Name: Theo Von Learns About Homing Pigeons and Falconry
Uploaded: 2020-11-16T20:00:01.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Theo Von Learns About Homing Pigeons and Falconry' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-11-16. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Theo Von Learns About Homing Pigeons and Falconry' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-11-16. Transcript available.

You and I started talking about this because I did Mike Tyson's Hot Boxing, and
you were asking
me how it was, and he's very subdued. You know, I really, I love him. He's very,
very subdued,
but we ended up talking a lot about pigeons because he was a pigeon guy. That's
how he
kind of started. He got in a fight over somebody who stole his pigeon. That was
the first time he
ever hit anybody, and that's kind of a famous story, but he's a pigeon fancier,
and I grew up
with pigeons. I started racing, homing pigeons when I was seven years old. So
was that big,
because I remember I went to the Spy Museum one time in Philadelphia, and they
had pigeons that
had like a little briefcase on their arm. They had pigeons that have like a
little, can you bring
that up to, Nick? They'll have pigeons that even have like a little backpack on,
you know,
and they used to use them for spy work. Yeah, they have. Yes, that's true, and
in fact,
they used them for, well, of course, they've always been a military asset
because they would use them
to communicate, you know, before they had telephones and walkie-talkies, and in
fact,
they used them right up until World War I, and... And they really used them?
Like, if you do it,
like, what can you tell a pigeon, and he'll go... Well, you can't tell him
anything, but you can...
The pigeon will always go back to the first place that he saw daylight. Oh, if
you, you know, raise a...
If you get an adult pigeon, you buy a pigeon at pigeon auction, and, you know,
a really big Homer,
a classic these days, people pay a million dollars for a good Homer. For a good
Homer pigeon, please.
They rate them by miles. Oh, if you're a thousand mile bird, you know, you're
worth a lot of money.
Back when I was a kid, we would, you know, pay a couple. Yeah, those are called
blue bars.
Okay. And those are Hungarians, which is the kind that I used to raise.
And we would put them in a train, and the train with all the other, you know,
we were, we had a pigeon club,
and all the other people would put them in a train right outside of my home in
Virginia,
and the train would go down to Delaware, and the conductor would then release
them all at once,
and when your pigeon came back to your coop, you would, you would take his band
off and run down to the post office
and have it time stamped, and that's how they would, you know, that's how they
would do the races.
Really? Yeah.
And so, so the pigeon, they'll know, so, so, so the first place it sees
daylight is the place it'll always come back to?
It'll always come back to it. So if you buy a pigeon at an auction or whatever,
you have to keep that pigeon locked up for the rest of his life, because if he
ever gets out,
he'll go back to the place where he was born, but in the military...
Like a hot woman, kind of, you know?
In the military, they taught them how to go to a, they would have a little, a
coop on wheels,
and they would teach them to go to that coop, and they would keep moving the
coop
so that the pigeon would learn to find the coop, so he's not going back to a,
you know, to a stationary barn.
Wow.
And, in fact, during World War I, the, they knew where all of the falcon, falcons,
which I moved to falconry when I was about 10 years old.
Is that early to be moving to that, or is that where you, like, where is it?
Well, that's when I found out about it, and there happened to be a guy who
lived near me
who was one of the pioneers of American falconry, and I read a book about it.
My uncle was in the White House, and I, and people were talking about Camelot,
and I read a book about Camelot by T.H. White, who is a British author who is
also a falconer,
and he has, and that book was called The Once and Future King.
They later made it into a Disney, you know, movie called The Sword and the
Stone.
Oh, wow.
But there is a chapter in there on falconry, and I read that chapter,
and I just said, this is what I want to do with my life.
And as it happened, there was a guy who had been an all-American football
player at Penn State.
He lived about a mile from my house.
His name was Alvin Nye, and he was one of the pioneers of American falconry.
And my father knew about him because whenever he worked as a designer of jets
at the Pentagon.
Of jets?
Yeah.
He was designing jets, and he was an engineer.
And one of the things that the State Department knew about him,
because whenever they were visiting Arab dignitaries who came to Washington,
the Arabs are all crazy about falconry.
Really?
Yes, crazy about it.
And that's falcons, right?
Yeah, that's falcons.
So falcon is, I mean, so when you moved up to falcons, were you just, I mean,
I can imagine if you were leaving pigeons, you probably left them behind, huh?
Well, actually, pigeons remain, are kind of part of the sport of falconry.
Okay.
You use pigeons in all in different parts of the sport, so I kept pigeons.
I had pigeons all my life until, really, until I moved to California six years
ago, I kept pigeons.
But I still have hawks at, you know, back in New York.
I have my falconry license out here, but I never brought them out here.
I got involved in surfing and, you know, a lot of other stuff, and it just wasn't
as easy here.
But, yeah, so this guy, I apprenticed under this guy, under Alvin Nye,
beginning when I was about 11 years old.
And then at that time, there was no regulation.
They passed regulations in 1973, and then you had to get a license.
And, you know, I was, I actually wrote the test at Falconer's Take in New York
State and elsewhere to get their license.
And I've been involved in it my whole life.
So would you compete, like, once you have this knowledge in this, so you're
learning, and, like, what is the man teaching you when you learn from Mr., what
was his name again, Smith?
He's teaching you how to trap the hawk, how to care for it, how to treat it
when it gets sick, and, of course, how to train it and then hunt with it.
If you're hunting my birds, take, I fly mainly Harris Hawks, and I've flown
every kind of hawk, but nowadays I fly mainly Harris Hawks.
They're very easy and they're very, very fun, and they hunt in groups.
They're very sociable.
They seem to be, you know, what you and I would interpret as a faction towards
humans, and they're almost like dogs.
So when you take them to hunt, I mean, this is, because, I mean, I grew up
raising hamsters.
I didn't mean to be talking about this.
No, it's fascinating, man, because, so let's see a Harris Hawks.
I just want to see what this even looks like.
And now when you take them to train or something, what do they do?
Like, when you take them to hunt with them, like, they're in a cage or on your
arm?
No, actually, they'll ride on the backseat of the car.
Unbelievable.
And I knew that.
And they'll hunt.
You knew that.
I mean, I just had an inkling.
If I look like that, man, I'm definitely, you know, I'm not driving.
I'm definitely getting a ride.
And they really just like dogs.
When you get to the place where you're hunting, you let them out of the car,
and they'll usually jump up and sit for a second and orient on the roof of the
car.
And then when you, as you start walking through the woods, they'll follow you.
Okay.
Yeah.
And then I use, I hunt with dogs, too.
So I have a couple of dogs who will be, you know, looking for rabbits and
squirrel and pheasant and turkey.
And when they, and when something moves, they'll chase it.
Okay.
So if you say when you're walking through the woods, they'll what?
Just be kind of going from tree to tree.
They know that you're their owner the whole time?
Yeah, they go to tree to tree.
They stay in the canopy above your head.
And they know that you're going to kick up game.
So, you know, they know, they learn, and they learn.
Like, I, the bird that I was flying until recently, I had for 24 years.
Wow.
And then every year I would breed that bird and get some eggs and babies out of
them.
And, you know, those birds are now all over New York State and all over the, at
least all over the East Coast.
You're working at the grassroots level of helping the environment if you are
breeding birds.
Yeah.
Like I said, I, you know, it was a passion for me from when I was, when I was
really little.
Man, yeah, because we, I grew up, I used to sell hamsters when I was growing up,
and we used to, you know, the big ones around us were the Roborowski hamsters.
Would you bring that up, Nick?
This is in Louisiana.
Yeah.
And we used to sell hamsters and guinea pigs, or G-pigs, they used to call them.
Well, they eat those down there, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, they call them cooies in Latin America, in Ecuador.
Oh, you get down to, oh, you get down to Ecuador, bro, you take a gerbil
anywhere south of Paraguay, and it's a wrap, you know?
I mean, Nicaragua, you show up with one of these bad boys, they think it's
Thanksgiving, you know?
But we have a different affinity for animals now.
I feel like if it looks cute, or if it's been marketed as cute, it becomes not
a food anymore, you know?
Once things get marketed as being too cute.
So you'll get there into the world.
In truth, it's not a good food, in my opinion.
Anyhow.
Yeah.
And I, you know, when I, when I, I spent a lot of time in Ecuador, and I lived
in Peru for a while, and I ended up eating a lot of guinea pigs.
I went to a restaurant, I took Cheryl to a restaurant where they were selling
them for food, and they had them.
You know how the, when you go into a seafood restaurant in New England, and
they have all the lobsters in the tank, and you can pick the one, and they're
alive in there.
Well, they had one of those where they, they had this really cute guinea pig
house, and you could pick the guinea pig you were eating, and, you know, Cheryl
is just.
Broke her heart.
Yeah, broke her heart.
Hopefully it wasn't, that wasn't balanced.
No, it wasn't.
Wow, so, so, so, so very similar to the lobster in the tank, they just had
these guinea pigs, just like in a big, like, kind of a children's, like, playhouse
or something, kind of a little deal?
It was a multi-storied playhouse with little balconies on it, and it looked
like an apartment building for guinea pigs, and there's no way.
They look like little people in there, and there's no way that you would ever
eat one of those.
But some people are rolling in and being like, oh, that's the one?
Yeah.
That's amazing, man.
Yeah, we never had any of that.
I've had owl.
I've had some wild meats.
People that have, like, my sister's family will grill up anything that's dead.
So, we've had owl.
We've had, like, what else did we have?
The roadkill type.
What, owl?
Roadkill, yeah.
No, they'll have, like, yard chicken, just chickens that they've raised in
their yards.
I'm trying to think of what else that I've had that was probably, you know,
kind of unique growing up.
Snake.
Sometimes somebody, I used to work on a farm for a couple years, and people
would kill a snake.
And somebody, sometimes, if somebody had enough time, they would cook it at
lunch.
Well, you must have eaten alligator, because that's on all the menus down there.
Yeah, I've eaten alligator.
Frog was really, you know, when I was young, it was fun to give a kid some frog,
you know.
At the restaurants, they used to have a lot of these kind of singing.
They had, like, this kind of black group of gentlemen that were, like, a quartet,
and they would sing.
And then at the end of the thing, they would give all the kids a little bit of
frog, you know.
It was just, like, some, like, fancy kind of restaurant we would go to, like,
when my parents were having an anniversary or something.
But, man, that's wild, though.
I don't know.
I've never met anybody that knew how to hunt with a hawk.
I mean, that's pretty.
And do hawks have a, or with a falcon, does a falcon have an arch nemesis in
nature?
Well, falcons get eaten a lot by eagles.
Unbelievable.
And then at night, they get eaten by owls, because they can't see anything at
night.
And that's why you put a hood on them, because once it gets dark, they just get
calm, because there's nothing they can do about anything.
Wow.
Their eyes are adapted for seeing both microscopically and telescopically
during the daytime, but they're almost incapable of seeing anything at night.
But a lot of the western falconers, when they, you know, they hunt sage grouse,
and they have to hunt early in the morning because their birds will get eaten
by eagles.
When the bird goes down on a sage grouse, the eagle will see that from miles
away and go down and eat both the grouse and the hawk.
Damn.
I know those are, man.
Do you know, 80% of hawks die during their first year.
It's hard for them to figure out how to hunt, and they, you know, only the
really smart and lucky ones survive.
A lot of, they have a lot of nemesis.
It's mainly owls and eagles.
So you're growing up, so you guys, so take me back also to the pigeon thing.
So you would take a pigeon, you would let it go, you would put it on a train.
Yeah, we put it on the train.
And it was like a pigeon club you were in.
Yes.
So everybody have a pigeon, they put it on the train, it goes to somewhere,
maybe down to the beach or somewhere, wherever it takes it, Myrtle Beach or
something.
And then they let it loose.
Right.
And then.
You know, like maybe 100 miles, the really good pigeons would go 200 or 300
miles.
If you, you know, if you had a 500 mile homer, that's what you would brag about.
That's like having like one of those big marbles that does like a steely marbling.
Wow.
That's fascinating, man.
So, so now whoever got theirs back first, did they kind of win the contest?
Yeah, they win.
I see.
That's amazing, man.
I can't even imagine that.
I can't even, because I think I would not have enough trust in my heart that I
would believe that that bird was ever going to come back.
It must have lifted your spirits when it got back.
Well, you don't, you don't take them 100 miles away the first time you do it.
I would take them to the school in the morning and let them go and go on the
weekends farther and farther away and, you know, make sure that they come back.
That's fascinating, man.
Good evening, good afternoon and other times.
Thanks for watching that video you just saw.
I mean, it was okay.
But the next video you could watch could be way better.
What if you watch a video right now that changes your life?
Well, you could.
Watch this one.
Or watch this one.
Watch this one.
Watch this one.
Watch this one.
Ah!

Theo Von Learns About Homing Pigeons and Falconry

You and I started talking about this because I did Mike Tyson's Hot Boxing, and
you were asking
me how it was, and he's very subdued. You know, I really, I love him. He's very,
very subdued,
but we ended up talking a lot about pigeons because he was a pigeon guy. That's
how he
kind of started. He got in a fight over somebody who stole his pigeon. That was
the first time he
ever hit anybody, and that's kind of a famous story, but he's a pigeon fancier,
and I grew up
with pigeons. I started racing, homing pigeons when I was seven years old. So
was that big,
because I remember I went to the Spy Museum one time in Philadelphia, and they
had pigeons that
had like a little briefcase on their arm. They had pigeons that have like a
little, can you bring
that up to, Nick? They'll have pigeons that even have like a little backpack on,
you know,
and they used to use them for spy work. Yeah, they have. Yes, that's true, and
in fact,
they used them for, well, of course, they've always been a military asset
because they would use them
to communicate, you know, before they had telephones and walkie-talkies, and in
fact,
they used them right up until World War I, and... And they really used them?
Like, if you do it,
like, what can you tell a pigeon, and he'll go... Well, you can't tell him
anything, but you can...
The pigeon will always go back to the first place that he saw daylight. Oh, if
you, you know, raise a...
If you get an adult pigeon, you buy a pigeon at pigeon auction, and, you know,
a really big Homer,
a classic these days, people pay a million dollars for a good Homer. For a good
Homer pigeon, please.
They rate them by miles. Oh, if you're a thousand mile bird, you know, you're
worth a lot of money.
Back when I was a kid, we would, you know, pay a couple. Yeah, those are called
blue bars.
Okay. And those are Hungarians, which is the kind that I used to raise.
And we would put them in a train, and the train with all the other, you know,
we were, we had a pigeon club,
and all the other people would put them in a train right outside of my home in
Virginia,
and the train would go down to Delaware, and the conductor would then release
them all at once,
and when your pigeon came back to your coop, you would, you would take his band
off and run down to the post office
and have it time stamped, and that's how they would, you know, that's how they
would do the races.
Really? Yeah.
And so, so the pigeon, they'll know, so, so, so the first place it sees
daylight is the place it'll always come back to?
It'll always come back to it. So if you buy a pigeon at an auction or whatever,
you have to keep that pigeon locked up for the rest of his life, because if he
ever gets out,
he'll go back to the place where he was born, but in the military...
Like a hot woman, kind of, you know?
In the military, they taught them how to go to a, they would have a little, a
coop on wheels,
and they would teach them to go to that coop, and they would keep moving the
coop
so that the pigeon would learn to find the coop, so he's not going back to a,
you know, to a stationary barn.
Wow.
And, in fact, during World War I, the, they knew where all of the falcon, falcons,
which I moved to falconry when I was about 10 years old.
Is that early to be moving to that, or is that where you, like, where is it?
Well, that's when I found out about it, and there happened to be a guy who
lived near me
who was one of the pioneers of American falconry, and I read a book about it.
My uncle was in the White House, and I, and people were talking about Camelot,
and I read a book about Camelot by T.H. White, who is a British author who is
also a falconer,
and he has, and that book was called The Once and Future King.
They later made it into a Disney, you know, movie called The Sword and the
Stone.
Oh, wow.
But there is a chapter in there on falconry, and I read that chapter,
and I just said, this is what I want to do with my life.
And as it happened, there was a guy who had been an all-American football
player at Penn State.
He lived about a mile from my house.
His name was Alvin Nye, and he was one of the pioneers of American falconry.
And my father knew about him because whenever he worked as a designer of jets
at the Pentagon.
Of jets?
Yeah.
He was designing jets, and he was an engineer.
And one of the things that the State Department knew about him,
because whenever they were visiting Arab dignitaries who came to Washington,
the Arabs are all crazy about falconry.
Really?
Yes, crazy about it.
And that's falcons, right?
Yeah, that's falcons.
So falcon is, I mean, so when you moved up to falcons, were you just, I mean,
I can imagine if you were leaving pigeons, you probably left them behind, huh?
Well, actually, pigeons remain, are kind of part of the sport of falconry.
Okay.
You use pigeons in all in different parts of the sport, so I kept pigeons.
I had pigeons all my life until, really, until I moved to California six years
ago, I kept pigeons.
But I still have hawks at, you know, back in New York.
I have my falconry license out here, but I never brought them out here.
I got involved in surfing and, you know, a lot of other stuff, and it just wasn't
as easy here.
But, yeah, so this guy, I apprenticed under this guy, under Alvin Nye,
beginning when I was about 11 years old.
And then at that time, there was no regulation.
They passed regulations in 1973, and then you had to get a license.
And, you know, I was, I actually wrote the test at Falconer's Take in New York
State and elsewhere to get their license.
And I've been involved in it my whole life.
So would you compete, like, once you have this knowledge in this, so you're
learning, and, like, what is the man teaching you when you learn from Mr., what
was his name again, Smith?
He's teaching you how to trap the hawk, how to care for it, how to treat it
when it gets sick, and, of course, how to train it and then hunt with it.
If you're hunting my birds, take, I fly mainly Harris Hawks, and I've flown
every kind of hawk, but nowadays I fly mainly Harris Hawks.
They're very easy and they're very, very fun, and they hunt in groups.
They're very sociable.
They seem to be, you know, what you and I would interpret as a faction towards
humans, and they're almost like dogs.
So when you take them to hunt, I mean, this is, because, I mean, I grew up
raising hamsters.
I didn't mean to be talking about this.
No, it's fascinating, man, because, so let's see a Harris Hawks.
I just want to see what this even looks like.
And now when you take them to train or something, what do they do?
Like, when you take them to hunt with them, like, they're in a cage or on your
arm?
No, actually, they'll ride on the backseat of the car.
Unbelievable.
And I knew that.
And they'll hunt.
You knew that.
I mean, I just had an inkling.
If I look like that, man, I'm definitely, you know, I'm not driving.
I'm definitely getting a ride.
And they really just like dogs.
When you get to the place where you're hunting, you let them out of the car,
and they'll usually jump up and sit for a second and orient on the roof of the
car.
And then when you, as you start walking through the woods, they'll follow you.
Okay.
Yeah.
And then I use, I hunt with dogs, too.
So I have a couple of dogs who will be, you know, looking for rabbits and
squirrel and pheasant and turkey.
And when they, and when something moves, they'll chase it.
Okay.
So if you say when you're walking through the woods, they'll what?
Just be kind of going from tree to tree.
They know that you're their owner the whole time?
Yeah, they go to tree to tree.
They stay in the canopy above your head.
And they know that you're going to kick up game.
So, you know, they know, they learn, and they learn.
Like, I, the bird that I was flying until recently, I had for 24 years.
Wow.
And then every year I would breed that bird and get some eggs and babies out of
them.
And, you know, those birds are now all over New York State and all over the, at
least all over the East Coast.
You're working at the grassroots level of helping the environment if you are
breeding birds.
Yeah.
Like I said, I, you know, it was a passion for me from when I was, when I was
really little.
Man, yeah, because we, I grew up, I used to sell hamsters when I was growing up,
and we used to, you know, the big ones around us were the Roborowski hamsters.
Would you bring that up, Nick?
This is in Louisiana.
Yeah.
And we used to sell hamsters and guinea pigs, or G-pigs, they used to call them.
Well, they eat those down there, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, they call them cooies in Latin America, in Ecuador.
Oh, you get down to, oh, you get down to Ecuador, bro, you take a gerbil
anywhere south of Paraguay, and it's a wrap, you know?
I mean, Nicaragua, you show up with one of these bad boys, they think it's
Thanksgiving, you know?
But we have a different affinity for animals now.
I feel like if it looks cute, or if it's been marketed as cute, it becomes not
a food anymore, you know?
Once things get marketed as being too cute.
So you'll get there into the world.
In truth, it's not a good food, in my opinion.
Anyhow.
Yeah.
And I, you know, when I, when I, I spent a lot of time in Ecuador, and I lived
in Peru for a while, and I ended up eating a lot of guinea pigs.
I went to a restaurant, I took Cheryl to a restaurant where they were selling
them for food, and they had them.
You know how the, when you go into a seafood restaurant in New England, and
they have all the lobsters in the tank, and you can pick the one, and they're
alive in there.
Well, they had one of those where they, they had this really cute guinea pig
house, and you could pick the guinea pig you were eating, and, you know, Cheryl
is just.
Broke her heart.
Yeah, broke her heart.
Hopefully it wasn't, that wasn't balanced.
No, it wasn't.
Wow, so, so, so, so very similar to the lobster in the tank, they just had
these guinea pigs, just like in a big, like, kind of a children's, like, playhouse
or something, kind of a little deal?
It was a multi-storied playhouse with little balconies on it, and it looked
like an apartment building for guinea pigs, and there's no way.
They look like little people in there, and there's no way that you would ever
eat one of those.
But some people are rolling in and being like, oh, that's the one?
Yeah.
That's amazing, man.
Yeah, we never had any of that.
I've had owl.
I've had some wild meats.
People that have, like, my sister's family will grill up anything that's dead.
So, we've had owl.
We've had, like, what else did we have?
The roadkill type.
What, owl?
Roadkill, yeah.
No, they'll have, like, yard chicken, just chickens that they've raised in
their yards.
I'm trying to think of what else that I've had that was probably, you know,
kind of unique growing up.
Snake.
Sometimes somebody, I used to work on a farm for a couple years, and people
would kill a snake.
And somebody, sometimes, if somebody had enough time, they would cook it at
lunch.
Well, you must have eaten alligator, because that's on all the menus down there.
Yeah, I've eaten alligator.
Frog was really, you know, when I was young, it was fun to give a kid some frog,
you know.
At the restaurants, they used to have a lot of these kind of singing.
They had, like, this kind of black group of gentlemen that were, like, a quartet,
and they would sing.
And then at the end of the thing, they would give all the kids a little bit of
frog, you know.
It was just, like, some, like, fancy kind of restaurant we would go to, like,
when my parents were having an anniversary or something.
But, man, that's wild, though.
I don't know.
I've never met anybody that knew how to hunt with a hawk.
I mean, that's pretty.
And do hawks have a, or with a falcon, does a falcon have an arch nemesis in
nature?
Well, falcons get eaten a lot by eagles.
Unbelievable.
And then at night, they get eaten by owls, because they can't see anything at
night.
And that's why you put a hood on them, because once it