The Art and Practice of HawkingMichell, E. B. (Edward Blair)
History
The Art and Practice of Hawking
Michell, E. B. (Edward Blair)
Falconry
Passage peregrines are, of course, much more likely to succeed with
grouse and black-game than eyesses. Out of a dozen falcons skilfully
taken in hand, and kept specially for game-hawking, it would not be
unreasonable to expect that eight or nine would take their quarry well.
By rights a passager which is intended to be flown principally at game
should be captured in the spring. There is no use in keeping her all
the while idle from November to the next August. If taken in April she
would be well fit for flying on the twelfth of August. There would,
it is true, be some trouble about the moult, but this might often be
deferred till very much later than it can be with eyesses. According
to modern practice, which is to catch no wild peregrines in spring,
the passager has almost always been more or less flown at rooks in the
early part of the year. She has accordingly to unlearn a good deal
that she learnt then, and be introduced to the much more risky and
artificial accomplishment of waiting on. That she should take kindly
to this habit is not a thing to be anticipated. It would be going
rather too far to expect her to moon about overhead humbly waiting
till the falconer below pleases to throw out for her a morsel of cold
and uninviting food. You will generally find it best to employ with
her rather different tactics from those which served for the eyesses.
Thus you may call her off to the lure from the other side of a wide
moorside, and, as she comes across the heather, contrive that there
shall get up out of it a very fast pigeon. On the first occasion it is
ten to one that she will start at this from the very moderate height
at which she was flying towards you; but whether she takes the pigeon
or not, she will know very well that she ought, for her own advantage,
to have been higher when he got up; and the next time you call her off
at a similar place and in a similar way, the odds are that she comes
to you higher in the air. A third trial will probably find her higher
still, and you may let her make a circle or two before starting the
pigeon. When she has once flown a grouse in a somewhat similar way the
effect will be still more marked. Do not now dream of lowering her
pitch by ever letting her stoop to the lure. Indeed, after the passager
is once made to the dead lure, it need scarcely be used at all, except
to call the hawk back after unsuccessful flights.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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