Another fatherless child unaware of his true identity, the young King Arthur, is transformed into a merlin by his teacher Merlin in T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone as part of his ‘eddication’. White’s portrayal playfully digs at familiar tropes of medievalism; his talking hawks and his Arthurian armoured knights share a social hierarchy, etiquette and iconography. In the mews of the Castle Sauvage, each hawk or falcon is ‘a motionless statue of a knight in armour’, the birds standing ‘gravely in their plumed helmets, spurred and armed’. The parallels are winningly unsubtle and beautifully couched: ‘The canvas or sacking screens of their perches moved heavily in a breath of wind, like banners in a chapel, and the rapt nobility of the air kept their knight’s vigil in knightly patience.’25 White gently satirizes the mores of military and sporting elites; before turning the Wart into a merlin and setting him loose into the mews, Merlin suggests that he ‘learn by listening to the experts’ in the martial culture Arthur will have to live and breathe as king. Merlin points out that these falconry birds:
don’t really understand that they are prisoners, any more than cavalry officers do. They look on themselves as being dedicated to their profession, like an order of knighthood or something like that. You see, the membership of the mews is after all restricted to the raptors, and that does help a lot. They know that none of the lower classes can get in. Their screen perches don’t carry blackbirds or such trash as that.26
In the 1930s White himself, an unhappy schoolteacher rent by anxieties over his status, his sexuality and his career, quit his job, took a gamekeeper’s cottage deep in a wood and set about the task of training a hawk. He saw hawk-training as a form of psychoanalysis, treasuring the notion that he might become a feral creature, like the bird he trained. Indeed, falcons’ long, familiar partnership with mankind as falconry birds – often living right inside the most domestic of spheres, the household – coupled with their resistance to domestication, has allowed falcons and other birds of prey to become powerfully charged symbols of wildness in many cultures. Falconry has marked mankind’s relation with falcons in myriad robust and decisive ways, and the next chapter explores the phenomenon of what T. H. White called a ‘rage that you sleep and drink and tremble to think of . . . even in recollection’,27 and what King James I described as an ‘extreme stirrer up of passions’.28
An iconic falconry image: an immature peregrine, wearing jesses, Lahore bells and a feather-plumed Dutch hood.
three
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.
A terracotta figure of a falconer from 6th-century Japan.
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 r
ouse.
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