Every day before work, Orion weighs in like a finely tuned athlete. He eats a high-protein diet to stay in top form.
Orion is a tawny one-year-old falcon but his job is essential to the safety of thousands of humans.
Part of a team of birds of prey, Orion patrols the grounds of Montreal's airports from sunrise to sunset, chasing away nuisance birds that could cause serious accidents if they lodged in jet engines.
Orion's handler is Mark Adam, who founded Falcon Environmental Services 10 years ago to use the ancient sport of falconry to solve a modern problem.
The company, based in suburban Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue, services Dorval and Mirabel airports in the Montreal area, Pearson International in Toronto, JFK in New York and several military airports.
Mr. Adam employs 15 falconers, who handle 150 birds of prey that chase gulls, starlings and other birds.
"When I started at Dorval 10 years ago, the fields were white with gulls," Mr. Adam said as he looked out over a runway.
"Today, I've only seen one. The birds know there are falcons here."
Mr. Adam said the strike rate, or number of times birds hit planes, was about 50 to 60 a year when the program started, but has since dropped by 75 per cent.
There have been no recordings of crashes caused by a bird strike at Montreal airports, but it has happened elsewhere. A military plane that hit a flock of Canada geese went down in Alaska four years ago, killing 35 people. At JFK, a bird strike 25 years ago brought down a DC-10.
Mangled engine-fan blades are the worst damage that has been caused at Dorval -- but with between 30 and 40 blades per engine and each blade costing $7,000, bird strikes can be an expensive problem.
Mr. Adam releases the birds alongside runways and on flight paths. They fly for anywhere from five minutes to half an hour, depending on the weather and their temperament.
Each bird in Mr. Adam's eight-member team at Dorval flies two or three times a day, seven days a week.
"The second the other birds see a falcon, they react immediately," Mr. Adam said. "A distress call goes up and they start clearing out."
But what really scares off other birds is the dive-bombing.
Birds of prey finishing off a hunt dive toward their target at great speed. After releasing a bird from a leather tether, Mr. Adam entices it to dive by swinging a leather bird-shaped decoy on the end of a rope. On the first few passes, he pulls the decoy back.
When he finally lets it catch the decoy, it is rewarded with a whole quail, which it devours right down to the feathers.
This teasing of the bird actually mimics the numerous attempts a bird has to make to catch prey in the wild.
"What keeps the birds coming back is the reward, but also the relationship with the falconer," Mr. Adam said.
Neither airport officials nor Mr. Adam would reveal how much he is paid for his services.
Mr. Adam's birds are a mix of falcons and hawks, with a few owls. Almost all have been bred in captivity at the company's facility in Alexandria, Ont., but with permission of wildlife authorities the occasional bird is caught in the wild.
At the end of a day's work, Orion and fellow falcons Mistral, Joshua, Geronimo, Harmattan, Figaro and Savanna sleep in their cages next to the runways.