The Cannes Film Festival kicked off on May 11, and aside from the controversy surrounding Woody Allen, it seems to be going well. That’s particularly the case for visitors to the Grand Hyatt Cannes Hotel Martinez, which deployed a team of five Harris’s Hawks — a species that hunts in packs, like wolves — to attack seagulls that might swoop down into the hotel’s poolside dining area to sample, perhaps, the red berries millefeuille and raspberry sorbet.
Alessandro Cresta, the hotel’s general manager, said these seagulls have caused trouble in the past, after guests began sharing scraps of food with them. And these gulls aren’t just going for the small, wadded pieces of bread you might feed to the ducks in the park. After all, this is Cannes — they have more expensive taste.
“We have seen a gull try to take a guest’s steak before. And others come to get peanuts or other things,” Cresta told Agence France-Presse. “Of course, it is also partly the guests’ fault. They have started taming them by feeding them regularly. After a while, birds get used to the presence of humans and lose their fear.”
Aside from the annoyance, the gulls can disrupt perfectly still tables, spilling food and drink onto guests and staining their clothes.
“If a gull that weighs a kilo lands on a table, knocking over glasses — keeping in mind that celebrities walking the red carpet are wearing unique dresses — if a drink spills on a dress, it’s all over,” professional hawker Christophe Puzin told the AFP.
Cue the mercenaries.
Puzin has 21 hawks in his employ, according to the Hollywood Reporter, but he only brought five to the hotel to keep watch. (Based on their names, they’ll fit right into a film festival. Among those five are Garfield, Big Foot and Aladdin.) His hawks have but one mission: hunt down the seagulls and … take care of the situation.
“We basically send our birds of prey to attack seagulls,” Puzin said. “During the day, when we serve breakfast, lunch, and dinner, we’re watching to make sure no seagulls land on the tables.”
The hawks fly about 500 feet above the hotel, keeping watch over its guests. Puzin promised the great birds pose no threat to the humans they’re sworn to protect, in part because they feed them and they’re just too big to eat.
“A falcon would never attack or be aggressive toward a person because, for them, we’re friends,” he said. “We feed them. We take care of them, and we are prey that would be a bit too big for them.”
According to the Audubon Field Guide, the Harris’s Hawk lives mostly in the southwestern United States and Mexico and is a common bird owned by those who practice falconry. Medium-sized birds are natural prey for these hawks, making them perfect for their security gig in Cannes.
Puzin reportedly has his birds well-trained, but hawks have posed threats to humans in the past. A Cooper Hawk recently attacked a student at Brigham Young University, drawing blood from his scalp, KTSU reported Tuesday. An answer provdied on Quora and republished on Forbes.com calls hawks “particularly ill-tempered,” going on to state that the “hawk version of ‘love’ is ‘enthusiastically engaging in cooperative hunting.'”
At Cannes, though, these five hawks are a fan favorite. And if you see an actress hitting the red carpet with a purple wine stain on her dress, you can rest assured it wasn’t the fault of a thirsty seagull.
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