The Art and Practice of Hawking. E. B. Michell
small treatise by Sir John Sebright, 1826, and the splendid illustrated volume by Schlegel and Wulverhorst, 1853. The Badminton Library contains half a volume on Falconry from the very able pen of Mr. Gerald Lascelles; and the Encyclopædia Britannica has an article on the subject by Colonel Delmé Radcliffe.
To look for any real revival of falconry in Europe would be altogether quixotic. Lucky indeed may the falconer of the future consider himself if the art even survives. Already the goshawk, the ger, and the golden eagle are almost extinct in England; sparrow-hawks have become so rare that constant advertisements offering to buy one remain without response; the harmless hobby and innocuous merlin are ferociously persecuted, and have been exterminated in most of their favourite haunts. A lost hawk has become almost a synonym for a murdered hawk. Owners are beset with enemies on every hand, besides being plagued and pestered by ignorant and impertinent intruders, if ever they venture with their hawks into a public place. The country becomes more and more unsuitable for hawking purposes. Upon many of the most open spaces bricks and mortar intrude; upon other parts the vexatious small plantations designed as shelters for game. Even when a suitable grouse-moor or partridge-ground is found in want of a tenant, obstacles may be raised. A baseless but deep-rooted prejudice deters many lessors from allowing trained hawks to be flown over their land, on the absurd plea that it will spoil it for subsequent tenants. In short, the impediments with which the modern falconer has to contend are too many and too great for any but a few very determined sportsmen. These, when they have once mastered the initial difficulties, usually persist in preferring the sport to any other. “Once a falconer, always a falconer,” is a maxim of universal truth. And the fraternal spirit which animates most English falconers—and, for that matter, most falconers throughout the world—is not the least agreeable feature presented by this ancient and honourable field sport.
CHAPTER II
The Birds used in Hawking
Of the numerous birds of prey which are found in various parts of the globe, a good many have been employed in the service of man as agents in the pursuit of other birds and of four-footed animals, partly for purposes of supplying him with food, and partly for sport. It is more than probable that others might be similarly trained and flown, especially some of the American and Australian hawks, which seem suitable for the purpose, but which have never yet, as far as we know, been thus taken in hand. It is not, however, proposed to describe at length any members of the large family of Raptores, except such as are known to have been used in hawking; and with regard to those which have been flown only in remote parts of the world, considerations of space necessitate a very brief reference.
It has usually been said that the list of birds used in hawking includes only two main divisions—the long-winged hawks, as falconers call them, known to naturalists under the name of “falcons”; and the short-winged hawks, to which the men of science apply specially the name of hawks. This ornithological classification of falcons on the one hand and hawks on the other, is not a very happy one; for in the general public estimation, as well as in falconers’ phraseology, every falcon is a hawk, although every hawk may not be properly called a falcon. The one term is of classic, and the other of Teutonic origin; and it was too late, when books about birds first began to be written scientifically, to attempt to establish a hard-and-fast difference between words which had already passed current for centuries as meaning pretty much the same thing. Moreover, hawking, which, if the naturalists’ view of the matter were accepted, ought to be concerned, like the French autourserie, with the short-winged hawks only, has long been considered in England a mere synonym for falconry, which also, if interpreted strictly according to the ornithological theory, ought to be regarded as dealing with the long-winged species.
The two-fold division, however, no matter whether it is into falcons and hawks, or into short-winged and long-winged hawks, seems to be insufficient and unsatisfactory. For eagles, which have been, and still are, extensively used in a sport for which the only English names are hawking and falconry, remain unincluded in the two usually accepted classes. No eagle can properly be called either a hawk or a falcon; and in order to find a place for them amongst the birds trained and flown at quarry, it seems necessary to institute a third class. What order of precedence should be taken by such new class is a matter of small consequence. In symmetry of shape, in its mode of flying, its character, and its tastes, the eagle is as inferior to the true hawk as the latter has always been deemed to be to the true falcon; and in this work, as in others on falconry, the first place has been retained for the long-winged hawks, and the second for the short-winged, leaving a third place for what little it seems necessary to say about such eagles as we know to have been flown at game.
The long-winged hawk is known by the following characteristics:—The second primary feather in the wing, reckoning from the outside, is the longest, or at least equal in length to any other, as in the merlin, which has the second and third feathers very nearly or quite of the same length. The upper mandible has on each of its sides, about a third part of the distance from the point to the cere, a projection somewhat resembling a very blunt tooth. The eye is dark brown. The wing is long enough in the outer joint to come down, when closed, considerably more than half-way between the end of the tail coverts and the end of the tail itself, and in some cases, as in the hobby, as far as the tail, or even farther.
In the short-winged hawks the wing is comparatively short in the outer joint, and, when expanded, presents a rounded appearance at the end, the fourth primary being the longest, and the first very short. That emargination, or narrowing in, of the feather near its end, which is observable in the first two primaries of the long-winged hawk, is still more pronounced in the short-winged, and is conspicuous in the third and fourth primaries also. The tail is long, and large when expanded. The iris is of some shade of yellow, light or dark. The upper mandible curves in a smooth line, without any projecting tooth.
SHAPE OF WINGS
In the eagles the tail is shorter and stouter. The outer joint of the wing is shorter than in the falcons, the wing deriving its power from the feathers near the body rather than from the outer ones. The beak is longer in shape than that of the other two sorts, and the legs are proportionately stouter. The size of the smallest eagle is very much greater than that of the largest falcon or hawk.
The differences which exist in the shape of the wing between the three classes will perhaps be best appreciated by a glance at the accompanying illustration, in which a characteristic wing of each kind is figured.
The French have convenient terms (see Belvallette, Traité d’Autourserie, Paris, 1887) which express in themselves, with great perspicuity, though perhaps a little exaggeration, the different methods of flying employed by the short- and the long-winged hawks. The latter they describe as ramiers, or rowers, because their mode of progression through the air resembles that of an oarsman, or rather sculler, striking with repeated beats of his sculls; whilst they describe the short-winged hawks (with eagles and all birds that have rounded wings) as voiliers, or sailers, maintaining that their impulse is gained by the pressure of the air against the wing, upon which it acts as upon a sail. Many people may be inclined to call such a distinction rather fanciful, and even question its truth; but the mere fact that the two words have been accepted as correctly denoting the two separate styles of flying, shows what a marked difference between them has been generally admitted to exist. It will be seen that the mode of flying the “rowers” and the “sailers” at quarry is also very distinct.
In accordance with the three-fold classification above suggested, I now proceed to mention the various birds used in hawking under the successive headings of—(1) Long-winged hawks; (2) Short-winged hawks; and (3) Eagles.
I. THE LONG-WINGED HAWKS (Falcons)[1]
[1] It should be observed that although the term falcon has an established meaning among ornithologists as a name for the long-winged hawks, it is used by falconers in quite a different acceptation. In hawking phraseology it is applied, in contradistinction