Falcon

by Helen Macdonald

  A saker falcon tail-feather.

  five

  Military Falcons

  Compare and contrast the reasons why an eagle will aggressively defend its territory with the reasons why countries defend their national borders.1

  A TRAINED PEREGRINE stands to attention on the ARI8228 passive warning radar of a Blackburn Buccaneer. Poised on this powerful low-level British nuclear bomber, she looks ready for flight. Head haloed within the curve of the open canopy, eyes scanning the far horizon for possible targets, the bird’s form irresistibly mirrors the plane – and she is a neat symbolic stand-in for the absent pilot: even her facial markings suggest a flight helmet. What is happening here? Is this merely one recent manifestation of an association between falcons and warfare that spans centuries and cultures, a snapshot resolving itself from history?

  It might seem so. Russian ornithologist G. P. Dementiev described an ancient ‘oriental proverb’ that ‘falconry is the sister of war’.2 Eighth-century Turkic warriors were thought to become gyrfalcons after they died in combat; Genghis Khan disguised his armies as hawking parties, and fifth-century Chinese falcons carried military messages tied to their tails. And falconry trained military men as well as birds: sixteenth-century Samurai manuals had a falconry section, and falconry was a component of the education of the medieval European knight. Thought to foster chivalric qualities and to hone tactical skills for battle, similar virtues are still appealed to today: falconer and author Nick Fox suggests that the qualities of strategic thinking one develops as a falconer gives one the edge in – one would hope less bloody – boardroom battles. The list continues: seventeenth-century English Royalists battled Parliamentarian troops with 2 lb Falcon cannons. Three centuries later the US Air Force named their guided quarter-kiloton nuclear-armed air-to-air missile the AIM-26 Falcon. A 1946 American book catalogue described peregrine eggs as ‘atomic bombs’ – a heart-rendingly ironic metaphor, for those eggs were doubtless contaminated by pesticides as invisible and deadly as fallout.

  Defenders of the air: a female peregrine and a Blackburn Buccaneer.

  But this Buccaneer falcon is not a mascot. It is a live bird recapitulating the aircraft’s role, a bird literally weaponized. An integral part of British air defence systems, its task is to defend the aircraft by targeting its potential destroyers – gulls. Ever since the US built an airbase in the middle of an albatross colony on Midway Island in the 1940s, ornithology has been a branch of military science. A single bird sucked into a jet intake or flung through a canopy can destroy a plane as spectacularly as can an air-to-air missile. On Midway the US Navy hit upon radical habitat management as a solution. They paved most of the island. Albatrosses don’t nest on concrete.

  But the problem is not limited to the Pacific theatre: airfield grass everywhere attracts flocking birds such as starlings and gulls. Shooting them or scaring them with vehicles doesn’t clear a runway and its associated airspace in seconds: but falcons do. Enter the cavalry. The falcon on the Buccaneer is from a 1970s Navy falconry unit stationed at Royal Naval Air Station Lossiemouth in Scotland. Initiated by falconer Philip Glasier, the team won its wings with a ‘live-fire’ demonstration to a group of officers, reporters and photographers. Clustering expectantly at the flightline, the naval officers were dubious. They were unconvinced that falcons could safely clear duty runways, and ‘did not fancy having a bunch of crazy falconers let loose on their airfield’.3 But Glasier’s demonstration was flawless. Cast off at a flock of herring gulls sitting on the runway, the falcon made the gulls clear the horizon in seconds, all save for one luckless laggard she pulled from the sky.

  Today, similar airfield bird-clearance units operate worldwide. The media loves their glamour; for the public they are a ‘greener’, more acceptable bird-control method than shotguns. And the military loves them too, for falconry units powerfully naturalize the ideology of military airpower. The unspoken argument runs as follows: if the military can demonstrate that natural falcon behaviour is the biological equivalent of tactical air warfare, then who can possibly see air warfare as wrong? It’s natural. This is a crafty move, and we buy into it wholesale. If we didn’t, that peregrine sitting on the Buccaneer would look incongruous. The naturalization works in part because war and nature are traditionally assumed to be utterly separate realms. ‘War’, wrote Karl von Clausewitz, ‘is a form of human intercourse.’4 But the strange history of military falcons shows, by turns bewilderingly, amusingly and horrifyingly, that the traditional supposition that war and nature are utterly separate realms is a lie.

  Raptors and aircraft are matched by nationality on the cover of this report. A lanner falcon and an F-16 Fighting Falcon share Jordanian airspace.

  Keep US interventionist foreign policy in mind when reading the words of a bird-clearance contractor at March Air Reserve Base, California. ‘Wherever the falcons fly, that area becomes their territory,’ he explained in Citizen Airman magazine in 1996. ‘In the bird kingdom,’ he continued, ‘boundaries are taken very seriously. It’s life or death.’5 Troubling. For these falcons are not behaving territorially, of course. They are not protecting their territory from intruders. They are hunting. What’s more, these confusions point to something about the nature of science, for the concept of bird territory itself has a military history. It was first described by British ornithologist Eliot Howard just after the First World War had decisively established the bloody realities of international territoriality on a grand scale. And in a rather less subtle naturalization of tactical air warfare in the late 1990s, the owner of the bird-clearance project at March Air Reserve Base explained earnestly that ‘just as the US puts an aircraft carrier off Iraq and flies fighter sorties to establish airspace dominance, our falcons do the same thing’.6

  But how is it the same? Is a falcon a fighter jet? Both are conceived of as pushing the outside of the envelope of physical possibility; both are often considered perfectly evolved objects in which form and function mesh so precisely that there is no room for redundancy. The falcon has long been the embodied shape of aviation’s dreams of the future. Back in the 1920s, Pennsylvania falconer Morgan Berthrong recalls an aviation engineer admiring a trained peregrine above, her wings pulled back into a sharp delta shape as she glided into a stiff headwind. ‘See that silhouette?’ exclaimed the engineer. ‘When we develop a motor strong enough, that will be the shape of an airplane.’7 And yes, General Dynamics’ F-16 ‘Fighting Falcon’ was named after the bird, and there are stories that the aeronautical engineers put peregrines through their paces in wind tunnels while designing the plane. Such tales may be apocryphal, but their continuance bespeaks an urge to show the plane as a more-than-material object whose function and form are as highly evolved as that of its natural exemplar, the falcon. ‘If it looks right, it flies right,’ runs the test pilots’ dictum. And war-bird homologies have been loaded with serious ideological weight. Kansas-based organization ‘Intelligent Design’ uses the plane-peregrine example to support the theory that intelligent causes are responsible for the origin of life and the universe.

  MOBILIZING FALCONS

  But twentieth-century falcons have been tasked with military roles far beyond airfield clearance or martial symbolism. The Second World War mobilized falcons too; and they flew for both sides. Allied planes carried a box of homing pigeons to be released if they were shot down behind enemy lines. There was a problem, however: wild English peregrines were catching and eating the pigeons after they’d crossed the Channel. Alarmed, the Air Ministry ordered that these quisling falcons on the south coast should be destroyed. Between 1940 and 1946, around 600 were shot, many eggs broken and young killed. Yet, at the same time, Allied peregrines were ‘signed up’. Falconer Ronald Stevens was convinced that falcons could be used in the war – somehow. He’d heard that in 1870 trained German falcons had been used to intercept the French Pigeon Post in the siege of Paris. Stevens quickly set to work. With a friend, he built a miniature range. ‘On it’, he explained, ‘
we put a ring of falconers round a besieged city, we covered a salient, we put a “net” of falconers behind enemy lines and in fact disposed falconers in every way we could think of.’8 Excited by the prospects, he sent photographs of the models, along with extensive logistical analyses, to the Air Ministry.

  Stevens must have been excessively persuasive, for a top-secret falcon squadron was recruited, trained and scrambled to patrol the skies above the Scilly Isles, near Keyhaven, and on the east coast between 1941 and 1943. A biological addendum to the top-secret chain of Key Home radar stations ringing the coastline, its mission was to intercept ‘enemy pigeons’ released from German E-boats or the like. An exclusive on the secret project later appeared in the American press. ‘Operations by friendly birds were controlled just like airplanes so they knew where every bird was all of the time,’ it enthusiastically explained. ‘Falcons were taught to fly at great heights and to fly in circles like an aircraft on patrol duty . . . a falling trail of feathers meant another dead Nazi bird.’9 What wasn’t revealed was that the practical results of the operation were almost nil. While many pigeons were killed and one or two captured alive, only two carried messages. An RAF commander dryly related the fate of one pigeon POW – put to work ‘making British pigeons’ in a Ministry of Defence pigeon-loft. But successful or not, it didn’t really seem to matter. The peregrines kept flying. Officers from Intelligence, the Royal Corps of Signals and the Air Force frequented the unit to watch ‘thrilling’ demonstration flights, and ‘were most impressed with the hawks’ performance’.10 Of course they were. Falcons were fast, manoeuvrable, their prey outflown, out-armed and despatched with a winning ‘cleanness’, naturalizing the ideology of honourable combat. Falcons were a moral predator. In 1948 Frank Illingworth recalled a cliff-top peregrine-watching session. ‘Mock battles are best demonstrated by two wild peregrines in playful mood,’ he wrote, before continuing:

  the profusion of winged movement which we watched that pre-war morning rivalled anything I saw in the same skies during the Battle of Britain . . . a few sharp wingbeats, a few chattering cries suggesting staccato machine-gun fire, and the tiercel ‘fell away’ like a black dive bomber . . . Here were two superb fighting machines indulging in mock battle for the sheer joy of movement.11

  In such passages, airpower evangelism meets falcon in the historical consciousness of the Romantic Right. From the dawn of the air age, a strand of thought had seen the fighter pilot as an aristocrat pitting his skill and courage in single combat with a worthy opponent, high above the messy realities of infantry and mud. Aerial combat was commonly conceived of as a throwback to an age of chivalry, the pilots as ‘knights of the air’. Such dreams are beautifully articulated in the opening of Michael Powell’s and Emeric Pressburger’s 1944 film A Canterbury Tale. Powell saw the film as a crusade against materialism, a paean to English historical continuity and to the eternal nature of spiritual values. It opens with a recitation – by falconer Philip Glasier’s cousin Esmond Knight – of the Prologue to The Canterbury Tales. Tracing a map of the medieval pilgrim’s route, the screen dissolves to a scene of Chaucer’s pilgrims riding along the high downland paths to Canterbury. A falconer unhoods and casts off his falcon. His upturned face is followed by footage of the falcon in flight, its flickering wings a drawn bow against the grey Kentish skies. A sharp cut that prefigures Kubrick’s famous bone-to-spaceship cut in 2001: A Space Odyssey by twenty years, and the falcon is transformed into a diving Spitfire. We return to the upturned face of the falconer – who is now a soldier watching the plane above – and instead of a line of medieval pilgrims, a military exercise crosses the downs towards Canterbury. The conflation of falcon as military aircraft with falcon as symbol of a mythical English past enabled its image to connect powerfully the idea of the nation’s heritage with its recent defence through aerial battles; an essential, continuous national identity recoverable through the image of a bird.

  ‘Is it a bird? Is it a plane?’ Stills from the opening sequence of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1944 film A Canterbury Tale.

  While A Canterbury Tale attempted to show wartime Americans why they should defend Britain, in the US the weaponization of falcons was assuming bizarre forms. ‘Real Warbirds for Uncle Sam’, ran the headline in American Weekly in 1941. ‘If the Time Comes When They Are Needed, the Fighting Falcon and the High-Flying Eagle May Take the Air to Put the Enemy’s Homing Pigeons Out of Action.’ It continued:

  While the nation’s airplane factories are busy turning out bombers and fighters for Uncle Sam’s growing air armada, the officers of the Army’s Signal Corps . . . are thinking seriously of pressing another type of warbird into service. Known to the military mind as ‘the original dive-bombers’ . . . two or three hundred falcons will be trained at Fort Monmouth under direction of Lt Thomas MacClure, of the pigeon-training center.12

  With his assistants, Privates Louis Halle and Irwin Saltz, MacClure aimed to ‘reinforce the falcon’s natural armament with razor-sharp knives attached to the talons, wings and body’. Not only would these trained birds be used to kill enemy carrier pigeons and take ‘the dead messengers and their message to headquarters’, but ‘the Army believes further that the falcons can be taught to dive at enemy parachutes and either rip them or cut the cords.’13 He explained in the New Yorker that although retrieving prey to the falconer was unheard of in traditional falconry, orthodoxy was not to stand in the way of efficiency. ‘War is different from falconry,’ he stated firmly.14 MacClure sent out letters soliciting donations of falcons and held a publicity talk, complete with hooded falcons, in Times Square. His rousing call did not impress one of the onlookers, falconer George Goodwin. Goodwin was the curator of mammology at the New York Museum of Natural History. He was appalled. ‘If McClure [sic] is a sample of the Army, thank God we have a Navy!’ he wrote in high dudgeon to a friend:

  Did you know that the Army has developed a method of teaching peregrines to distinguish between their own pigeons and the enemy’s? Well it has but that’s a Military Secret that cannot be divulged! Hallelujah! . . . it drives me nuts just to think of it. I’m glad to have some first hand information on the Pigeon Blitz Patrol and on McClure, but I wish to hell I hadn’t seen the show they put on. I’m scared to go to sleep now for fear I’ll wake up dreaming about it.15

  Other US falconers sprang into action ‘Something must be done,’ wrote anatomy professor Robert Stabler to the chief of the US Fish and Wildlife Service. ‘Can’t you give this man and his group something of an investigation? Is there no limit to what a man may do under the guise of defending America?’16 And falconer and army aviator Colonel Luff Meredith took immediate steps at the War Department to ensure that MacClure’s programme never got off the ground.

  The press seized gleefully on Lieut. Thomas MacClure’s scheme to use falcons as ‘real warbirds for Uncle Sam’. Here MacClure points into the sky with his right hand – perhaps he has seen an enemy pigeon?

  Band of Brothers: three USAFA mascot peregrines, bound and taped to prevent injury while travelling to their new homes, have their first taste of fame.

  Meredith recruited falcons into the military in a far subtler fashion than MacClure: no Times Square event was required. He was a friend of General Harmon, who was to head the newly created US Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. A few years after the end of the Second World War, recalled Robert Stabler, he and Meredith ‘grabbed a couple of peregrines, hopped in Meredith’s Jaguar’ and drove down to Lowry Air Force Base; Meredith was convinced that the Air Force needed the peregrine falcon as its mascot. Harmon ‘had US to lunch and we had the peregrines sitting on the back of a chair – Mrs Harmon there – we put newspapers on the floor’. Harmon sent them over to show the birds to General Stillwell and Colonel Heiberg; they ‘picked up the birds and became immediately consumed with the peregrine’. Stabler remembers Stillwell saying:

  Behind the scenes, Air Force Academy personnel stare intrigued into a box containing a new mascot f
alcon.

  ‘well we will certainly present this bird as one of the things’ . . . I think they were considering a tiger and a hawk of some kind and so on. ‘So we’ll present a peregrine and so on to the Cadet wings and let them vote on what they want.’ And they did that . . . and they voted on the peregrine as being the mascot of the Air Force.17

  On election day, the officer lobbying for the falcon succinctly concluded his speech: ‘the falcon has a speed in level flight of approximately 165 mph. Its dive speed is classified information. The golden eagle is a scavenger! You will now vote.’18 On 5 October 1955 the first mascots duly arrived at the Academy. Held aloft for the Air Force photographer, and swaddled and bound to prevent injury en route, they look as bemused as their uniformed couriers. Since 1956 falcons have been flown at Academy football games in half-time demonstrations of airpower dominance. The USAFA website explains how falcons characterize the combat role of the US Air Force: they are fast and ‘manoeuvre with ease, grace and evident enjoyment’. Courageous, fearless and aggressive, they ‘fiercely defend their nest and young against intruders. They have been known to unhesitatingly attack and kill prey more than twice their size.’ And of course, along with their keen eyesight, they are marked by their ‘alertness, regal carriage and noble tradition’.19 With a nod to Tom Wolfe, US military falcons are The Right Stuff.