RFK Jr: America’s Falconer-in-Chief
Exotic animals from a leopard tortoise to a sea lion have moved in and out of 70-year-old’s life, but falcons never left
WASHINGTON—When Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. gathered his 2024 presidential campaign team for a meeting, he elbowed his neighbor to point at the window: several falcons were flying through the air.
Long before he was a vaccine skeptic, presidential candidate and president-elect Trump’s pick to lead the Health and Human Services Department, Kennedy got hooked on falconry. The sport, in which wild birds of prey are trained to hunt with their handlers, hasn’t let go.
So central is falconry to Kennedy’s identity that a ballot access lawsuit last year challenging his claim that he lived in New York involved a debate over whether he had a valid falconry license in California.
Kennedy argued that while his three dogs and an emu moved to the Malibu home he shared with his wife, actress Cheryl Hines, his roughly 20 hawks and falcons stayed in New York. Kennedy, 70, said his life in California was temporary and suggested someone else had signed the license application on his behalf.
Opposing lawyers showed a social media clip of ravens he was teaching to eat out of his hand on the balcony of his California abode.
“I trained them to come when I called them and also to talk and also to do certain tricks—mainly take like a poker chip and put it in somebody’s pocket,” Kennedy said in court of his history training the birds. Ravens, he noted, after a year or so of training can “talk like a parrot.”
The judge sided against Kennedy, finding his “testimony that he may return to that [New York] bedroom to reside with his wife, family members, multiple pets, and all of his personal belongings to be highly improbable, if not preposterous.”
Kennedy has courted controversy before with his exotic animals. He famously said he left a dead bear cub in Central Park a decade ago, noting he had initially planned to keep the meat in his fridge.
“The Bear, The Penguin, Baby Reindeer. These are not just things found in R.F.K.’s freezer,” comedian Nikki Glaser said, referring to television shows at the Golden Globes awards ceremony this month.
Kennedy kept a coatimundi, a member of the raccoon family, in the basement playroom of his childhood house, until it assaulted his pregnant mother, sending her into premature labor, he wrote in his memoir “American Values.”
After a trip to East Africa in 1964, Kennedy wrote that he brought home a 16-pound leopard tortoise named Carruthers in a Gucci suitcase lent to him by his mother “which could not be used thereafter.”
The family briefly kept a California sea lion named Sandy in its pool, though Kennedy wrote Sandy would ride in the car with his mother for school pickups. After Sandy started roving with the family dogs and caused a “rush-hour traffic jam” in McLean, Va., the sea lion was donated to the zoo.
Kennedy found his true passion at the age of 11, when he read T.H. White’s “The Once and Future King,” a retelling of King Arthur’s adventures, including with a goshawk, a large hawk. Kennedy found a local falconer, Alva Nye, an aircraft acquisition specialist for the Defense Department, to teach him the fundamentals. Nye instructed Kennedy not only how to hunt with raptors but also how to care for them, said his son, Geoff Nye.
“It’s not like having a cat or a dog, I’ll tell you that,” Nye said. “They require very careful management of their health.”
“There’s not been any time in my life really since then that I haven’t had birds and haven’t been involved in the sport,” Kennedy said in a video posted to Instagram last year. “It’s kind of like being allowed to hunt with a wolf pack—if the wolves would actually allow you to go out with them.”
His bird bible was Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II’s manual on falconry, written shortly before 1250, that enumerated the life skills a falconer should possess, including nimbleness, a daring spirit, an imperviousness to hunger, heat and cold, a tendency to sleep lightly “so as to hear his falcon bells” and a strict prohibition against laziness. “These became my blueprints for living,” Kennedy wrote in his memoir.
As a child, Kennedy said he watched for peregrine falcons at the Justice Department, where his father, Robert Kennedy, worked as the Attorney General, and the White House, when his uncle, John F. Kennedy, was president. (The nest remains at the nearby Waldorf Astoria, a Hilton spokeswoman said.)
“He has a very intense appreciation for the natural world and this is just an extension of that,” said Steve Layman, a longtime falconer who has gone hawking, the term used for hunting with wild raptors, with Kennedy.
In the late 1980s, Kennedy wrote the New York state falconry study guide and exam manual.
As Kennedy turned to politics, he continued to draw on his falconry experience. Ahead of his 2024 presidential run, he met one of his senior campaign advisers at a falconry event he organized.
After endorsing Trump, Kennedy participated in a sweepstakes where winners could join him and Donald Trump Jr. for an October day of falcon hunting in the Hudson Valley. For $50,000, donors could also reserve their spot to “experience nature’s fiercest predators alongside two of America’s bravest personalities.”
Kennedy’s avian interests also extend to pigeons, which as a child, he said he would put on a train going to Delaware and time how long it took them to fly back to his home in Virginia. On boxer Mike Tyson’s podcast, he said that observing and interacting with birds never grows old for him.
“I could sit and watch pigeons for weeks and not get bored,” he said.