- [Announcer] Funding for this program is provided in part by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.

(soft music) (upbeat music) - [Narrator] Coming up on the next "Off 90."

We visit with the president of the Minnesota Falconers Association.

(upbeat music continues) Then we travel to Grand Meadow to learn about a regional chert quarry.

It's all just ahead on the next "Off 90."

(bright upbeat music) (bright upbeat music continues) (bright music) (gentle music) - I am Grant Hartman.

I'm the president of the Minnesota Falconers Association.

(gentle music continues) By definition, falconry is kind of the sport of pursuing quarry with a trained raptor.

Falconry itself is thousands of years old.

You know, before shotguns and gunpowder, it's pretty hard to catch a bird.

The only way you can really do that well is with another bird.

And so, you know, I think it, the oldest, it goes back might be like 5,000-ish years.

You know, people in Mongolia using eagles to kind of go for foxes and things like that.

You know, there's plenty of falcons in the hieroglyphics of, you know, the pyramids and stuff like that.

So, it's a incredibly old sport and method of hunting.

We follow pretty much all the same regulations as you would for a normal hunting license.

We hunt kind of September 1st through the end of February.

There's essentially three different types of falconry, to boil it down.

So most of falconry in Minnesota is done with a red-tailed hawk and legally you have to start with a red-tailed hawk, once you get your license.

They're from the Buteo family, and those sit in a perch and watch what you're doing and kind of follow along from tree top to tree top watching for what you flush.

And that would be red tails and Harris's hawks are kind of the only ones that get used in Minnesota.

Then we have short wings, which are the Accipiter family of birds.

So they have shorter wings, longer tails, and they're more native to, like, this would be goshawks and they're more native to like thicker timbery areas here.

And so what that means is they can take off and accelerate really quickly and do lots of tight maneuvering.

And so those hunt off the fist compared to a red-tailed hawk, which is kind of hunting from a tree.

So when you have one on your fist, you're walking around, you and the dog are working brush, and when you flush a rabbit, you just kind of toss 'em.

And then the third type would be long winging.

And that is for all of the falcons.

So that wouldn't use, you know, peregrine falcons, prairie falcons, cheer falcons, any kind of falcon.

And they hunt a lot differently than the other two.

And so they need to be up really, really, really high.

And then you flush game and they utilize all that height to fly super, super fast and hit a bird out of the air.

And so those are used primarily on, like, pheasants, ducks, other birds.

So structurally they have, like, long skinny toes compared to, like, a red-tailed hawk.

So they have all that surface area to hit another bird in the air.

In falconry, the birds that we use usually wear bells.

And so that's how, that's so you know where they are.

- Do you have a male and a female or just a male (indistinct)?

- I just have a boy.

- It's pretty hard actually to keep your eyes on where, you know, your bird is.

And so just being able to hear them take flight lets you know kind of what direction they were moving.

In the United States, pretty much every state has a graduated license system for falconry.

So when you start, you are an apprentice for at least two years.

When you're an apprentice in Minnesota, you can only fly a red-tailed hawk and that red-tailed hawk you have to have trapped from the wild when it was less than a year old.

So they hatch in the spring and then they're fully grown physically within about eight weeks.

So they're as big as they'll ever be by about eight weeks.

We trap them later in the fall, after August 21st is the earliest you can do it.

So they are fully physically grown, it's just that they are starting to hunt for themselves and their parents are weaning them off.

So we're intervening, you know, as they're just starting to figure out life on their own.

So it's kind of the equivalent of like a 20, 22-year-old person.

And then what's cool is since you trap them from the wild, they never lose their wild instincts.

So, at the end of the season, if you'd like, you can release that hawk right back into the wild.

And that first year of life, they have a 70 to 80% mortality rate.

And so in theory, you're trapping a bird that wouldn't have survived on its own.

You're kind of giving it the safety net of regular meals, vet care, anything that it might need that it wouldn't get in the wild.

And giving it more opportunities to learn how to hunt better and ensure its survival.

So you're releasing a bird at the end that probably wouldn't have made it on its own and now it's more than capable of taking care of itself.

So once you finish your apprenticeship, you move onto a general, and once you have your general permit, that kind of opens up the playing field to being able to use pretty much any bird that you would want to in falconry.

And then you can also get those birds in different ways.

So you can pull one from a nest, you can buy one from a breeder, pretty much any way that you want.

And then you can also have more than one bird.

You can have up to two with your general permit.

And that general level lasts for 10 years I think.

And then you become a master of falconry.

And the only kind of benefit of that is then you could have up to five birds, I believe.

But that's a lot to manage.

So, pretty much no one does that.

My bird doesn't... Birds don't understand anything we're doing kind of beyond food.

The only communication I have with my bird is a couple whistles.

Some people don't use whistles, some people do.

It's just kind of repeatedly pairing that whistle with whatever you want.

So if I want my bird to come a little bit closer, I have a whistle that it knows that, you know, I've got food on my glove, get over here.

And then there's kind of like an emergency whistle, which they've only heard when there's a lot of food out on what we call a lure.

And that's just something they've, my bird has only ever seen that lure with a lot of food on it.

So when I blow my lure whistle and that lure is out, it is like nothing's getting in her way of getting to that lure.

And that's kind of like an e-brake.

So you need to be able to do that if they're getting near a power line or something dangerous or, you know, I've had a bird get tangled up with like an owl.

And so we use that lure as like a right now come over here to, like, stop what you're doing, there's all this food.

And so after so much pairing with that, that lure and that whistle, it is like, immediate, hopefully if you've done it right.

To be a good falconer, you definitely have to have lots of time to dump into it.

Whether that is, you know, the process of trapping a bird can be very time-intensive.

Training a bird can be time-intensive during the hunting season, which is, you know, the fun part that is also very time-intensive.

So it really demands a lot of your free time and it's more of a lifestyle than it is a hobby.

I would say during the hunting season, on average I'm spending maybe two to three hours hunting, whether that is, you know, driving to where we're going or the actual hunting itself or you know, driving home, it eats up a lot of time.

There's about a hundred different niche, you know, roads to go down within falconry.

So it just depends on what part speak to you most.

Whether it be animal training or leather working, you know, you have to make a lot of the equipment, trapping, like each part of falconry is like a deep dive in itself.

So you have to kind of have a lot of interest in a variety of things.

It's hard to get into the brain of a rabbit, but what's beneficial about also using a dog is they now are more concerned about predators on the ground versus being aware of something coming from the air.

So they're trying to flee you or the dog mainly.

And that bird is utilizing the element of surprise to get 'em from above.

So to get your falconry permit, what you need to do is pass a test with the DNR.

You have to find a licensed falconer who's been doing it for at least four or five years to agree to sponsor you for your two-year apprenticeship.

And then you have to hopefully under the supervision of your sponsor, you then have to construct facilities to house 'em in called a mews.

And the DNR has to come and inspect that mews to make sure that it meets all the regulations and there's nothing that your bird would kind of injure itself on.

We have an apprentice coordinator and he takes out a lot of people each year I take out people... We're always taking new people out in the field.

Some people like it because then you get an extra body there to kind of help beat brush and your bird's gonna be more successful for it.

Yeah, we take new people out all the time without birds.

I would say if you want to get started in falconry, each state kind of has its own club and so the Minnesota Falconers Association is good for people to get that start so you can meet people that have their licenses and be potential sponsors and kind of go out hunting with people as much as you can to get a good idea of what it's actually like.

You know, you don't wanna go through all that work only to go out for your first hunt and decide, "I don't like this," or, "This isn't what I thought it would be."

So it's really important to kind of experience it as much as you can ahead of time.

And so that's where a club like us comes in handy because we can take you out hunting or we can kind of show you what this looks like up close and personal or give you an overview on how this equipment works or, you know, we're a very kind of open group of people and a lot of people that are excited to kind of share their knowledge and help people learn what they've spent essentially a lifetime learning themselves.

(bright upbeat music) (bright gentle music) (gentle music continues) - I am Tom Trow, I'm the project director and consulting archeologist for the Grand Meadow Chert Quarry, also known as Wanhi Yukan, which is a site in southern Minnesota.

It's the most recent archeological site to come to light and be available to the public to come see.

This is a place where Native Americans came for 8,000 years to get stone out of the ground that they used for making all of the tools that they need for daily use.

The stone is called chert, which is in Europe known as flint, same thing.

But it's a kind of stone that keeps its shape after you start hitting it with a rock to turn it into something like a knife or an arrowhead or a spearpoint or a number of other tools.

And then you can keep resharpening it.

And that's one of the important features of chert.

The chert from here is only one of 26 cherts in Minnesota.

For 7,000 years, they came here and got all the Grand Meadow chert they needed by simply walking along a creek bed and taking nodules out of the ground.

Something happened about a thousand years ago.

The amount of Grand Meadow chert they needed to take out of here increased.

They started coming back for more and more and they didn't have enough any longer in the stream beds where they were finding the nodules.

They realized that if they stepped out of the stream and dug a hole, a shallow hole, they could get more chert out of the ground.

So that's what they started to do.

And the problem is the landscape rises and so as the landscape went north away from the creek, they had to dig deeper holes to get at the flat level of chert and they did it, it was worth it.

They kept on digging.

Nodules are just great big pieces of crystallized stone and this is what they look like.

This is a piece of Grand Meadow chert.

- Flint knapping is when you take a nodule, usually you start by putting it on an anvil stone, which is a stone on the ground.

We have a couple here, which is quite exciting and you wanna split it open.

So then first you're kind of checking the quality of the chert and then if it's good quality, you're taking rocks and you're shaping it into something.

And so the great thing about chert is that the way it fractures is remarkably predictable.

- So from this they would be able to make something that looks like this.

This is a knife about 5,000 years old, but in a closeup view you'll be able to see the serrated edge, the very fine flaking.

And note that the flake pattern is different on both edges.

That's how we know it's not a spear, it's not aerodynamic, but it is perfect for just holding in your hand and being able to cut.

The Grand Meadow Chert Quarry wasn't really known to archeologists until recently, until 1980.

We got here because a local collector of artifacts and rocks found it when he was a kid and he knew what it was, he figured it out.

- Maynard Green was a local collector from Grand Meadow and he passed away in 2011, I believe.

And we have his collection at the Historical Society in Austin, which is over 800 points, spearheads, arrowheads.

Most of Maynard's collection was all found within 20 miles of the Grand Meadow area.

So that makes his collection very specific to Mower County.

- After we found the place in 1980 and we put it in an archeological record and shortly after that, I gave a talk to the archeological community and convinced folks that that's what we had here, that it was a chert quarry unique to Minnesota.

And I think all of my colleagues recognized how special it was.

So what we have now is a collaborative partnership among the Archeological Conservancy, the Prairie Island Indian Community, and the Mower County Historical Society.

So together we are preserving and protecting this space and also making it accessible to the public.

- I'm Randall J. Forster.

I am the executive director for the Mower County Historical Society and over the last several years, I've been kind of spearheading the project with our different partners to make this site here open and accessible to the public.

- This project began in the fall of 2019, and I presented to a round table the idea of what we have here, what we wanted to accomplish.

And we had literally a hundred percent enthusiastic support from the Soil and Water Conservation District, from the DNR, from the county administrators, from the local landowners who were at the table.

Nobody said no.

So, alright, that's good, but we were not gonna move forward without an indigenous partner.

So I figured I'd have to go to the four Dakota communities and ask them if they would join us with a seat at the table for making all the decisions.

And I started with Prairie Island, I told them about the site, showed them some slides, talked to their tribal historic preservation office staff.

And when I finished, Frankie Jackson said, "We have no idea this exists.

Nobody told us.

We don't have any oral history about this.

This is just a total surprise.

Tell us how to help."

(gentle music) - I am Dr.

Ron Schirmer, I'm a professor of anthropology at Minnesota State University of Mankato.

I focus in my prehistoric work on the ancestors of today's Siouan-speaking people, so mostly Dakota folks, but also Ho-Chunk and Ioway, Oto, and all of those sorts of folks.

So here today in back of me what we're doing is a method called electrical resistivity.

And that involves laying out a grid of a whole bunch of electrodes that all connect to a whole series of boxes that switch the current amongst all of the different probes, sending current to different pairs of probes across the whole grid.

Why that's useful is because when people disturb the ground, they may dig a pit and then it may fill in and if they dug the pit and then it filled in, there's going to be more pore space between the soil particles there and that is going to increase how resistive that soil is in that pit to electrical current traveling through it.

So we can look at all of these different measurements across these probes and map out where different parts of the site are and what they, how we can characterize them.

You can see that there are higher areas and lower areas, there's kind of strangely shaped pits.

And what those things speak to is the fact that sometimes people would come and dig a pit and then later on they'd come back and dig another pit and then see, oh, there's a nice big hole there, let's just put all the soil in there.

So this is a way that we can do these analyses and figure out the timing of when pits were dug and when pits were filled in.

Because if a pit is filled in, that means it's an earlier one.

And we can also look at the profiles and see which pits intrude into other pits.

And that of course tells us the sequence of the pits there as well.

- I'm Ari Reyes, I'm a student at Carleton College, and I'm on a grant to do research for Tom.

Every year, the archeology class comes and takes a trip here and we do some work as part of our kind of community engagement element.

And so my first year we were here helping clear buckthorn, which has been a long mission here as part of the environmental restoration.

And last year I came as a teaching assistant for that class and I met Tom.

We got to talking and he mentioned that he wanted a Wikipedia page, and I felt prepared to help him take on that task.

- The best way that we have to communicate about the site is we have a lot of information posted on our website at the Mower County Historical Society.

We have a great Wikipedia page with lots of information, lots of published articles that people have written about Grand Meadow chert.

(gentle music) So when you first arrive here at the site, we have a public parking area and then you can kind of walk through the trails.

We have a welcome kiosk that kind of has a little introductory about the site, a little map.

And then as you walk through the trails, we have 12 different interpretive signs that are all written in English and Dakota.

- All of the signage here in the chert quarry was written in collaboration with the tribal communities and especially with Prairie Island's elders who got to review the drafts after they first made suggestions about what the signage should contain.

And then they got to review our first guess as to what we should do in response to that.

And then before we went to the final creation of the signage, they got to see it one last time, and they've been here now and toured through and saw the results of their help.

But it's been at every step a collaboration.

- A lot of flint knappers take interest in this site and at the Historical Society they can find samples of Grand Meadow chert that they can then knap and practice knapping.

And so we have experts who can come and kind of reenact the process that indigenous folks were using to make these artifacts as well, which is cool.

- I think this site has so much potential for the future.

One of the things that we're currently working on right now is some educational programs with our partners at Rochester Public Schools, Austin Public Schools.

And we would really like to create an indigenous day here at the quarry.

One of the goals is to possibly have sixth grade tours come to this site on an annual basis, and hopefully we can make that happen in the near future.

- All of the project here has been informed by our partnership with the four Dakota communities in Minnesota, and those communities have worked together with the Prairie Island Indian Community as their representative.

So we've been in touch with all of them, but it's Prairie Island that makes the decisions with us on their behalf, that was their request.

So it's been really great to work with their tribal historic preservation office and to be able to touch on the information we need at every step that we go.

And they help us make the decisions about what we're looking for and where to look.

But most importantly, they've been helping us with the interpretation of the site.

Behind me is one of two bur oak trees that have been here for hundreds and hundreds of years.

Our estimate is this is a little bit over 500 years old, and we call it the grandfather tree because that's what our indigenous partners called it.

And the other tree is the grandmother tree.

It's a tree that's special to anybody who comes in here that's indigenous.

The first time I walked in with an elder, I was with a small group of people and he just stopped in his tracks and started singing to the tree and said, "That's the problem with so many trees dying in northern Minnesota.

Nobody's there to sing to them anymore."

(wind blowing) (gentle music) - Every time I'm here, I'm always struck walking through the pits at how the site sort of tells a story.

I mean, as you're walking, you can imagine people digging.

You can imagine people in those pits with their bison scapulas and their digging sticks.

It just feels remarkably spiritual.

And I think just looking, it's so accessible to seeing archeology everywhere.

Sometimes I'm out in the prairie and I'll be walking and I'll be looking down and I can pick up a nodule of chert or a chert flake and think, "Wow, somebody thousands of years ago picked this up.

And this is part of something that was shaped into something that can become incredibly useful."

- This isn't about just what happened in the past.

This is a living site, and we added to the official name of it, the word cultural.

It's an archeological and cultural preserve.

That's important so that people are reminded of that when they come in, that this has meaning and significance in a very current way to everybody who walks in here.

And to that end, we really aimed all of our interpretive program at Dakota youth so that they specifically would have a place to come and when they walked in, they would know that they're surrounded by something special that their ancestors did and that they would have a chance to experience that firsthand now.

(music ends) (bright upbeat music) (bright upbeat music continues) (bright upbeat music continues) (bright upbeat music continues) (soft music) - [Announcer] Funding for this program is provided in part by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.

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