "operator" errors...like the fall of 2000, when I was surprised to see a passage goshawk doing Mach 1 towards the lure from about 1500 ft out. Panicked, I tried to reel the pigeon into the center of the bownet; naturally, I grabbed the triggerline instead of the lureline and released the trap prematurely ( Click here to see how I solved that problem). So I reluctantly got out of the blind and shooed her off before she could grab the pigeon (I didn't set up the dho-gazza to supplement the bownet at the time, but now I always do).

Or the time when I released the trap on a nice passage red-tailed...and nothing happened. I pulled on the triggerline again and nothing...went to see what was wrong and sure enough the safety hook was still engaged! Or like the time when I let my four year-old son set the trap (me holding down the hoop of course and the safety hook inplace). As luck would have it, we lured in a nice red-tailed that folded up from about 2000 ft. up and dropped right on the lure. When I released the trap, it went about a third of the way up and STOP. When we investigated it further, it turned out that my son had neatly tucked the safety hook into the folded up netting and when we released it, the hook eventually caught the netting.

I could go on and on, but you probably already knew that Murphy's Law could have easily been uttered by a falconer instead of an engineer, right?

I have also designed and built my own "Automatic Goshawk Traps" over the years and always looking for a way to make it more ergonomic - lightweight, portability, versatility, and ease of use. My Swedish Goshawk Trap design is simply the best stationary trap out there. It's collapsible and the trap section may be detached and used as a stand-alone bownet (only on the Compound-Bownet model). Of course I also designed and fabricate my own remote trigger for these bownets.

I have always thought that there's got to be a better way in keeping daily records of my hawking activities and training/manning statistics. So in 1999 I started writing a program specifically for keeping falconry diary logs. I initially wrote the program in Visual Basic, but soon realized the potential of MSExcel's extensibility and decided to switch to writing the program in Excel to take advantage of its flexibilty and other functions such as mathematical capabilities. It is a perfect combination, using Excel as a platform to collect/store data then apply it's multitude of functionalities to perform tasks such as plotting graphs of various activities like - weights, performance, temperatures, quarry caught vs. weights, etc. I have also written my own custom modules to compute daily food requirement for a hawk with a specific weight in reference to the expected low temperature of the day....I also realized the need to keep it flexible by making the program versatile enough that the user could switch between US & Metric system on the fly so he/she is not limited to working in just one system.