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Trained Falcons
‘FALCONRY’S NOT A SPORT, IT’S A VIRUS,’ explained the American falconer. Necks craned upward, we watched his trained peregrine climb into a late winter sky. ‘A pandemic,’ he continued mischievously. ‘Appeared in central Asia thousands of years ago and spread all over the place. By medieval times,’ he grinned, ‘you guys in Europe were in the grip of an epidemic way worse than the Black Death.’ His pet theory was succinct, crazy and about par for the course. Falconers routinely pathologize their activity. They say that they never meant to be falconers. That they came under the grip of an impulse they couldn’t control. Once a falconer, always a falconer was the maxim of nineteenth-century falconer E. B. Michell. I have heard falconers bemoan how falconry has ruined their careers, destroyed their marriages and occasioned serious heartache, exertion and expense. And do so happily.
Dictionaries define falconry as the use of trained birds of prey to catch wild game. But this singularly fails to capture the social, emotional and historical allure of an activity that has fascinated humans for thousands of years and has taken a most extraordinary variety of forms. Centuries ago, Persian falconers flew peregrines at night, catching ducks flushed from moonlit ponds and marshes; they even trained sakers to catch such unlikely quarry as eagles and gazelles. Louis XIII caught sparrows with trained grey shrikes in the gardens of the Louvre; at dusk he hawked bats with peregrines. But in scale, form and social nature, falconry is just as varied a pursuit today. In fragrant desert, American falconers search out the largest and most spectacular quarry for trained falcons, the sagegrouse. Arab VIPS land with their falcons in glossy private jets on dedicated landing strips in Pakistan. On Scottish moors, tweed-clad and rain-soaked figures tramp across heather to fly red grouse with their peregrines. In Zimbabwe, pupils at Falcon College have even trained falcons as part of their school curriculum.
Queen Kristina of Sweden (r. 1632–54) and her falconer, in a mid-17th-century oil painting by Sébastien Bourdon.
Some see falconry as an anachronistic pursuit, an irrelevant pastime beloved of historical re-enactment fanatics. It’s easy to see why; media coverage of falconry tends to linger on its ancient and venerable history. But falconry has a vibrant present. In some countries it’s a part of everyday life: falcons are carried in local marketplaces and malls to tame them in the United Arab Emirates. American falconers see themselves as living in a new golden age of falconry. In Britain, falconry is more popular today than at any time over the last three centuries: no country show is without its falconry display, and British radio’s oldest soap-opera The Archers has its falconer. Falconry centres and schools have opened across Britain and Europe. International, national and local falconry clubs thrive. The inimitable Martha Stewart, doyenne of American interior design, has even appeared on television with a peregrine on her gloved fist. Whether this is a high or a low point in falconry’s history is moot. Falconry is very much alive.
WHY AND WHEN?
Humans have used falcons as hunting partners for at least 6,000 years, perhaps more: no one agrees on when, where or how falconry began. Each falconry culture has its own creation myth that invariably locates the birth of falconry in past societies that reflect its own cultural preoccupations. In 1943, for example, Harvard professor Hans Epstein maintained that falconry was a mark of civilization, requiring a ‘wealth of leisure, great patience, sensitivity and ingenuity, not ordinarily shown with regard to animals by primitive people’.1 He was sure, therefore, that it could not possibly have a Germanic origin. The Trojans were the first falconers, thought many sixteenth-century Europeans. Nineteenth-century British falconers with good classical educations seized on Pliny’s brief description of Thracian bird-catchers using hawks to drive wild birds into nets as proof that falconry began in ancient Greece, even though Xenophon’s exhaustive essay on Greek hunting, Cynegeticus, mentions falconry not once.
Young falcons in the desert near Abu Dhabi. Falcon training here takes place in the morning and evening; when the sun’s heat becomes too great, the falcons rest in the shade.
Recent discoveries of raptor bones in Near East Palaeolithic graves lead some to suggest that falconry has a prehistoric origin. But most modern commentators think that it first arose on the high plateaux of Central Asia. From there it was carried east, arriving in China and Japan in the third century AD, and west with trade and invasion all the way to Western Europe. Of course, falconry could have arisen independently in several places. Cortez reported that Montezuma kept large collections of birds of prey at the Aztec court, although whether or not they were used for falconry is hotly debated. Arab scholars have written that the first man to train a hawk to hunt was al-Harith bin Mu’awiyah bin Thawr bin Kindah, back in pre-Islamic times. Marvelling at a falcon accidentally caught in a bird-catcher’s net, he took it home and carried it about perched on his arm. One day the falcon left his arm and caught a pigeon, the next day, a hare – and falconry was born. And falconry has the honour of being sanctioned in the Holy Koran:
They ask you what is lawful to them. Say all good things are lawful to you, as well as that which you have taught the birds and beasts of prey [Jarih] to catch, training them as Allah has taught you. Eat of what they catch for you, pronouncing upon it the name of Allah. And have fear of Allah: swift is Allah’s reckoning.
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In the 1930s British falconer Colonel Gilbert Blaine tried to explain the strange hold falconry had over him and his fellows. He declared that the ‘true falconer is born, not made’. ‘Deeply rooted in the nature of certain individuals [exists] some quality which inspires a natural liking for hawks,’ he continued. Musing on what this quality might be, he concluded that it must be ‘an instinct inherited from our ancestors’ who pursued the sport.2 Rather winningly, Blaine then awards himself and his friends a fortunate lineage. For the ancestors of the modern-day ‘true falconer’ were all aristocrats. ‘No uncultured race has ever attempted to explore [falconry’s] mysteries’, he wrote; ‘even among the cultured peoples the use and possession of the noble falcons were confined to the aristocracy, as an exclusive right and privilege.’3
THE FALCONS IN FALCONRY
Blaine’s words are mired deep in his own social preoccupations, but his notion that falcons are aristocratic birds is a constant across most falconry cultures. ‘Their calm behaviour, noble, cool appearance and reliability is what sets the falcons apart from all other hawks,’ wrote American falconer Harold Webster in the 1960s, his sentiment well-nigh indistinguishable from that of early modern falconers and loaded with just as normative a social component. ‘It always has and always will. There is nothing quite comparable to them.’ He described hunting with falcons as a highly social affair, ‘spacious, noisy, spectacular, beautiful and exciting’. And consequently ‘it has its highest appeal to the extrovert who likes to be out with friends and in company.’4 As in foxhunting today, hawking with falcons in early modern Europe was a grand social occasion requiring a large entourage and vast tracts of land to be seen at its best. And again, Webster is heir to centuries of social positioning in falconry when he writes that the man who shuns falcons and prefers hunting with short-winged hawks such as sparrowhawks and goshawks is ‘something of an introvert’ who ‘prefers to go alone to secret, tangled places along creekbanks, hedgerows and field edges’.5 Indeed, in the thirteenth century, austringer, the term for someone who flew hawks rather than falcons, was a term of abuse.
Holding a gyrfalcon, and dressed in sable fur and red leather, this is Robert Cheseman, falconer to Henry VIII, in a painting by Hans Holbein the Younger, 1533.
What, then, is this spacious, noisy, spectacular, beautiful and exciting activity Webster describes? While the sport – or art, or vocation, or however one chooses to call it – is falconry, the activity of hunting using any bird of prey is hawking. And you don’t train a falcon to chase quarry – she does so instinctively (in Western falconry parlance, all falcons are she, just like cars and ships and aircraft). The falconer’s task is threefold: to tame the falcon; to shape the manner in which she chases quarry; to train her to return should the flight be unsuccessful. No falcons retrieve their prey; should the falcon catch something, the falconer has to run to her and reward her for her efforts, while gently retrieving the dead pheasant, duck or grouse for the pot. After months of work and preparation, the falconer’s duty is above all else, as falconer Jim Weaver succinctly put it, ‘to provide an opportunity for his falcon to demonstrate its natural abilities to the fullest extent possible’.6
AERIAL BATTLES
Falcons are trained to fly in one of two styles – either a direct pursuit of quarry from the falconer’s fist, or by diving down onto quarry from a great height. In pursuit flights, or ‘out of the hood’ flights, the falconer first spies out the quarry before unhooding and releasing the falcon. Arab falconers fly their birds in this way at hubara (houbara bustard) and kurrowan (stone curlew). These beautifully camouflaged sand-and-rock-coloured birds are hard to spot with the human eye. So Arab falconers often use a spotter falcon, often a wily old saker, to spy out quarry for other falcons to chase. Scanning the horizon, the saker will bob her head, tighten her feathers and stare intently when she has spotted distant quarry.
In modern Europe, pursuit flights are most often seen between falcon and crow, or falcon and rook. Sometimes the quarry rings up or climbs hundreds of feet into the air, attempting to keep above the falcon. In turn, the falcon strives to climb above the quarry, so that she can dive, or stoop, upon it. Very high flights in this manner are termed the Haut Vol – the Great Flights. They were the ne plus ultra of early modern European falconry, and to secure them, peregrines and gyrfalcons were flown at cranes, herons and kites. These high aerial battles were seen as reflections of human intrigues of political and military strategy and power. Heron hawking was a ‘game of state’ to George Turberville, and poet William Somerville makes the most of these connotations. In his poem ‘Field Sports’, he describes an ‘aerial fight’ between falcon and heron that leaves noble, villager and shepherd boy alike transfixed with ‘wild amaze’:
The falcon hov’ring flies
Balanc’d in Air, and confidently bold
Hangs o’er him like a Cloud, then aims her Blow
Full at his destin’d Head. The watchful Hern
A saker falcon chases a houbara bustard across the sandy plains of Baluchistan. Houbaras sometimes evade attacks at close range by squirting droppings at their pursuer.
Shoots from her like a blazing Meteor swift
That gilds the Night, eludes her Talons keen,
And pointed Beak, and gains a Length of Way.
Observe th’attentive croud, all Hearts are fix’d
On this important War, and pleasing Hope
Glows in each Breast. The Vulgar and the Great,
Equally happy how, with Freedom share
The common Joy . . .7
A peregrine falcon flying at rooks in a pencil drawing by Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Bauerle (1831–1912).
Compared to these buoyant, unpredictable and sky-covering pursuits, the waiting on flight, a speciality of Western falconry, is an elaborate and formal affair. Here, falcons are trained to wait on at a high pitch, circling perhaps as high as 1,000 feet above the falconer in expectation that quarry – usually ducks, or gamebirds such as pheasants, partridges or grouse – will be flushed below it. When the game is flushed, the whole point of game hawking becomes apparent: the falcon, espying the quarry, tips over into a vertical stoop, falling at dramatic speed on an intercepting path towards its prey. The sound of a falcon stooping from a towering pitch across miles of sky can be awe-inspiring: a strange, tearing noise like ripping cloth. As the bird cuts through the air, an adrenalin-filled rush of a kind familiar to airshow or Grand Prix attendees is the inevitable result for the onlooker. ‘You are the bird,’ exclaimed falconer Alva Nye.8 It seems that the quarry will inevitably be overhauled and killed instantly with a clout of the falcon’s foot. But inevitable it is not. Most flights end with the quarry escaping and the falcon returning to the falconer’s lure.
The Haut Vol, high-altitude flight, was revived in the 19th century by the exclusive Royal Loo Hawking Club, which flew peregrines at herons over the open heaths of the Veluwe region of the Netherlands. The herons were usually released after they had been caught.
The lure – a long cord with a leather pad or a pair of dried wings at one end – is also used to exercise the falcon by getting her to chase it in mid-air. It’s a device familiar to readers of The Taming of the Shrew, in which many obscure falconry terms are encountered. Shakespeare was writing in falconry’s European heyday, a time when its terminology was bewilderingly complex. As in any elite activity, the vocabulary and etiquette of falconry had gatekeeping functions; a proficient command of them attested to one’s high social position. Jesuit spy Father Southwell, for example, was exceedingly worried that he would reveal his true identity by forgetting his falconry terms.9
There were dedicated terms for falconry furniture, for different flight styles, for every part of the falcon. A hawk’s talons were her pounces, her toes her petty singles, her wings her sails and chest-feathers her mail. When a falcon sneezed, she snurted. Some of these terms are still used by falconers: young falcons are eyasses and immature wild falcons passagers. When a falcon lands she pitches; falcons mount into the sky, rather than climb; when they wipe their beaks they feak and when they shake themselves they rouse.
Their original meanings now obscure, some terms continue in more general use today: when hawks drink, they bowse or booze. Tid-bits are scraps of meat proffered to a falcon; a cadge is a field-perch; a haggard is a wild adult falcon and thus difficult to train. And while the term might be more familiarly applied to exclusive, eye-wideningly expensive properties in central London, mews were originally built to house birds of prey while they moulted in the summer months.
In a 1940s photograph, the American falconer Steve Gatti exercises his peregrine to the lure.
Falconers claim Shakespeare as one of their own. This engraving from J. E. Harting’s 1864 Ornithology of Shakespeare playfully adds a falcon to the famous Chandos portrait. |
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FALCONRY FURNITURE
Despite the arcane terminology of falconry, its equipment, or furniture, is relatively simple and eminently practical. Perhaps the most familiar of all is the thin leather hood. Popped over the falcon’s head it blocks out all light, and apart from its role in the hunting field, its judicious use keeps half-trained or highly strung birds from alarming sights. Hoods come in many designs – Indian goatskin hoods; soft Arab hoods; stiff, heavy Dutch hoods with coloured side-panels and a wool and feather plume. Modern artisan-falconers have created moulded and beautifully finished hybrid designs that are far lighter and more comfortable for the falcon than many of the ornamented older styles.
Falcons are normally held on the leather-gloved left fist. Arab falconers carry them on a woven mangalah, or cuff. The reasons for holding falcons on the left fist are obscure. Medieval clerics unsurprisingly saw it has having mystical significance. According to one manuscript, falcons are carried on the left hand in order that they should fly to the right to seek their prey:
the left represents temporal things, the right everything that is eternal. On the left sit those who rule over temporal things; all those who in the depths of their hearts desire eternal things fly to the right. There the hawk will catch the dove; that is, he who turns towards the good will receive the grace of the Holy Spirit.10
The trailing leg-straps by which the falconer holds the falcon are called sabq in Arabic, and are made of plaited silk or cord. Their Western equivalents, jesses, are made of soft leather. At home their ends are attached to a metal swivel to stop them twisting, and the swivel in turn to a leash. This leash is tied to a perch or block using the falconer’s knot – for obvious reasons easily tied and untied with one hand.
For centuries, small silver or brass bells attached to the falcon’s legs or tail have been used to locate the falcon while out hawking, their plangent tones audible for half a mile or more downwind. In the 1970s American falconer-engineers developed a tiny radio transmitter that could be attached to a falcon’s tail or leg. With a range of scores of miles, telemetry systems have dramatically reduced the possibility of losing a falcon. Telemetry was greeted with enthusiasm by falconers in the Gulf States, for whom falconry continues to be a vibrant and popular cultural practice. Conversely, many European falconers viewed this new invention with distaste. A minority pursuit compared to more modern hunting methods, European falconers have tended to validate and define falconry in terms of its rich cultural tradition and long history. They commonly assert historical precedent as a legitimating device, and threats to its established, traditional modes of practice tend to be perceived as a threat to falconry itself. Yet these anti-modernist misgivings seem to have been largely overcome. Today many falcons are flown with a modern radio transmitter attached almost invisibly to the tail – often right next to a Lahore brass bell, manufactured in Pakistan to a design of immense antiquity. Plus ça change.
A plate from Diderot and d’Alembert’s 1751 Encyclopédie showing the mews (above) and falconry equipment (below): a screen perch, two Dutch hoods, a rufter hood, turf blocks and a cadge for carrying falcons into the field.
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In the United Arab Emirates, falconer Khameez calms a young falcon in training as he picks it up from its wakr, or perch. |
TRAINING FALCONS
The falconer’s first impression of a new falcon, sitting hooded on her perch, is one of unalloyed wildness. The slightest touch or sound and she’ll puff out her feathers and hiss like a snake. Falcons are trained entirely through positive reinforcement. They must never be punished; as solitary creatures, they fail to understand hierarchical dominance relations familiar to social creatures such as dogs or horses. As Lord Tweedsmuir wrote in the 1950s, secure in his impression that falcons were an avian aristocracy:
No hawk regards you as a master. At the best, they regard you as an ally, who will provide for them and care for them and introduce them to some good hunting. You only have to look at the proud, imperious face of a peregrine falcon to realise that. In reality you become their slave.11
Despite Tweedsmuir’s characterization of the falcon as a death-dealing dominatrix, falcons can become rather affectionate. In the Gulf States, some falcons jump from their indoor perches and run to the falconer should he call their names. British falconer and author Philip Glasier had a tiercel peregrine that slept on his bookshelf and jumped onto his bed in the morning to wake him by nibbling his ear; another British falconer, Frank Illingworth, had a peregrine that took rides around the garden on the back of his dog; gyrfalcons enjoy playing with tennis balls and footballs.
So how does one train a falcon? Early modern authors capture the key perfectly. Through the falconer’s constant attention to the bird’s ‘stomacke’: that is, her appetite and physical condition. Indeed, in the most basic sense, falcons are trained through their stomachs – through associating the falconer with food. If a falcon isn’t hungry, is too high, she’ll see little point either in chasing quarry or returning to the falconer. Conversely, should she be a little too thin, or low in condition, she’ll lack the energy to give that palpable sense of inner urgency in flight that is the watchword of truly exciting falconry. The conditioning of a falcon revolves around a terrifying number of variables: the weather, the time of year, the stage in training, the type of food the falcon has eaten and how much exercise she has had. Falconers assess condition in a variety of ways. Some are quantitative: daily weighing, for example. Others involve tacit knowledges built from years of experience: feeling the amount of muscle around a falcon’s breast-bone, the bird’s posture and demeanour, the way she carries her feathers, even the expression on her face.
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Knight with a falcon, from a 15th-century copy of the Codex Capodilista, tempera on vellum. |
Taming and training a falcon is a serious and skilled business. Every autumn, falconers bring new falcons to their sheikhs and princes in the Gulf States. In long meetings, the quality and condition of each falcon are assessed, appraised and measured with fine exactitude. Falcons are tamed rapidly in this falconry culture; they are kept constantly on their falconer’s fist, or on perches nearby, totally immersed in everyday human life. While initially stressful, this method quickly promotes an unflappable tameness in the falcon. A similar method, termed ‘waking’, was commonplace in early modern Europe: the new falcon was kept constantly on someone’s fist until it overcame its fears sufficiently to sleep.
Western falcon training today is a far slower process. The untamed falcon is initially handled only while the falconer offers her food on the fist. Soon she associates the falconer with food and jumps to the fist from her perch. The distance she jumps for food is gradually extended and she soon flies to the falconer – first on a light line known as a creance and then free. In both Arab and Western falconry, free-flying falcons are trained to return to a lure, but more creative methods of retrieving falcons have existed: falconer Roger Upton recounts a story from the days when the only lights in the Saudi desert were campfires. Back then, one Bedouin falconer made sure he only ever fed his falcon right next to the fire. When this falcon became lost during hawking expeditions, she flew back, even at night, to the huge fire her anxious falconer built as a beacon for her return. Every spring he released her in the Hejaz mountains so she could breed, and every October he returned to the mountains, built a big fire and re-trapped her.
Highly ornate lures and hoods from the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I (r. 1493–1519). |
‘NOTHING SO FREQUENT’
For more than 500 years, falconry was immensely popular across Europe, Asia and the Arab world. It carried enormous cultural capital. Historian Robin Oggins describes early modern European falconry as an almost perfect example of conspicuous consumption; ‘expensive, time consuming and useless, and in all three respects [serving] to set its practitioners apart as a class’.12 Expensive it was. Extraordinarily so. In thirteenth-century England a falcon could cost as much as half the yearly income of a knight. Four hundred years later, Robert Burton maintained that there was ‘nothing so frequent’ as falconry, that ‘he is nobody, that in the season hath not a hawk on his fist. A great art, and many books written on it.’13 Some European gentlemen hawked every day, even on campaign or when conducting official business. Henry VIII hawked both morning and afternoon if the weather was fine, and would have drowned in a bog while out hawking had his falconer not pulled him out. Medieval Spanish falconer Pero López de Ayala considered falconry an essential part of a princely education, for it prevented sickness and damnation and demanded patience, endurance and skill. For much of its long European history, falconry was considered to exemplify youth and the active life, and, like all elite pursuits, it was ripe for satire. In his 1517 work De fructu qui ex doctrina percipitur, the Tudor diplomat and man of letters Richard Pace put these words into the mouth of a nobleman: ‘It becomes the sons of gentlemen to blow the horn nicely, to hunt skilfully and elegantly carry and train a hawk! But the study of letters should be left to the sons of rustics.’14
Despite falconry’s opposition to the via contemplativa, clergy were keen falconers too. D’Arcussia suggested that ‘more devout souls’ should go hawking in order to raise spirits ‘brought down from previous vigour by continual study or by having too many concerns’.15 The councils of 506, 507 and 518 strictly forbade priests and bishops to practise falconry, but the clergy deliberately misinterpreted the word devots (devotees) so that the term would not apply to them. Pope Leo X was such an inveterate falconer that he would hawk in any weather. D’Arcussia described him as ‘so sharp . . . a sportsman that he would not spare from his wrath anyone . . . who failed to observe any of the duties of Falconry’.16 William of Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester, complained that nuns taking their falcons into chapel with them interfered with the service, and it’s said that an enraged medieval bishop of Ely stormed back into the cathedral and threatened to excommunicate the culprit after he discovered his falcons had been stolen from the vestry.
THE FOUR CORNERS OF THE EARTH
Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II of Hohenstaufen infamously led a Holy Crusade even after he’d been excommunicated. His contemporaries called him stupor mundi, the wonder of the world. Modern falconers know him familiarly as ‘Fred the second’, consider him the world’s greatest-ever falconer and still glean his massive thirteenth-century work De arte venandi cum avibus, ‘On the art of hunting with birds’, for practical hints. Eastern falconry techniques and technologies were imported into Europe through his court; his interpreter Theodore of Antioch translated Arab and Persian falconry works into Latin, and the emperor employed Arab, English, Spanish, German and Italian falconers ‘at great expense’. He wrote:
We . . . summoned from the four corners of the earth masters in the practice of the art of falconry. We entertained these experts in our domains, meantime seeking their opinions, weighting the importance of their knowledge, and endeavouring to retain in memory the more valuable of their words and deeds.17
Falconry techniques and knowledges have been traded between disparate cultures for millennia. European knights took falcons with them on the Crusades, and learned how to hood falcons from their foes. In the early twelfth century, in what is now Syria, falconer Usamah Ibn-Muquidh complained that because his hunting land was now adjacent to Frankish territory, his falconry expeditions needed extra horses, attendants and weapons. Falconry’s symbolic system was largely shared between both sides, and so it was able to articulate power-struggles and conflicts in ways immediately comprehensible to either. A besieged Richard I sent an envoy to Saladin to request food for his starving falcons; Saladin immediately delivered baskets of his best poultry for the falcons alone. During the siege of Acre in 1190 a prized gyrfalcon belonging to King Philip I broke its leash and flew straight to the top of the city walls. Philip was horrified. An envoy requesting that the falcon be returned was refused, as was a second envoy accompanied by trumpets, ensigns and heralds, offering 1,000 gold crowns to Saladin in exchange for the errant falcon.
A 19th-century rendering of Emperor Frederick II of Hohenstaufen (r. 1215–50) and one of his falconers.
Throughout the early modern period, travelling European merchants and diplomats encountered falconry traditions that awed and bewildered them. Marco Polo was familiar with falconry, but its scale in Central Asia astonished him. With bated pen he explained that the falconry expeditions of the Great Khan involved a retinue of ten thousand falconers – a figure not to be taken literally, but surely indicating a sizeable army. On hawking expeditions the Great Khan was borne by up to four elephants. On their backs stood a pavilion furnished inside with gold braided cloth and outside with lion’s skins. ‘Such facilities’, he wrote, ‘are required by the Kublai Khan on these hunting excursions also, since he is very much bothered by gout in the feet’:
In this pavilion he always has with him twelve of the best gyrfalcons and twelve of his particularly beloved honour bearers for diversion and for company. The riders beside the Khan inform him when in the vicinity of cranes or other birds flying by. He then raises the curtain of the pavilion, and when he has seen the game, he casts the falcons, which hunt the cranes and overcome them after a long flight. The Khan lies on a comfortable lounge, and the sight of this gives him, as well as the gentlemen serving him and the riders surrounding him, great pleasure.18
Persian kings were so enamoured of falconry that they trained sparrows and starlings to catch butterflies, recorded Sir Richard Burton. In the late seventeenth century, English traveller Sir John Chardin enthused about the ability of Persian falconers. One could see them ‘all year round in the City and the Country . . . going backwards and forward with a Hawk on their Hand’. Chardin heard of some stranger and less sociable traditions here. It seemed that falcons were once commonly taught to assault men. ‘They say’, he wrote in wonderment, ‘that there are still such Birds in the King’s Bird-House. I have not seen any of them, but I hear’d that Aly-couly-can, Governour of Tauris, whom I was particularly acquainted with, could not forbear diverting himself with that dangerous and cruel sport, tho’ with the loss of his friends.’19
A late 15th-century gouache of a mounted falconer with white gyrfalcon.
And falconry’s reach was extraordinary. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, falcon-traders brought falcons to the French court from Flanders, Germany, Russia, Switzerland, Norway, Sicily, Corsica, Sardinia, the Balearic Islands, Spain, Turkey, Alexandria, the Barbary States and India. The fifth Earl of Bedford imported hawks from as far afield as North Africa, Nova Scotia and New England. In many European countries only noblemen were allowed to use native falcons. In sixteenth-century England, a thriving smuggling trade developed after foreign hawks were classed as luxuries and were subject to an import duty of a shilling in the pound.
But by the end of the seventeenth century, falconry’s popularity was waning in Europe. Louis XIII was exceptional: so obsessed with falconry that he hawked most days of the week, he even composed a libretto for his ballet La Merlaison describing the delights of hawking for blackbirds and thrushes. The use of falcons as diplomatic gifts gradually faded in the eighteenth century, and falconry’s connection with royalty and nobility won it no favours after the French Revolution. Landowners converted their mews to other uses; new sports had become fashionable: shooting, fox-hunting and horse-racing. By the nineteenth century European falconry had become the pursuit of a very few individuals who had banded together into falconry clubs – and of eccentrics, among whom was Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s father. Toulouse-Lautrec senior used to walk about the streets of Albi with shirt-tails flapping and falcon on his fist. ‘Not wishing, doubtless, to deprive his raptors of the succour of religion’, wrote Henri, ‘he would give them holy water to drink.’20
IMPERIAL FALCONRY
But falconry was still practised elsewhere. In 1913 the American writer William Coffin explained that while in Europe ‘it exists . . . only as a fad of a few medieval-minded sportsmen, in the East, where the art of falconry perhaps originated, it flourishes still’.21 Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers often used falconry’s persistence in non-Western cultures as evidence that such cultures either lagged far behind the West or, indeed, existed entirely outside the progress of history. And falconry had further roles to play in the age of Empire. Still the sport of elite or ruling classes in many countries, it seemed to offer a global naturalization of social hierarchy. Hunting-crazy officers in nineteenth-century British India took up falconry and employed local falconers. Not only did they enjoy the sport, but they saw it as a means of reinforcing their elite social status and winning loyalty from Indian soldiers under their command. In the North Punjab the Regiment of Guides (Cavalry and Infantry) kept a regimental establishment of saker falcons; officers flew them at ravine deer and houbara.22 Lieut. Col. E. Delmé-Radcliffe of the 88th Connaught Rangers famously responded to the first cries of his newborn child with the exclamation ‘Good God! There’s a cat at my falcons!’23 Lieut. Col. E. H. Cobb took up hawking while political agent in Gilgit in the 1940s because a shortage of shotgun cartridges precluded partridge shooting. But to his delight he soon discovered that in falconry at least ‘the local Chiefs readily supported the British Officers’.24 ‘From time immemorial’, he wrote happily, falconry ‘has been considered to be a princely sport and nowhere can it be practised to such advantage as by the feudal chieftains of the Hindu Kush . . . for they have the power to control large areas of falconry ideally suited to falconry and also to command a large army of falconers.’ He added that as far as falconry goes, ‘the Asiatic methods are very similar to our own’.25
Algerian falconers setting out for the field. Romantic, orientalist representations of falconry were commonplace in the late 19th century, and this 1898 painting by Gustave Henri Marchetti is a prime example.
These imperial imaginings typically obliterated any drive to understand how falconry’s social functions differed across cultures. Such blindness is still encountered. Even today one encounters explanations of the rise of falconry in the Arabian Gulf as being a means for nomadic people to obtain additional protein to supplement a meagre diet. This functional explanation is as blind to cultural nuance as that of many a nineteenth-century commentator. For falconry has always had significant spiritual and social importance in Bedouin culture, where it is highly valued for its egalitarian nature and the qualities of self-denial and generosity it fosters. A hawking expedition grants falconers of all social backgrounds space to meet as equals in the desert, to swap stories and share food, while their falcons doze in the firelight.
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Bedouin men hawking on horseback with saker and lanner falcons, Palestine, between 1900 and 1920. |
THE FALCON GENTLE
We learn that spy-hero Richard Hannay’s son is a falconer in John Buchan’s thriller Island of Sheep. ‘If you keep hawks,’ Buchan explains, ‘you have to be a pretty efficient nursemaid, and feed them and wash them and mend for them.’26 Indeed. Falconry granted the English gentleman a legitimate form of domesticity: when attending to a falcon, one could be both manly and a nursemaid. Falcon-training mirrored the education of the public schoolboy, the purpose of which was to tame and control the natural strength, wildness and unruliness of the growing boy through discipline, physical restraint, self-sacrifice, virtu and honour. And so with the falcon. For centuries, the process of training a falcon has been seen as training oneself, learning patience and bodily and emotional self-control. ‘Training a falcon trains the man quite as much as the man trains the falcon,’ explained Harold Webster succinctly in 1964,27 a notion that perhaps informs programmes at several British prisons where inmates keep and breed falcons and hawks.
The notion that the emasculating effects of modern life can be cured by contact with wild nature has been a standard trope in writings on masculinity from Roosevelt to Robert Bly. Associating with wild or ferocious animals – through hunting them or, in the case of falconry, training them – has often been cast as a panacea for such lily-livery. In this tradition, through training a falcon the falconer assumes some of the wildness of the falcon, whilst the falcon correspondingly assumes the manners of a man. ‘One never really tames a falcon,’ wrote one American falconer in the 1950s. ‘One just becomes a little wild like she is.’28 Masculine qualities considered lost or marginalized in modern life – wildness, power, strength and so on – had already been projected onto falcons. Through the psychologically charged identifications of trainer and hawk during the training process the falconer can repossess these qualities while the falcon at the same time becomes ‘civilized’. No wonder there are still so few female falconers.
T. H. White clearly saw magical, almost Freudian transferences between human and hawk as intrinsic to falconry. He described his own attempts as the project of a man ‘alone in a wood, being tired of most humans in any case, to train a person who was not human, but a bird’.29 White decided to ‘wake’ his hawk by the old-fashioned method. This involved ‘reciting Shakespeare to keep the hawk awake and thinking with pride and happiness about the hawk’s tradition’:
There was a bas-relief of a Babylonian with a hawk on his fist in Khorsabad, which dated from about 3,000 years ago. Many people were not able to understand why this was pleasant, but it was. I thought it was right that I should now be happy to continue as one of a long line. The unconscious of the race was a medium in which one’s own unconscious microscopically swam, and not only in that of the living race but of all the races which had gone before. The Assyrian had begotten children. I grasped that ancestor’s bony hand, in which all the knuckles were as well defined as the nutty calf of his bas-relief leg, across the centuries.30
Many twentieth-century commentators shared White’s desire for historical continuity and community; they also saw falconry as a romantic, pastoralist, anti-modern pursuit. In 1930s America, an era of chivalric youth groups such as the Knights of King Arthur, many boys caught the falconry bug because they were beguiled by falconry’s fantasies of reliving a knightly past. Grown-ups were not immune. Arch-ruralist J. Wentworth Day’s account of a day’s hawking with the British Falconers Club in Kent explained how the hawking expedition was a trip to a lost past:
standing on the hump-backed vallum of a British earth-work, all the sea and the marshes at your feet, the wind in your face, the hawk on your fist, you may know that you are, for a brief space, a heir of the ages. A minor page of history has turned back a thousand years.31
On the left, the novelist John Buchan holds up a kestrel; on the right, his son has a goshawk. Buchan senior was for some years the president of the Oxford University Falconry Club. |
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The notion that falconry could be a kind of virtual time-travelling is commonplace in inter-war writings on the sport. After the horrors of the Great War, falconry allowed one to reclaim historical continuity; it was a bond, a healing link with a lost pastoral age. Falconers themselves rarely wrote in such purple prose. They tended to keep any lyrical sentiments hidden beneath the bluff demeanour of the practised field-sportsman. But they too were at pains to point out that British falconry had never died out and had an unbroken link with the past.
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A 19th-century bas-relief of the Shah of Persia, Nâser al-Din (d. 1896). |
Fifty years later, the final passages of Stephen Bodio’s book A Rage for Falcons seem cast in the same mould. Describing a group of modern American falconers attending to hawk and quarry in the snow, Bodio muses that ‘there is no way to tell where or when this picture comes from, not on three continents, not in four thousand years.’32 But falconry is not all history for Bodio. Like many modern falconers, he values falconry’s ability to reforge links with nature. ‘Here right at the very edge of the city,’ runs the book’s final sentence, ‘it seems we have found a way of going on, of touching the wild in this twentieth century.’ His view is analogous to that of Professor Tom Cade, who describes falconry as a form of high-intensity birdwatching. Bodio characterizes falconers as having ‘a feeling for the woods and fields, an intuitive grasp of ecology’.33 This notion of falconer-as-ecologist was first championed by Aldo Leopold in the 1940s. For him, falconry was superior to modern, technologically augmented hunting methods. It provided insight into the workings of ecological processes, demanded strenuous outdoor activity and required the learning of many practical skills. At heart, it taught the falconer a fortuitous psychological ability: to maintain the correct balance between wild and civilized states – in both falcon and falconer. ‘At the slightest error in the technique of handling,’ Leopold wrote, ‘the falconer’s hawk may either “go tame” like Homo sapiens or fly away into the blue. All in all falconry is the perfect hobby.’34
‘Shakespeare meets Abercrombie and Fitch’: post-war America reinvents falconry.
THE FORGOTTEN FIELD SPORT?
Yet many would disagree with Leopold, seeing falconry less as a means of recapturing right relations with nature, and more as a bloodthirsty, atavistic activity. The RSPCA lamented the irrevocable coarsening of the minds and manners of young ladies who took up the sport in the nineteenth century. A century later, one British anti-hunting group explained that falconers fly their falcons in remote countryside in order to prevent members of the public seeing what they are doing. I still recall the raised eyebrow and acid response of one falconer to this statement: ‘Do birdwatchers go to remote places so that no one can see them watching birds?’ he enquired.
Falconry’s position within the highly polarized hunting debate is intriguing. Its opponents describe it as the ‘forgotten’ field sport, for it seems aligned with bird-watching rather than hunting in today’s cultural milieu: falconry books, for example, tend to be shelved in the natural-history section of British bookshops rather than in the hunting section. Falconer-biologist Nick Fox enthusiastically promotes falconry as a ‘green’ activity, arguing that the falconer ‘doesn’t need to modify the countryside by building sports grounds or golf courses, or by killing vermin, rearing large numbers of game birds, and restricting public access . . . falconry is a natural, low-impact field-sport, self-sustaining and well-suited to the needs of modern man’.35 His position is shared by at least one academic ornithologist who told me that good falconry is a particularly enlightened form of animal–human relationship, so perfectly does it match the behavioural repertoire of the wild animal.
Yet as he pointed out, larger problems quite unrelated to one’s moral stance on hunting are associated with falconry. Perhaps the best known is that of the illegal taking of young falcons from the wild. Thieves exerted a serious toll on European falcon eyries in the 1960s and ’70s. Along with the activities of egg-collectors, these depredations exerted considerable pressure on populations threatened by pesticides. Today, with captive-bred birds readily available, eyrie thefts are thankfully much rarer in Europe; offenders are treated harshly by conservation organizations, falconry organizations and the law alike. But sadly, this is far from being true elsewhere. Falcon smuggling, sometimes small-scale, sometimes large and mafia-run, has had devastating effects on some saker populations in the former Soviet Union. At the same time, falconers were directly responsible for one of the most successful feats of conservation ever undertaken: the restoration of the peregrine falcon to much of the United States in the 1970s. The story of the decline and recovery of the peregrine falcon is truly extraordinary. Thirty years ago, doomy predictions of the species’ extinction were common. Now the peregrine has been removed from the American Endangered Species list. Millions of dollars, thousands of people, universities, governments, corporations, even the military, were involved in its restoration. What makes such conservation success stories so compelling, so mesmerizing?
Falconry as a symbol of Arab cultural identity meets Bald Eagle as a symbol of American imperialism: a 2004 cartoon from Al Jazeera.