Falconry

• 1. Introduction

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  Falconry is the art of hunting wild animals in their natural habitat using a trained bird of prey, and it has been practiced for more than nine thousand years. Consider that for a moment: before the written word was widespread, before many empires rose and fell, people in the Arabian Peninsula were already bonding with saker falcons and flying them against hares. Today, twenty-four countries have nominated falconry to UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, making it the largest multi-national element on that list. How did a hunting technique this ancient survive the invention of the rifle, the collapse of the noble classes that once championed it, and the chemical poisoning of its birds in the twentieth century? And what does it mean that the very falconers who mourned the peregrine's near-extinction also engineered its return? Those are the threads this documentary will follow.

• 2. A Language of Its Own

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  In early English falconry literature, the word "falcon" referred specifically to a female peregrine falcon, not to the broader family of birds we now call falcons. A male hawk or falcon went by a different term entirely: "tiercel," sometimes spelled "tercel," because the male was roughly one-third smaller than the female. Two distinct terms also described the practitioners. A "falconer" flew a falcon; an "austringer" (a word of Old French origin) kept Eurasian goshawks and used accipiters for hunting. These distinctions mattered deeply in a world where your bird signaled your rank. The often-quoted Book of Saint Albans, first printed in 1486 and often attributed to Dame Juliana Berners, assigned specific birds to specific social ranks: gyrfalcons to kings, peregrine falcons to earls, goshawks to yeomen, and kestrels to knaves or servants. Veteran British falconer Phillip Glasier dismissed the list as "merely a formalised and rather fanciful listing of birds," and he had reason to: vultures, which the book assigned to emperors, are not used for falconry at all. What that hierarchy reveals, even in its errors, is how deeply embedded falconry had become in the social fabric of medieval Europe, where the bird on your fist announced who you were before you spoke a word. The everyday English language still carries falconry's fingerprints: the word "haggard" once meant a hawk caught from the wild as an adult, and "lure" originally described the feathered device used to recall a trained bird to its handler's glove.

• 3. Birds of the Hunt

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  Harris's hawk is arguably the best rabbit or hare raptor available anywhere, and the reason lies in its social life. Unlike every other bird-of-prey species, Harris's hawk is found in the wild living in groups or packs, hunting cooperatively with a social hierarchy similar to wolves. That gregarious nature translates into an unusually adaptable disposition in falconry. The genus Parabuteo, to which Harris's hawk belongs, is native to the Americas from southern Texas and Arizona down to South America, and the bird is often captive-bred for falconry today. At the opposite extreme in temperament sits the accipiter. Hawk expert Mike McDermott once said, "The attack of the accipiters is extremely swift, rapid, and violent in every way." The Eurasian goshawk, the most prominent of these, has been trained for falconry for hundreds of years and takes a wide variety of birds and mammals. Golden eagles present a different set of challenges entirely. In the western Mongolian province of Bayan-Ölgii, Altaic Kazakh eagle hunters use golden eagles to hunt foxes and other large prey, often flying the birds from horseback. A little over three hundred active falconers use eagles in Central Asia, with around two hundred and fifty of them in western Mongolia and fifty in Kazakhstan. Owls occupy a curious corner of the practice. Only two species, the Eurasian eagle-owl and the great horned owl, have been successfully trained, and their training demands a completely different approach: owls are hearing-oriented rather than sight-oriented, can only see black and white, and are long-sighted, which means they are easily distracted by unfamiliar sounds and do not respond as readily to food cues as hawks do.

• 4. Thirteen Centuries of Records

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  Around 680 BC, Chinese records described falconry, placing the practice firmly in recorded history long before medieval Europe discovered it. But an Assyrian bas-relief from the ruins of the palace of Sargon II, dating to 722-705 BC, was once cited as the earliest pictorial evidence; scholars now note it actually depicts an archer shooting at raptors, not a falconer flying one. Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, who lived from 1194 to 1250, is generally acknowledged as the most significant wellspring of traditional falconry knowledge. He obtained a copy of the Arab falconer Moamyn's manual and had it translated into Latin by Theodore of Antioch. Frederick II himself corrected that translation in 1241, producing De Scientia Venandi per Aves. Later, in the final years of his life, he wrote De arte venandi cum avibus, widely accepted as the first comprehensive book of falconry and notable also for its contributions to ornithology and zoology. It stands among the earliest challenges to Aristotle's explanations of nature. In the Arabian Peninsula, the saker falcon carries a name that reflects its cultural weight: Arabs call it "Hur," meaning Free-bird. Saker falcons are the national bird of the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, and Yemen. Among nomadic societies like the Bedouin, falconry was not the recreation of noblemen; falcons were trapped and hunted on small game during winter to supplement a very limited diet. In the UK and parts of Europe, falconry probably reached its peak in the 17th century before fading as firearms replaced the bird of prey as the hunter's tool of choice.

• 5. The Peregrine's Near Extinction

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  By 1970, peregrine falcons were listed as an endangered species in the United States, a consequence driven primarily by DDT. The pesticide had been accumulating through the food chain, thinning eggshells and collapsing breeding populations across North America. DDT was banned in the US on the 31st of December 1972, but it continued in use in Mexico and other nations. The first known raptors to breed in captivity belonged to a German falconer named Renz Waller, who produced two young peregrines in Dusseldorf in 1942-43. In North America, the first successful captive breeding of peregrine falcons came in the early 1970s, led by the Peregrine Fund, professor and falconer Heinz Meng, and private breeders including David Jamieson and Les Boyd, who bred the first peregrines by means of artificial insemination. In Great Britain, falconer Phillip Glasier of the Falconry Centre in Newent, Gloucestershire, obtained young from more than twenty species of captive raptors. The recovery effort involved government agencies, non-government organizations, and falconers working together, supported in part by funding through the Endangered Species Act of 1972. Between 1972 and 2001, nearly all peregrines used for falconry in the US were captive-bred. On the 25th of August 1999, peregrine falcons were formally removed from the United States' endangered species list, after reports confirmed at least 1,650 breeding pairs in the US and Canada. A 2003 population study by the US Fish and Wildlife Service found well over 3,000 pairs in North America, numbers that kept climbing in subsequent surveys.

• 6. Regulation and Revival

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  In the United States, falconry is legal in every state except Hawaii, which prohibits it largely due to fears that escaped non-native birds of prey could worsen the already serious problem of invasive species impacts on native wildlife. Acquiring a US falconry license requires passing a written test, having equipment and facilities inspected, and serving a minimum of two years as an apprentice under a licensed falconer, during which time the apprentice may possess only one raptor. After a minimum of five years at the general license level, a falconer may apply for a master class license, which permits keeping up to five wild raptors and an unlimited number of captive-produced raptors. In Great Britain, the contrast is sharp: falconry requires no special license, but all birds must be captive-bred, officially ringed, and government-registered, a framework established by the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981. The British Falconers' Club, founded in 1927 by the surviving members of the Old Hawking Club, now counts more than 1,200 members. The Old Hawking Club itself had been founded in 1864. The North American Falconers Association, founded in 1961, serves members across the US, Canada, and Mexico. The International Association for Falconry and Conservation of Birds of Prey, founded in 1968, currently represents 156 falconry clubs and conservation organisations from 87 countries, totalling over 75,000 members. In New Zealand, falconry was formally legalised only in 2011 for a single species, the Australasian harrier, after more than 25 years of effort from Wingspan National Bird of Prey Center and the Raptor Association of New Zealand. The United Arab Emirates reportedly spends over 27 million US dollars annually on the protection and conservation of wild falcons, and the Abu Dhabi Falcon Hospital is the largest falcon hospital in the world.

• 7. Falconry in Culture and Letters

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  Ornithologist Tim Gallagher, editor of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's Living Bird magazine, documented his experiences with modern falconry in a 2008 book, Falcon Fever. He is one entry in a long lineage of writers drawn to the practice. T.H. White, himself a falconer, wrote The Goshawk about his attempt to train a hawk in the traditional art; falconry also appears throughout The Once and Future King. Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk, published in 2015, won both the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Costa Book of the Year in 2014, interweaving her training of a goshawk with her grief over her father's death. In Irish poet William Butler Yeats's poem "The Second Coming," the image of "The falcon cannot hear the falconer" stands as a metaphor for social disintegration. Giovanni Boccaccio's ninth novel of the fifth day of The Decameron gives a falcon the central role in a story of love and sacrifice: Nobleman Federigo degli Alberighi has wasted his fortune on an unrequited love until only his falcon remains, and when his lady finally visits, he kills the bird to feed her. Barry Hines's 1968 novel A Kestrel for a Knave, set in Barnsley, South Yorkshire, follows a young working-class boy named Billy Casper who finds solace in training a kestrel named Kes; Hines drew directly on his younger brother Richard's experience. Director Ken Loach adapted the book into the film Kes in 1969. The Secret History of the Mongols describes Bodonchar Munkhag, the first leader of the Borjigan tribe, as having caught a falcon and fed it through winter; through Genghis Khan's empire, that tradition spread to China, Korea, Japan, and Europe. UNESCO's 2010 inscription rationale put it simply: falconry "has acquired other values over time and has been integrated into communities as a social and recreational practice and as a way of connecting with nature."