Training and Entering
We have traced the history of the wild-caught hawk from the moment of her misadventure in the bow-net to that in which having been introduced under good auspices to the society of her new friends she has learnt at least to tolerate their presence, if not to rejoice in it. She can be taken amongst men, women, and children, dogs, horses, and carriages, without feeling uneasy. She has, in fact, now been manned. When we took leave of our eyesses they had not yet arrived at this stage. They were only just taken up from hack. But the manning of the eyess is accomplished in no different way from that of the passager, except that the more vigorous parts of the discipline may be omitted or modified. Waking is not necessary for eyess merlins, hobbies, or kestrels. It may often be dispensed with altogether with eyess peregrines, even after a prolonged hack. Carrying and handling are with them, as with their wilder brethren, the simple but laborious methods whereby they are tamed. But manning is only the first step in the reclamation of a hawk. She must be made also to come to the fist, at least to a certain extent. If, indeed, she is a short-winged hawk, this lesson of coming to the fist may be considered the principal part of her training. But all hawks should be taught and accustomed to jump a short distance on to the fist, whenever it is held out invitingly towards them. Nor is there any great difficulty about this, if a right beginning is made. As the falconer stands with his hawk bareheaded on the glove, he should get her first to reach forward with her head when he offers a morsel of food on the end of his short stick. Then by degrees he may induce her to step an inch or two sideways towards his wrist for the same purpose. Next, to walk a little way along the screen-perch. And, when she will do this, he may set her down on the perch, and, touching it with the open fingers of the gloved left hand, invite her to step on to them and to the knuckles. The next short step is to get her to jump from the perch to the hand. When once she will do this, even if the jump is one of an inch only, the distance can soon be made much greater. But in order to succeed with this lesson she must not be tantalised. It is no good to stand for five minutes with the left hand outstretched and a piece of meat on or near it within six inches of your hawk, when she is in no humour to make the leap which seems to her so perilous. When she will not come, humour her, and put the meat nearer, so that she can get it without jumping. Sooner or later she will find that the meat so placed before her is not a trap or a sham, but really meant for her delectation, and that she can get it a little quicker if she chooses to go for it. There is no use in telling her the story of Mahomet and the mountain, but you can illustrate the theory by a sort of practical dumb-show. If a more advanced pupil is placed on the perch next to the slow learner, the latter will see how much quicker her sister gets the proffered delicacies by jumping for them. As soon as she will come a little way from the screen-perch, try her from a block, and then from a gate-post out of doors. Keep her at this exercise for some days, but do not make a toil of it to her; merely let her know that if she comes for it, she will get the tit-bit at once, whereas, if she does not, she will get it all the later.
Next comes the lure. Passage hawks are notoriously and naturally bad at the lure. Nothing in their previous experience at all leads up to it; and you have to teach them an entirely new lesson. Consequently, you must take pains about it, and be prepared for disappointments and delays. The lure is as important to the falconer as a hook to a fisherman, or a bridle to a rider. To take a long-winged hawk out to the field without a lure would be almost as silly as to go out shooting without any cartridges. When first introduced to the pupil the lure must be well garnished with attractive and palatable viands. It is by no means enough to throw down a freshly-killed pigeon in front of the hungry hawk. She is quite likely, if a passager, to stare at it absently, and apparently without any very defined belief that it is at all good to eat. After a minute or so she is not unlikely to look the other way, and pay no more attention to your well-intended bait. But you must not then be surprised, or begin exclaiming at her “stupidity.” If the passager will not come to the dead pigeon, take a lure and cover it with chopped meat. Give her pieces off this, and presently let her pick them off it. Then let her walk towards the lure to get the pieces, as she has already learnt to go to the fist. When once she has walked even three inches to it she can soon be made to fly to it right across the lawn.
Prolong these lessons, therefore, till your hawk is well “made to the lure.” Each day at feeding-time make her come a longer and longer distance to it for her dinner. After a while she will be flown to it in a creance, that is, a line attached to the end of the leash, or, better still, to the swivel, from which the leash has been detached. The best way to give the lesson is to get an under-falconer or assistant to hold the hawk on his fist in an open piece of ground, and then, going a little way off, to show her the lure, on which she knows by experience that her food is fastened. In the case of eyesses which have been hacked to the lure they are of course well habituated to the business in hand. But all hawks, if properly treated, will after a time learn to look with some eagerness, at the dinner hour, for the appearance of the lure. Peregrines and all the bigger hawks will be hooded up before going out; and when the hood is taken off they will glance around in search of the trainer. As soon as they discern him swinging his lure, they should jump off and fly towards it, and, when it is thrown on the ground, alight on it. Merlins and sparrow-hawks may generally be set down on a post, and lured from it by the same person who took them out, without the need of an assistant. Or, when they know the lure sufficiently, it may be attached to the far end of the creance, and, after being swung once or twice, thrown to a short distance, and the little hawk thrown off at the same time, when she is pretty sure to go straight to it. These exercises at the lure should be continued till there is no longer any reasonable doubt that the pupil will come as soon as she has the chance; and, in order to make sure, the length of the creance may be increased from a few feet to at least a hundred yards. It will be a proud moment when first you trust your passage hawk entirely free, and, detaching the swivel from her jesses, abandon for the moment all actual control over her. On this occasion you will probably take extra precautions, making sure that no intruder will interrupt the operations, and that your hawk is undeniably sharp-set. But in order to make certain of this, do not dream of starving her; merely put off the feeding-time for an hour or so. Hawks in captivity should commonly be fed, as will be seen later on, at about 11 a.m. When you first fly your passage hawk free, wait until past noon. The small extra delay will have put an edge on her appetite. If all goes well she will not notice or suspect that anything unusual is occurring. Very likely, if a light line has been used, she may have supposed for days past that she was flying free. Possibly she has never once suspected the existence of the creance.
It is well to make all hawks to the lure, even if afterwards you should have no use for it. A lost goshawk will very often come to the lure when she will not come to the fist. As a rule, it will be seen that short-winged hawks in the field should not be called to the lure; they are “hawks of the fist,” and should be taught to come to it whenever they have the chance, in default of wild quarry. It requires some faith to believe when the wild-caught sparrow-hawk is first taken in hand that she will ever do this. Nothing will seem much more unlikely than that this fierce, restless creature, a feathered termagant, would ever so lay aside her innate wildness as to come contentedly out of the free air, and, disdaining all other resting-places, take perch by preference on the hand of her once detested captor. Yet so it is. Goshawks and sparrow-hawks can all be brought to come habitually to the fist, and remain there willingly at all times except when there is quarry to be pursued. In their case the calling-off to the hand in the open field is only a prolongation and extension of the early lessons in which they were taught to jump to it from the perch, as already described. After the creance is no longer necessary each kind of hawk should be called off for two or three days at least, the one to the lure and the other to the fist, one man holding the hawk, while the other swings the lure or holds out the fist. And here ends the early drudgery of reclaiming the wild-caught hawk.
The education of the eyess, whether flown at hack or not, must, of course, be brought down to the same stage. If they have had no hack at all they will have been manned very early in life and habituated to come to the fist. If they have been well hacked, they will have become in many respects very like wild hawks—possibly “more so.” Anyhow, they will be full summed and full grown in all respects before they come to be put in actual training for the field. We took leave of our eyesses in the third chapter, soon after they had been taken up; and we must now assume that by a modified application of the régime prescribed for the haggard they have been manned and taught to come to the hand or the lure, or both. The time occupied in this process will of course have varied according to the disposition of the individuals. A well-natured eyess merlin hacked under the lure-and-fist system will be manned in two or three days. A goshawk, or a peregrine of an independent turn of mind, hacked at the board, may resist for the best part of a fortnight the best-intentioned efforts to subdue her wild instincts. It will be well in all cases, and will save an immensity of time and trouble, to reduce the eyess to some extent as soon as she is taken up. For my own part I incline to doing, even at this early stage, a bit of mild physicking. Half a Cockle’s pill for a peregrine or one-eighth for a merlin will do no manner of harm. At all events the allowance of food must be cut down. Hack hawks, when taken up, should be as round as balls and as bumptious as undergraduates. They know not what it is to be really sharp-set; and unless dosed they make quite a favour of eating at all during the first two or three days of real captivity. Continue feeding them at the rate they have been accustomed to, and you will lose patience before you can bring them under any sort of control. In fact, you will not do so at all. Yet I do not mean that they should be made thin. There is, it is true, no longer any fear of hunger-traces, but a thin hawk is a weak hawk, and sometimes even a spoilt hawk. Her small feathers lose their gloss; her flight feathers grow weak and brittle, and are ready to break on slight provocation; her nares lose colour, and begin to harbour mites. In short, a thin hawk is an abomination and a disgrace. She must therefore not be either overfed or underfed, but just made hungry enough before each meal-time to be really keen after her food. And as she has accumulated during her probationary time of adolescence more or less internal fat, the quickest and easiest way to get rid of it is to give her a mild dose or two of purgative medicine, and some rangle, as recommended in the chapter on ailments. Hack hawks and all other eyesses must be taught to jump and fly to the fist. If long-winged, they must be made to the lure. And in all cases they should be thoroughly broken to the hood.
Thus we have arrived at the same stage with our eyesses and with our wild-caught hawks; and the subsequent stages are very nearly the same with each. Carrying (on the fist—I do not mean the vice of that ilk) is still a sine quâ non. No hawk can have too much of it. I have read in some hawking books a reference to hawks being “too tame.” The phrase, as applied to a trained hawk, is not very well chosen, and might mislead a beginner. Some of the most deadly hawks ever flown have been as “tame as parrots.” When a very tame hawk flies badly it is not, as a rule, because she is too tame, but because she is too fat, or, more likely still, because she is not properly sharp-set at the moment of flying. Some remarks on the conditioning of hawks will be found later on. In the meantime let not the beginner be afraid of getting his hawk too fond of him. She should “rejoyce in him,” as the old falconers expressed it, and at sight of him be all excitement to come to him, not only for food, but for the chance of a flight, which she will soon begin to think that he alone can procure for her. Even wild hawks will sometimes wait on upon their known enemy, man, on the chance of his putting up game, and so “serving them,” as the saying is. How much more should a trained hawk do, who is beginning to know that the falconer is a good friend?
Our charges must now be classified in a different way. The distinction is not now so much between eyess and passager, as between long-winged and short-winged—between those which are to be flown at one or other sort of quarry. Thus, short-winged hawks of both kinds, eagles, merlins, and all the long-winged hawks which are to be flown at rook, heron, kite, or gull, are flown from the fist, whereas hobbies and all the long-winged hawks which are destined to fly either at game or duck are allowed to mount to their pitch before the quarry is sprung, and from thence descend upon it. We may first speak of the first-mentioned category, premising that as far as safety is concerned the flight from the fist is preferable.