TRAINED GOSHAWK “GAIETY GAL”
OWNED BY MR. A. NEWALL
Mr. Riley trains his own hawks, and, for convenience and for saving time in an enclosed country, has sometimes used a lure. He keeps them as hard at work as he can. He has much difficulty in finding enough quarry for them, and is much troubled by poultry. But for these causes the bags made would have been even much larger than they were. He has a great preference for haggards, whose style of flying he considers very far superior to that of the eyesses. Tostin, especially, used to shoot up some feet when he left the fist; and this seemed to have a demoralising effect on the partridges. He hit them so hard that the blow could be heard a long way off. When he was unsuccessful, instead of coming straight back, he would throw up two or three hundred feet, moving his head from side to side as he flew. Sometimes he would come down upon partridges on the ground, so as to put them up all round him, and then, if there was no friendly hedge at hand, he was pretty sure to have one. It was no doubt a great feat to get him fully trained in so short a time after his capture as fifty-six days. Pity his brilliant career was so soon ended by death! Almost all the partridges taken, by one hawk or the other, were captured in fair flight, without any routing about in hedges or other covert.
To show what goshawks will do when well worked, I may mention that Mr. St. Quintin’s falconer (now the head falconer of the Old Hawking Club) took out his female goshawk in November 1885, and gave her seventeen chances at rabbits lying out in the grass. She caught them all, but being a bit blown, let the last one go. Sir Henry Boynton’s goshawk, Red Queen, on 2nd December 1895, killed as many as twenty-four rabbits in one day.
The illustration is a portrait of “Gaiety Gal,” the goshawk which, while she was owned by Mr. Arthur Newall and flown by him, killed in one season fifty-five hares, nineteen rabbits, two pheasants, one partridge, one wood-pigeon, one Norfolk plover, one landrail—total, eighty head. This fine hawk was afterwards sold for £20; and the vendor always considered that he had been a loser by the bargain.
The Sparrow-Hawk