Meet Rufus, this Wimbledon veteran has never played tennis in his 18-year career

Every morning during Wimbledon, somewhere between 4 am and 9 am, before the gates open and the strawberries are cut, a Harris's hawk named Rufus does a lap of Centre Court. He doesn't hunt anything. He just sits on the public seating, dark brown and roughly a metre wing tip to wing tip, and lets the pigeons work out for themselves that this is not a good place to be.

His handler Donna Davis explained that the team arrives just as the sun rises and the birds are becoming active, since that's the best window to check the grounds for pigeons that might cause trouble. It is, by most job descriptions, one of the stranger gigs in professional sport, and Rufus has been doing it for longer than several current players have been alive.

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He's not the club's first bird of prey, but he is its longest serving. He has been patrolling the skies and lawns of the All England Club since 2008, when he was eighteen weeks old. Before matches, before ball boys, before the queue forms outside, Rufus is up checking rooftops. His actual job is to keep pigeons from scavenging for food and nesting in the roofs of the club buildings. Anyone who has watched a pigeon strut across a cricket pitch mid-over knows why a stadium the size of Wimbledon can't risk it during a five-set match on live television.

A career that outlasted his own theft

Rufus's most dramatic season had nothing to do with tennis. In 2012, he was stolen overnight from his handler's van while it was parked at the grounds, and what followed was a genuinely frantic search involving the club, the press and eventually a rescue centre in south London where he turned up safe. The next morning, he made the front page of The Times under the headline "Rufus is back." It's what tells you how far his fame has travelled beyond the groundskeeping brief, an animal employee getting front-page treatment usually reserved for match winners.

He's also not exclusive to SW19. Outside the Championships, Rufus does the same job at Lord's cricket ground and Westminster Abbey, which makes him arguably the most well-travelled pest control officer in British sport.

The drone problem

There's a stranger story sitting underneath this one. The Times recently reported that Rufus's job could, in theory, be automated. Some venues with the same pigeon problem have started testing drones and AI-based detection systems to keep birds away, the kind of tech that can spot a flock and react faster than any hawk on a leash. So the paper put the obvious question to Wimbledon: is a trained animal really the most efficient way to do this anymore? The club's answer was calm, with no plans to replace him. And since Harris's hawks can live into their thirties, Rufus isn't going anywhere soon anyway.

Still, it's an odd spot for a working animal to be in. Technically replaceable, kept on anyway, because a hawk with an Instagram following fits Wimbledon's whole brand of tradition better than a drone ever could.

When people ask Donna Davis, his handler, who takes over once Rufus retires, she doesn't really answer. Sometimes she brushes it off with a joke instead, the kind that makes it clear she's not planning that conversation anytime soon. For now, nobody's in a rush to find out what a drone patrol over Centre Court would even look like.