Bird Brother: A Falconer’s Journey and the Healing Power of Wildlife, Rodney Stotts is a master falconer who has spent nearly a decade trainingand apprenticing to trap, care for, and teach raptors to hunt alongside humans.
Rodney Stotts is a master falconer who has spent nearly a decade trainingand apprenticing to trap, care for, and teach raptors to hunt alongside humans. (His bird of choice? Harris’s Hawks.) But Stotts has spent just as much of his career educating others—and helping more people realize that falconry is something they can do, too.
In his new memoir, Bird Brother: A Falconer’s Journey and the Healing Power of Wildlife, Stotts shares how he arrived at that revelation. With humor and a deep respect for those who influenced him, Stotts recounts how an innate love of nature stuck with him through years of ups and downs. He grew up in housing projects in southeast Washington, D.C., and in the early 1990s took a job cleaning up the Anacostia River with the Earth Conservation Corps (ECC), which set him on a path of becoming a conservationist. All the while, however, he juggled various other part-time jobs, including dealing drugs. In 2002, he was sent to jail due to more punishing laws about possession of marijuana, but by then he’d already started helping with raptor rehabilitation at the ECC. When he was released in 2003, he had a sense of clarity about what he wanted to do with his life. Ever since, he’s dedicated his time to falconry, educating people about raptors, and eventually training his son Mike to be a falconer, too.
A willingness to look at life differently is important to Stotts, both in his own path toward working with animals—which he hadn’t thought possible growing up—and in teaching people to appreciate birds. “Look up and you’ll start to see things,” he says. “You’re riding down the highway, you will pass 10 hawks.” (The day after we spoke, I looked up while driving at sunrise; there was a raptor perched on a light pole.) Stotts’s charisma and knack for storytelling have already placed him in the spotlight, including in the documentary The Falconer and a 2016 piece in Audubon. With his new book, Stotts is sharing his journey in his words.
Reached by phone on his property in rural Virginia, Stotts sounded most excited about plans for a new chapter in sharing his love of the outdoors. He’s been clearing land to build a sanctuary called Dippy’s Dream, named after his late mother, where people can camp and spend time with animals like horses, goats, and of course, birds. It will be donation-based so that anyone can attend if they can't afford to pay. He hopes to provide a space for people to find release and connect with the renewed perspective that nature can offer. "It's a place to come and heal," Stotts says.
