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The Falconer’s Tale

Dan Kieran

For most of us the countryside is a realm of escape; a living postcard that runs in real time through your brain, somewhere to dream of when you are immersed in the mania of a city. A walk in this landscape loosens your shoulders and draws out your breath in soft gasps. Waves ‘dance’, flowers ‘flutter’ and the promise of lusty milkmaids is only ever the next valley away. This is nature in soft focus, the Wordsworthian idyll of our imagination where we carelessly love to play.

Stalking through the woods with a hawk on your gloved fist strips nature of such romance but keeps its authenticity vividly intact. The memory of something more agile and real about the living, wild world begins to seep out of your bones and your focus razors. His head moves slowly and methodically, the wings stretch out as he rebalances with his yellow taloned feet and the eyes flit and twitch. No longer passively consuming the landscape from the audience, he pulls you onto the stage. The breeze flattens. Birdsong scatters. Silence. The sound of the wild food chain. You begin to feel the pressure of every living thing in the earth on the back of your neck as you pace beyond the gorse, but even in this heightened state you are ponderous. Remaining sure-footed, his head plunges towards the ground, anticipating a vole’s movement, but by the time your gaze lands with his you are lucky to glimpse a shoelace tail vanish into the grass. Your shoulders broaden with anticipation and you untie the falconer’s knot that binds him to your glove with your right hand and lightly hold the jesses – the soft leather straps attached to his ankles – between the fingers and palm of your left. Hawks and falcons calculate unconsciously whether the energy required to catch potential quarry is worth the effort. You think of the astonishing triangulation these instincts perform when a flurry of feathers brushes your face. You instinctively open your hand, extend your arm and reel slightly. He’s off – coursing through the light.

This sensation of closeness between tamed man and wild bird has a lineage that goes back millennia. According to the written, or more often drawn, archive that we use to trace the route of history, hawks and falcons were first used to hunt for food in China and Mesopotamia around 700 bc. From the training to the equipment it requires, the essential elements of falconry are unchanged since that time. Practised by emperors, soldiers, commoners and men and women, falconry, or hawking, crossed the deserts of Asia, the Middle East and Africa before conquering the disparate realms of Europe and the New World. The practice graces the oral poetry and written pages of ancient texts in every culture it has touched along the way, popping up in the writings and stories of kings and emperors (most notably Emperor Frederick II, 1194–1250), a Tsar (Alexei Romanov, 1629–76), an Arabic astronomer (The Book of Moamyn, c.1200), Saxon poetry (‘The Battle of Maldon’, 991), our own Knights of the Round Table (Sir Tristan is a renowned harpist and falconer), monks (The Boke of St Albans, 1486) and, perhaps most exotically for a Western mind, in those of the warriors of the Samurai (Nihon Shoki, the Chronicles of Japan, 720). To learn that the feeling of setting out with a hawk on your fist in the hunt for food, partnering with a bird’s natural wild behaviour, is something that has been experienced by such varied ancestors adds a glint of substance to the myth of their forgotten lives. I like to think their shadows drift with you in the woods – the echo of a collective experience ingrained in our very species.

What the Samurai or the Knights of the Round Table would have made of my initial experience of falconry is harder to imagine. The first time a Harris hawk landed on my fist I was standing in the rain in the middle of a pine forest surrounded by wooden lodges in the dystopian eco-habitat of Center Parcs in Somerset as part of a group of seven people clad in bright waterproofs with arms outstretched, as a hawk did its duty and flew from the falconer to each of us in turn. But despite my location and the formulaic atmosphere, experiencing a wild bird fly towards me for the first time – so I could see exactly how the tail feathers push the air to slow the hawk to the point that it can literally step from flight onto my fist – was surely little different to the sensation it must have evoked for the first time in a squire in medieval England or a warrior in Jomon Japan. This was a spectacle, biology, sport, instinct, a privileged insight into wild behaviour and a philosophy of life all merged into one. In the ten years since that experience I have become an avid fan of hawks and falcons. I’ve gone on falconry experience days and holidays and read every obscure book on the subject I can trace. I’ve had barn owls, eagle owls, kestrels, lanner and peregrine falcons, all kinds of hybrids, a merlin and even a golden eagle perched on my fist. I drove for six hours one Saturday morning to the edge of Cornwall from Sussex with my friend Kev once – just on the off chance we might glimpse a snowy owl that had got lost on migration.

But while I love raptors in all their forms Harris hawks have always been my favourite. Known as the ‘wolves of the air’ because of their habit of hunting in packs of up to six, they are highly social, have the ideal temperament for falconry and a hunting style most accommodating to human beings. Their natural habitat is desert where one of them will scout ahead, others will walk along the ground in the hope of scaring something into movement, while those that remain wait above – preparing to strike. The group then share whatever is caught. Going hunting with Harris hawks is certainly the most self-contained, dramatic, inspiring and shocking thing I have ever done.

It’s important to appreciate that a trained hawk or falcon of any kind bears absolutely no relation to a domesticated pet. Birds of prey only remain with the falconer as long as he or she remains a more efficient food source than the bird could achieve out in the wild. It’s a relationship but by no means a friendship. Even if a hawk or falcon consented to remain with you for twenty years their wild instincts would remain intact. This is why the jesses are made from leather, or sometimes kangaroo skin, because eventually they will rot and fall off should the falcon one day decide it has had enough of you. Everything about the husbandry involved in taking care of a hawk is based with transience in mind. This is as true for a falconry enthusiast in the UK as it is for those who still rely on birds of prey for food and animal skins in the mountains of Kazakhstan. Go there today and you’ll still find men and their sons hawking on horseback with golden eagles on the fist. Sixteen-year-old boys are sent down a cliff face with simple rope to take a juvenile eagle from its eyrie. They train them for six months under the watchful eye of their fathers and then hunt with them for nine years. After that they release them, grateful for the work they have done (golden eagles can live over thirty years in the wild and up to eighty in captivity).

Despite often being bundled up with other country sports, falconry is also far more awesome and has little in common with fox hunting, or shooting pheasants or deer.

Instead of stacking the odds in your favour with technology or superior numbers you participate in natural behaviour to catch your prey. It might seem a little blood curdling, but I’d rather be a wild rabbit and take my chances with a Harris hawk than a chicken in a battery farm. As for enjoying the act of death? Well, to be honest, that’s my least favourite part but I’m of the view that if you can’t bring yourself to kill an animal then you have no right to eat it. Not that the food argument is relevant from a human perspective anyway. Whenever I’ve been hunting with Harris hawks they’ve been catching their own dinner.

Back in the woods he’s gone. Blending through a thicket of trees. The possibility of a squirrel or a resting bird perhaps. You hear the bell on his ankle tinkling and follow the sound, jogging and ducking through the branches. Cautious, you feel the eyes around you as the bracken folds under your feet. Then through the damp, newly fallen leaves suddenly the bell is louder. You spot him standing atop a tree, looking around with feathers rousing about his neck. His vision is tunnelled, seeking prey. You try and call yourself into his mind, tapping a scrap of meat on your left thumb with your right hand. He spots it instantly and embraces the air. His wings are flat but his head tilts, almost with curiosity, and he glides towards you. Minimum effort, maximum effect. From that vantage point he swoops below the line of your fist before adjusting and rising up again. The wings open, his powerful feet thrust forward and tail feathers break the air. Feet on flesh but with barely any sensation of impact. You grin broadly. His beak immediately pulls at the food on your hand and you tuck the jesses between your thumb and finger. Finished, he opens his wings to adjust and looks ahead. Concentrating. Still hungry. Looking for something else.

Becoming a falconer is not something to attempt on a whim. The training and hard work required is seldom appreciated by the hawk, but the most important factor is time. That’s why, for most serious falconers to do it properly, they have to be absurdly rich, unmarried and have no children, or they have to make falconry earn them a living. Being in the company of a falconer who has made it their career is always inspiring. It is hard work, with astonishingly long hours, but certainly not a mundane job. They enthuse and cajole newcomers by sharing their birds and their enthusiasm but offer plenty of stories of warning and danger too. They have no time for people who embark on the process of having a wild bird if they are not prepared to show the bird the respect required by learning how to care for it properly. In the UK today you don’t need a licence to have a bird of prey and no one comes to check if you’re housing it properly – even though these are wild and dangerous birds. A warm and gentle falconer I spent a few days with in Scotland once told me a story about a novice who took it upon himself to get a golden eagle as his first bird. This man was as mild a soul as I have ever met but he almost delighted in telling me how the novice failed to show the eagle the necessary respect and the precise details of how he was consequently attacked, losing the sight in one eye in the process. People are normally uneasy about having a bird of prey on their fist because they’re afraid of the bird’s beak, but it’s little more than a knife and fork. The taloned feet are what you have to watch out for. Only an arrogant fool or a respectful master of falconry would dare to offer a home to a golden eagle.

The woods clear and you climb a small hill, where the tufts and clumps of grass shelter rabbit holes. As you reach the top a long shallow valley falls away towards a derelict barn and a lonely telegraph pole. He bates, feathers wildly flapping, and fights to be free of your fist. With the height you’ve gained he wants to claim the roof of the barn. Now. Then you’ll walk towards him and scare the quarry as you come. He can sit, wait and pounce. Simple. You want him to work a little harder than that. You scoop him up and back on to your fist. He screams violence in your face, but any eye contact is unconscious. You walk gingerly through the holes along the ridge, heading further on.

The annals of falconry offer a variety of methods for training your bird, a process that begins with ‘manning’. You have to grind down the bird’s natural instincts to flee from you by keeping him on your fist for as long as possible. Eventually he will accept you, and when he is hungry enough will drop his eyes and eat from your fist. This is the first step in training the bird. Feeding from the fist opens up the possibilities of more advanced training as he begins to associate you with food. In The Goshawk, T.H. White struggles with the tempestuous Gos, who is delivered from Germany in a basket, only a few weeks old and still never having seen another living thing:

. . . he was tumultuous and frightening . . . born to fly, sloping sideways, free among the verdure of that Teutonic upland, to murder with his fierce feet and to consume with that curved Persian beak, who now hopped up and down in a clothes basket with a kind of imperious precocity, the impatience of a spoiled but noble heir-apparent to the Holy Roman Empire.

White introduces himself to Gos in a barn, and what follows is a battle of patience and instinct as White attempts to force Gos to accept him. Endlessly placing him on his fist only for Gos to ‘bate’ and end up suspended by his jesses until White again puts him on his fist, and on it goes.

I was to stay awake if necessary for three days and nights, during which, I hoped, the tyrant would learn to stop his bating and to accept my hand as a perch, would consent to eat there, and would become a little accustomed to the strange life of human beings.

Eventually Gos accepts White, suffering to sit on his fist while he walks around his farm, into town and even on a visit to the local pub.

Happily these days the best method of training birds of prey is more widely agreed on and much less stressful for both bird and man. For one thing eggs are no longer taken from nests but laid in captivity, and chicks are fed from the glove from the moment they hatch. This ‘imprints’ the person doing the feeding as the parent and means the bird will accept food from anyone from that moment on – as long as it is offered from a glove. This process makes the hawk or falcon think that you and they are the same species. While this has obvious benefits when it comes to training, it also means that they have no fear of you and if cornered will attack. Falconers also introduce the ‘lure’ earlier in the training process these days too. Feeding a bird of prey from a small leather pouch at the end of a long string familiarises the bird with the lure as a food source. You can then drag the lure, with food and/or animal fur attached, to ‘remind’ the bird of its natural behaviour when the bird is more mature. Because they tend to hunt prey that lives on the ground, hawks and eagles are taught to go for a dragged lure to simulate chasing rabbits and small animals. Falcons will hunt other birds on the wing (in mid air). In this instance the bird, familiar with the lure as a food source, will attempt to catch the lure when the falconer swings it around his head. Expert lure practitioners strengthen their falcons and improve their hunting ability by sweeping the lure away at the last minute in a cross between a choreographed dance and a martial art. (I’ve tried my hand at lure swinging, but was no match for the saker falcon I found myself pitted against. She mugged me for it on her first attempt.) The falcon needs this kind of training so it can cope with hunting in the wild – I saw a hobby hunting bats at dusk on the River Avon once, which was stupefying. Falcons have an instinctive agility that the human eye can barely match, but as the falconer is aiming to push the falcon into discovering its innate ability rather than teach it everything from scratch, it doesn’t take long for the bird to ‘get it’ and successfully hunt on its own.

The ridge softens and you stop in front of a bramble bush that shelters you from the field, slowly untying the falconer’s knot and releasing the jesses with your right hand. Closer to the barn now, you raise your arm and push him into the air. You must not let him get too far away. He glides down towards the roof, and lands on its highest point. You are 100 metres or so away when you begin to walk towards the barn. The brown fur of a rabbit lollops near you, but he just sits – it’s not worth it. He looks behind the barn, spots something and vanishes. Damn! But you don’t run. There’s no point. You twinge in panic – could this be the day he decides to leave? It’s always possible, but no. You remember his hunting weight. It’s just hunger driving instinct. Then he reappears on the roof. You relax with relief. You start to move again. The wave of impact from your footsteps begins to interest him, he spots something but there’s no movement. Then he beats his wings and dives down. The rabbit that you can’t see has a fifty-fifty chance. You imagine it darting left and right, heading for a hole. The hawk seems to be going too slowly. He’s barely moving his wings, then he arcs one way and then another. You see it! The rabbit’s back legs force him into a high leap over something, towards a bush. Then he stoops, wings raised and feet falling, covering, and then there’s no sound. You run now, forgetting the holes. You charge and find them both. He turns to you and squawks mercilessly. The rabbit is alive, one eye fixed in terror and the heart juddering under its fur. He mantles with his wings, talons gripping the rabbit’s face and back. Not sharing, not yet. You offer something else from the bag, a whole chick that’s dead – easier to eat and no risk of injury. Your left hand now firmly presses down on the rabbit’s back. He jumps for the chick and eats it in one go, cocking his neck to swallow. Your right hand reaches for the rabbit’s neck. You pause, registering the soft fur, and then you pull hard. The rabbit’s neck breaks and the fight is gone. You feel exhilarated and shocked. The quarry goes into your bag.

You sit in the wet grass. Breathless. He stands on the floor. There is no pleasure in death but also no regret. His eyes flit and twitch. You are tame. He is wild. This is the world. A glimpse of the truth that lies behind every breath becomes clearer in the cold autumn light. Whether you would have it or not, this is the world. Climbing to your feet you hold out your fist. He flaps his wings impatiently and is up. His feet tangle with the jesses. You unravel them and hold them between the fingers and palm of your left hand. He’s still concentrating. Still hungry. Always looking for something else.