SANDPOINT — Native to the Arizona desert, Harris’s hawks and are one of the only raptor species that hunts in packs.

“So they are quite social,” said falconer Megan Johnson as Harry sat perched on her arm, occasionally letting out little squeaks in an attempt to communicate with the crowd of Home School Academy students gathered around the duo on Tuesday.

Johnson, who is the aunt of one of the HSA students, also brought her two falcons — a peregrine and a peregrine/prairie cross — though they were not as impressed with the crowd as Harry, since they are naturally not social creatures as he is. She and the birds of prey were at the school this week in support of the ornithology class, which is working on the rough drafts of their two-part book, “Birds of North Idaho and the Pacific Northwest.” Each part can be 66 pages, said HSA director Melinda Rossman, so while they both have the same title, the kindergarten through third-graders are doing one part and the fourth- through eighth-graders are doing another.

One student was excited to see the falcons, as he said it is the bird he is researching for the project.

“I know a lot of very cool stuff — it’s the fastest diving bird,” he said, a statement Johnson affirmed.

Another student pointed out that the peregrines nearly went extinct at one time, and Johnson said if it wasn’t for falconers, they very well could be extinct. Falconers have used birds they bred in captivity to repopulate the wild when they were on the verge of extinction.

Johnson explained to the students that falconry is when a human and a bird of prey create a bond and become hunting partners.

“You pursue the game that the hawk would naturally pursue in the wild together,” she said. “... In order for us to enjoy being able to be with these amazing creatures, we want to make sure they can do what they are naturally supposed to do.”

While she and Harry hunt rabbits together, her job with the falcons is a bit different. Johnson works for vineyard companies, which tend to have trouble with flocks of starlings trying to eat the grapes. So her job is to take the falcons to the vineyards and fly them all day long to scare the starlings away.

“So if you’ve ever wondered if you can actually make money and fly falcons, it is possible, but it requires a lot of dedication, as does falconry,” Johnson said.

One of the biggest tasks in falconry is weighing the birds every day in order to keep them at an adequate flying weight, she said. If they are too fat, they don’t fly very well aerodynamically, Johnson said, and they lose motivation if they aren’t very hungry.

The kids were full of questions, such as whether the birds get “snippety,” or mad, to which the answer was yes; or whether they lose their beak when they moult, to which the answer was no.

Johnson had named her female peregrine falcon Sheba, though she had not yet decided what to call the young male hybrid. Rossman and the students decided to help her out before she finished her talk, listing off several names for her to mull over — Sonic, Jack, Shadow, Aventador, Blazer, Thor and Arnold among others.

Mary Malone can be reached by email at [email protected] and follow her on Twitter @MaryDailyBee.