Falcon

by Helen Macdonald

  Algerian falconers setting out for the field. Romantic, orientalist representations of falconry were commonplace in the late 19th century, and this 1898 painting by Gustave Henri Marchetti is a prime example.

  These imperial imaginings typically obliterated any drive to understand how falconry’s social functions differed across cultures. Such blindness is still encountered. Even today one encounters explanations of the rise of falconry in the Arabian Gulf as being a means for nomadic people to obtain additional protein to supplement a meagre diet. This functional explanation is as blind to cultural nuance as that of many a nineteenth-century commentator. For falconry has always had significant spiritual and social importance in Bedouin culture, where it is highly valued for its egalitarian nature and the qualities of self-denial and generosity it fosters. A hawking expedition grants falconers of all social backgrounds space to meet as equals in the desert, to swap stories and share food, while their falcons doze in the firelight.

  Bedouin men hawking on horseback with saker and lanner falcons, Palestine, between 1900 and 1920.

  THE FALCON GENTLE

  We learn that spy-hero Richard Hannay’s son is a falconer in John Buchan’s thriller Island of Sheep. ‘If you keep hawks,’ Buchan explains, ‘you have to be a pretty efficient nursemaid, and feed them and wash them and mend for them.’26 Indeed. Falconry granted the English gentleman a legitimate form of domesticity: when attending to a falcon, one could be both manly and a nursemaid. Falcon-training mirrored the education of the public schoolboy, the purpose of which was to tame and control the natural strength, wildness and unruliness of the growing boy through discipline, physical restraint, self-sacrifice, virtu and honour. And so with the falcon. For centuries, the process of training a falcon has been seen as training oneself, learning patience and bodily and emotional self-control. ‘Training a falcon trains the man quite as much as the man trains the falcon,’ explained Harold Webster succinctly in 1964,27 a notion that perhaps informs programmes at several British prisons where inmates keep and breed falcons and hawks.

  The notion that the emasculating effects of modern life can be cured by contact with wild nature has been a standard trope in writings on masculinity from Roosevelt to Robert Bly. Associating with wild or ferocious animals – through hunting them or, in the case of falconry, training them – has often been cast as a panacea for such lily-livery. In this tradition, through training a falcon the falconer assumes some of the wildness of the falcon, whilst the falcon correspondingly assumes the manners of a man. ‘One never really tames a falcon,’ wrote one American falconer in the 1950s. ‘One just becomes a little wild like she is.’28 Masculine qualities considered lost or marginalized in modern life – wildness, power, strength and so on – had already been projected onto falcons. Through the psychologically charged identifications of trainer and hawk during the training process the falconer can repossess these qualities while the falcon at the same time becomes ‘civilized’. No wonder there are still so few female falconers.

  T. H. White clearly saw magical, almost Freudian transferences between human and hawk as intrinsic to falconry. He described his own attempts as the project of a man ‘alone in a wood, being tired of most humans in any case, to train a person who was not human, but a bird’.29 White decided to ‘wake’ his hawk by the old-fashioned method. This involved ‘reciting Shakespeare to keep the hawk awake and thinking with pride and happiness about the hawk’s tradition’:

  There was a bas-relief of a Babylonian with a hawk on his fist in Khorsabad, which dated from about 3,000 years ago. Many people were not able to understand why this was pleasant, but it was. I thought it was right that I should now be happy to continue as one of a long line. The unconscious of the race was a medium in which one’s own unconscious microscopically swam, and not only in that of the living race but of all the races which had gone before. The Assyrian had begotten children. I grasped that ancestor’s bony hand, in which all the knuckles were as well defined as the nutty calf of his bas-relief leg, across the centuries.30

  Many twentieth-century commentators shared White’s desire for historical continuity and community; they also saw falconry as a romantic, pastoralist, anti-modern pursuit. In 1930s America, an era of chivalric youth groups such as the Knights of King Arthur, many boys caught the falconry bug because they were beguiled by falconry’s fantasies of reliving a knightly past. Grown-ups were not immune. Arch-ruralist J. Wentworth Day’s account of a day’s hawking with the British Falconers Club in Kent explained how the hawking expedition was a trip to a lost past:

  standing on the hump-backed vallum of a British earth-work, all the sea and the marshes at your feet, the wind in your face, the hawk on your fist, you may know that you are, for a brief space, a heir of the ages. A minor page of history has turned back a thousand years.31

  On the left, the novelist John Buchan holds up a kestrel; on the right, his son has a goshawk. Buchan senior was for some years the president of the Oxford University Falconry Club.

  The notion that falconry could be a kind of virtual time-travelling is commonplace in inter-war writings on the sport. After the horrors of the Great War, falconry allowed one to reclaim historical continuity; it was a bond, a healing link with a lost pastoral age. Falconers themselves rarely wrote in such purple prose. They tended to keep any lyrical sentiments hidden beneath the bluff demeanour of the practised field-sportsman. But they too were at pains to point out that British falconry had never died out and had an unbroken link with the past.

  A 19th-century bas-relief of the Shah of Persia, Nâser al-Din (d. 1896).

  Fifty years later, the final passages of Stephen Bodio’s book A Rage for Falcons seem cast in the same mould. Describing a group of modern American falconers attending to hawk and quarry in the snow, Bodio muses that ‘there is no way to tell where or when this picture comes from, not on three continents, not in four thousand years.’32 But falconry is not all history for Bodio. Like many modern falconers, he values falconry’s ability to reforge links with nature. ‘Here right at the very edge of the city,’ runs the book’s final sentence, ‘it seems we have found a way of going on, of touching the wild in this twentieth century.’ His view is analogous to that of Professor Tom Cade, who describes falconry as a form of high-intensity birdwatching. Bodio characterizes falconers as having ‘a feeling for the woods and fields, an intuitive grasp of ecology’.33 This notion of falconer-as-ecologist was first championed by Aldo Leopold in the 1940s. For him, falconry was superior to modern, technologically augmented hunting methods. It provided insight into the workings of ecological processes, demanded strenuous outdoor activity and required the learning of many practical skills. At heart, it taught the falconer a fortuitous psychological ability: to maintain the correct balance between wild and civilized states – in both falcon and falconer. ‘At the slightest error in the technique of handling,’ Leopold wrote, ‘the falconer’s hawk may either “go tame” like Homo sapiens or fly away into the blue. All in all falconry is the perfect hobby.’34

  ‘Shakespeare meets Abercrombie and Fitch’: post-war America reinvents falconry.

  THE FORGOTTEN FIELD SPORT?

  Yet many would disagree with Leopold, seeing falconry less as a means of recapturing right relations with nature, and more as a bloodthirsty, atavistic activity. The RSPCA lamented the irrevocable coarsening of the minds and manners of young ladies who took up the sport in the nineteenth century. A century later, one British anti-hunting group explained that falconers fly their falcons in remote countryside in order to prevent members of the public seeing what they are doing. I still recall the raised eyebrow and acid response of one falconer to this statement: ‘Do birdwatchers go to remote places so that no one can see them watching birds?’ he enquired.

  Falconry’s position within the highly polarized hunting debate is intriguing. Its opponents describe it as the ‘forgotten’ field sport, for it seems aligned with bird-watching rather than hunting in today’s cultural milieu: falc
onry books, for example, tend to be shelved in the natural-history section of British bookshops rather than in the hunting section. Falconer-biologist Nick Fox enthusiastically promotes falconry as a ‘green’ activity, arguing that the falconer ‘doesn’t need to modify the countryside by building sports grounds or golf courses, or by killing vermin, rearing large numbers of game birds, and restricting public access . . . falconry is a natural, low-impact field-sport, self-sustaining and well-suited to the needs of modern man’.35 His position is shared by at least one academic ornithologist who told me that good falconry is a particularly enlightened form of animal–human relationship, so perfectly does it match the behavioural repertoire of the wild animal.

  An anti-falconry engraving from a 19th-century publication by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Note the entirely imaginary dramatic elements here: the live bird on a string and the bow tied around a falcon.

  Yet as he pointed out, larger problems quite unrelated to one’s moral stance on hunting are associated with falconry. Perhaps the best known is that of the illegal taking of young falcons from the wild. Thieves exerted a serious toll on European falcon eyries in the 1960s and ’70s. Along with the activities of egg-collectors, these depredations exerted considerable pressure on populations threatened by pesticides. Today, with captive-bred birds readily available, eyrie thefts are thankfully much rarer in Europe; offenders are treated harshly by conservation organizations, falconry organizations and the law alike. But sadly, this is far from being true elsewhere. Falcon smuggling, sometimes small-scale, sometimes large and mafia-run, has had devastating effects on some saker populations in the former Soviet Union. At the same time, falconers were directly responsible for one of the most successful feats of conservation ever undertaken: the restoration of the peregrine falcon to much of the United States in the 1970s. The story of the decline and recovery of the peregrine falcon is truly extraordinary. Thirty years ago, doomy predictions of the species’ extinction were common. Now the peregrine has been removed from the American Endangered Species list. Millions of dollars, thousands of people, universities, governments, corporations, even the military, were involved in its restoration. What makes such conservation success stories so compelling, so mesmerizing?

  Falconry as a symbol of Arab cultural identity meets Bald Eagle as a symbol of American imperialism: a 2004 cartoon from Al Jazeera.

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  Threatened Falcons

  SNOW LEOPARDS. Giant pandas. Peregrine falcons. Bengal tigers. All are rare and spectacular animals, icons of environmentalism, stars of the small screen. Their faces are familiar from magazine covers and their lives are favoured subjects for nature writers. These are species bathed in an aura denied other, commoner creatures. Put bluntly, they’re celebrities. They exist in the wild, but they live in glossy magazines. And the peregrine is right up there on the ‘A-list’, along with a select few other icons of extinction. Rarity is a slippery concept. Separating its biological from its cultural meanings is a difficult task. Animals on that A-list seem made of rarity, an identity-characteristic almost impossible to ‘think round’ to get to the animal itself. Just as the decline in house sparrows in Britain in the 1990s was masked by the species’ presumed ubiquity, so upturns in the fortune of celebrity endangered animals often fail to register on popular consciousness. In 2004, for example, a BBC webpage described peregrine falcons as being ‘now rare enough to share the same protection as the Giant Panda’, even though peregrines are commoner today in Britain than ever before.1

  How does one become a celebrity animal? Both pandas and peregrines got their A-list status during the 1960s and ’70s. Pandas sent as diplomatic gifts from China were Cold War icons; their sex lives in Western zoos had ramifications far beyond their conservation value. And peregrines? The threat to the peregrine in the 1950s and ’60s was real. An entire race of peregrines – the huge, dark anatum birds of the eastern US – became extinct and across a vast swathe of North America and Europe peregrine populations plummeted to frighteningly low levels. This disaster mightily increased a series of symbolic attributions previously accorded peregrines – ones relating to wilderness and primitivist glamour – and transformed the peregrine falcon into a supreme icon of environmental destruction, a symbol of how science and technological progress had betrayed its promise to build a better world.

  Traders selling saker falcons in Beijing, 1909. These may have been destined for falconry, but, despite government protection, falcons are still eaten in parts of China.

  PARADISE LOST

  Part of the compulsion of the falcon conservation story as it is generally told is derived from its mythical structure. It’s a familiar one – a biblical one. Once, in a distant, Edenic past, it explains, humans lived in harmony with falcons, accorded them reverence. They were worshipped as gods or messengers to the gods. Later, they were treasured as falconry birds, the consorts of kings and emperors. Then came the Fall. Our bond with the wild was lost, and the downturn in the symbolic and biological fortunes of falcons was vast and desperate, first with the massive nineteenth-century raptor extermination campaigns, and second with the calamitous effects of pesticides on falcons in the 1950s and ’60s. But this is an Edenic story with an upside, of course, for we are telling it to ourselves: enlightenment and redemption have already occurred. A gradual understanding of the importance of these birds to natural ecosystems, coupled with a new attitude towards predators and nature as a whole, drove US to save them in the nick of time. Once again, it seems, humans understand and protect these special birds.

  The Eden story is a powerful legitimating myth. It can be a force for good, energizing conservation action and promoting consideration of the ethics of human relations with the natural world. But like all myths it is a partial reading, obscuring facts that get in the way of the story. Falcons were indeed worshipped as manifestations of divinity in ancient Egypt. But the massive trade in live falcons for mummification ‘falls out’ of the story. In early modern Europe, falcons were certainly the birds of kings. But what of the innumerable falcons that perished as they were shipped across continents by falcon traders? And while falcons were protected by law in the Middle Ages, with harsh punishments for commoners who dared to catch falcons or take their eggs, such laws evidence the exercise of power, not concern for the welfare of falcons. We should be wary of ascribing an enlightened view of nature to medieval kings simply because they wished to protect their own symbolic capital. And crucially, the Eden myth masks clear and present conservation dangers. It would be crazy not to celebrate the return of the peregrine falcon after the dark DDT era, or fail to applaud the passionate hard work of those individuals and institutions that helped this happen. But delight should be tempered with a realization that we are not wholly redeemed; this is not the end of the story; habitat loss, pesticides and falcon smuggling are still endangering falcon populations across much of the world, as the end of this chapter shows.

  But the Edenic mythical structure of the falcon story is, however, rooted in historical reality. This story can only be told at all because the cultural history of falcons has been indubitably marked by spectacular, vast changes in their symbolic fortunes.

  THE FALL

  By the nineteenth century, shooting held the sporting capital once accorded to falconry. ‘Shooting flying’ had become the test of the true marksman, the pursuit of elite sporting society. Shotgun retorts, not falcon bells, rang across European moor, crag and manor. Estate owners competed with each other to provide record bags of game for invited guns. And any animals that threatened to compete with guns for game were persona non grata. No longer the consorts of kings, falcons had become the worst of vermin. And so began an era of vast raptor extermination campaigns:

  Sportsmen early learn that this hawk is exceptionally obnoxious to the amusement . . . it is a remorseless marauder and murderer, killing for amusement after satisfying its hunger completely. No man should be accounted a genuine sportsman with the gun w
ho does not instantly slaughter the Duck Hawk [peregrine] on sight.2

  Killing birds of prey was a condition of employment for nineteenth-century British gamekeepers. On one Scottish estate, for example, new keepers signed an oath that they would use their ‘best endeavours to destroy all birds of prey, etc., with their nests, wherever they can be found therein. So help me God.’3 Fallen falcon corpses were hung on gibbets, or sent to taxidermists who transformed them into trophies for display in domestic spaces: the bird of kings reduced to a bundle of bones and feathers swinging from a tree, or cured with arsenic and set behind glass. ‘Alas!’, wrote British falconer-naturalist J. E. Harting in his 1871 guide The Ornithology of Shakespeare, ‘that we should live to see our noble falcons gibbeted, like thieves, upon the “keeper’s tree”.’4