The personal attention paid to a moulting hawk varies very widely. Some falconers make frequent visits to the room, and habituate the captive to come to the fist, and be carried and handled and maintained in a very tame state. The ancient falconers--and some of our own time--gave themselves very little trouble, and left the moulting hawks pretty much to their own devices. Probably the one course has nearly as much to commend it as the other. It seems more amiable and business-like to keep up, even during the off-season, that friendly intercourse with your hawk which is natural among friends, and even some of those habits of obedience which you have so laboriously taught. On the other hand, while you are giving your hawk a holiday, you may almost as well give her a real one as do it by halves. She will very possibly moult a little quicker, perhaps a little better, if she has no worry at all, and can concentrate her whole energies upon the mere growing of feathers, just as she did when in the nest, instead of having to bother herself about jumping to the fist--a mere perfunctory act of meaningless duty, devoid of practical use or result. The falconer will, at least once a day, visit the moulting-room, if it is only for the purpose of changing the bath water, clearing away the castings and the stray feathers of birds that have been plucked and eaten, and gathering up any feathers which may have been dropped by the hawk herself. The order in which these feathers fall is admirably arranged, so that each new feather as it successively appears in the place of one that has dropped out finds itself between two completely grown feathers, either old or new, one on each side, between which it can grow down with a protector right and left of it. The deck feathers, _i.e._ the central feathers of the tail, are the first to drop, and in the wings the "beam" or longest feathers are about the latest to fall. By this time the smaller feathers of the body and other parts will have mostly been changed. By rights, of course, the change should be universal and complete, but in peregrines and lanners it is often not so. Very commonly one of the former may be seen with several brown feathers interspersed among the light grey plumage of the first moult. A falconer must be rather over-fastidious if he is put out at this; but there is more reason for complaint when rusty-looking primaries, well worn in the nestling stage of existence, persist in keeping their places amongst the brand-new shafts and webs of flight feathers just come down. A blue hawk thus parti-coloured, looks as if there was something wrong with her; and the owner is apt to fancy, whether rightly or wrongly I cannot say, that the old feathers abnormally left in are not as serviceable as new ones would have been. At anyrate, most falconers consider it rather a feather in their cap to have their hawks "clean moulted," that is to say, with a complete suit of new feathers on their bodies.