The Art and Practice of Hawking

by E. B. Michell

The Birds used in Hawking

Of the numerous birds of prey which are found in various parts of the globe, a good many have been employed in the service of man as agents in the pursuit of other birds and of four-footed animals, partly for purposes of supplying him with food, and partly for sport. It is more than probable that others might be similarly trained and flown, especially some of the American and Australian hawks, which seem suitable for the purpose, but which have never yet, as far as we know, been thus taken in hand. It is not, however, proposed to describe at length any members of the large family of Raptores, except such as are known to have been used in hawking; and with regard to those which have been flown only in remote parts of the world, considerations of space necessitate a very brief reference.

It has usually been said that the list of birds used in hawking includes only two main divisions—the long-winged hawks, as falconers call them, known to naturalists under the name of “falcons”; and the short-winged hawks, to which the men of science apply specially the name of hawks. This ornithological classification of falcons on the one hand and hawks on the other, is not a very happy one; for in the general public estimation, as well as in falconers’ phraseology, every falcon is a hawk, although every hawk may not be properly called a falcon. The one term is of classic, and the other of Teutonic origin; and it was too late, when books about birds first began to be written scientifically, to attempt to establish a hard-and-fast difference between words which had already passed current for centuries as meaning pretty much the same thing. Moreover, hawking, which, if the naturalists’ view of the matter were accepted, ought to be concerned, like the French autourserie, with the short-winged hawks only, has long been considered in England a mere synonym for falconry, which also, if interpreted strictly according to the ornithological theory, ought to be regarded as dealing with the long-winged species.

The two-fold division, however, no matter whether it is into falcons and hawks, or into short-winged and long-winged hawks, seems to be insufficient and unsatisfactory. For eagles, which have been, and still are, extensively used in a sport for which the only English names are hawking and falconry, remain unincluded in the two usually accepted classes. No eagle can properly be called either a hawk or a falcon; and in order to find a place for them amongst the birds trained and flown at quarry, it seems necessary to institute a third class. What order of precedence should be taken by such new class is a matter of small consequence. In symmetry of shape, in its mode of flying, its character, and its tastes, the eagle is as inferior to the true hawk as the latter has always been deemed to be to the true falcon; and in this work, as in others on falconry, the first place has been retained for the long-winged hawks, and the second for the short-winged, leaving a third place for what little it seems necessary to say about such eagles as we know to have been flown at game.

The long-winged hawk is known by the following characteristics:—The second primary feather in the wing, reckoning from the outside, is the longest, or at least equal in length to any other, as in the merlin, which has the second and third feathers very nearly or quite of the same length. The upper mandible has on each of its sides, about a third part of the distance from the point to the cere, a projection somewhat resembling a very blunt tooth. The eye is dark brown. The wing is long enough in the outer joint to come down, when closed, considerably more than half-way between the end of the tail coverts and the end of the tail itself, and in some cases, as in the hobby, as far as the tail, or even farther.

In the short-winged hawks the wing is comparatively short in the outer joint, and, when expanded, presents a rounded appearance at the end, the fourth primary being the longest, and the first very short. That emargination, or narrowing in, of the feather near its end, which is observable in the first two primaries of the long-winged hawk, is still more pronounced in the short-winged, and is conspicuous in the third and fourth primaries also. The tail is long, and large when expanded. The iris is of some shade of yellow, light or dark. The upper mandible curves in a smooth line, without any projecting tooth.

SHAPE OF WINGS

In the eagles the tail is shorter and stouter. The outer joint of the wing is shorter than in the falcons, the wing deriving its power from the feathers near the body rather than from the outer ones. The beak is longer in shape than that of the other two sorts, and the legs are proportionately stouter. The size of the smallest eagle is very much greater than that of the largest falcon or hawk.