Richard Hoyer (Corvallis, Oregon) began training wild eyas gyr and peregrine falcons back in 1959 and 1960. He was a helicopter pilot working summers in Alaska and the arctic circle. He trained the falcons at his base camp, and you can see pictures of the falcons perching on his helicopter. Richard brought back some of those early falcons to Oregon upon his return and shared them with fellow falconers. His story was written up by Frank Beebe and published in the very first NAFA Journal back in 1962. Click on the links below to read:

• the Introduction by Frank Beebe
• the article from the 1962 NAFA Journal (from Volume I, Number 1!)
• corrections to the Journal Article (from Richard)
• NAFA republished Richard’s pictures in the NAFA Journal Volume 50, 2011
• more of Richard’s falconry in Oregon from the 1950s on