GOSHEN—It’s a big responsibility to own a bird of prey, and master falconer Thomas Cullen has almost 100 of them at his home at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac in Goshen. In May he brought some of them out for a show-and-tell as part of a fundraiser for the Cheetah Conservation Fund, which included a cheetah named Adaeze and her dog companion Odie from the Leo Zoological Conservation Center in Greenwich, Connecticut. Birds of prey are defined as birds that hunt with their feet instead of their beaks and there are around 700 different species, Cullen said. He breeds and trains them to go hunting with him, a sport called falconry that dates back at least 2,000 years, he said.
A 4-week old boobook owl in Goshen on May 14, 2016. Holly Kellum/Epoch Times
