Zoppini, bird catcher

Signor Zoppini is my shoemaking pal, who is now 95 or 96 depending on whether you consult him (96) or do the math with his birth year (95). I continue to learn fascinating things about him, though, that I like to share from time to time.

Recently, I mentioned to a local acquaintance that I was accompanying Zoppì to Marsciano for some shopping. The man cracked up, saying, "Ah, è un chiappasciuette" ("Oh, he's a ..." [something in dialect]). I had to enquire further, never having heard the word. Come to find out, Zoppì used to catch civets (little owls; in Italian there is a distinction between owls "gufi" and small owls "civette", which we don't have in English. I was told at that point to ask the man himself for more information.

Completely intrigued, I went to the horse's mouth. Here's what he said: Catching owls was a seasonal thing; you had a 40-day window every year in which to catch them. Hunters then used the owls to hunt for larks. I think the owls flushed the larks, but they didn't use them actually to do the hunting? Or maybe they did; that part was somewhat unclear to me. 

Hunting the owls went as follows: he got a stick about 2-3 meters long, and attached four flattish shortish pieces to the top in a sort of helicopter pattern. Small potatoes were wedged onto the end of each blade (for what purpose is unclear to me). The whole thing was then strewn with a confusion of something, presumably twine, but Zoppì was using dialectical words and I didn't want to interrupt to get the complete particular. He then used a little whistle that he had made to attract the owls, which then got embrangled in the helicopter stick because of the twine nest. He popped the owl into a bag or cage and then tried again. He often caught 4 or 5 a night, but one memorable occasion saw him prancing home with 13!

The forty days of owl hunting brought him the equivalent annual income from a year's worth of making shoes. 

When I later went to his workshop to see his whistles, he pulled out a series of brass and possibly aluminum whistles. Each one is designed to attract a different bird. Apart from owls, it appears he made quite a thing of trapping other sorts of birds to eat and/or sell. His method was illicit; although one could at the time hunt the birds quite legally, he had a special way of trapping them which consisted of defoliating shrubs and adding spines or thorns to the branches. He used the whistles to attract the birds to the booby-trapped shrubs, and then it was just a matter of harvesting them.

His owl whistles, however, he made himself. They looked like cane or bamboo with longitudinal cuts. Rather than blowing across the pieces (as with a flute) or down through them (like maybe a standard whistle or a recorder) he blew through some longitudinal cuts. In other words, they were held like a flute, but he blew through the slits rather than across them; there is a plastic "reed" inside. He had three different varieties to show me, all of which were about 3 1/2" long. They had rubber or plastic end pieces on each side, like the type you might find on a walking stick, although of course smaller.

Zoppini credits his ability to buy his house (outright, no mortgages, mind you!) in 1969 to his owl hunting activities. 

Love,

Alexandra