[289] For the use of a peregrine as a decoy vide Badminton Library volume, page 264.
[290] The best bait for a kestril is a mole-cricket.
[291] Wild peregrines and sakers will occasionally kill and eat kestrils and shikras. Trained hawks will also do so. Under a lagar’s eyrie, in a cliff, I have found the feathers of quite a number of kestrils. Major C. H. Fisher, in his Reminiscences of a Falconer (page 59), mentions that he once took a sparrow-hawk with a trained falcon.
[292] Presumably the birds would “crab,” and the eyess being tame would not let go on the approach of the falconer. More than once, had I had a butterfly net, I could have placed it over a wild peregrine that was engrossed in a fight on the ground with a trained hawk.
[293] Sār, “buzzard.”
[294] Of the Eastern Red-Legged Falcon (Erythropus vespertinus of Jerdon, and E. amurensis of Blanford), Jerdon writes:—“Although the adult male in its mode of colouration resembles the kestrils, especially the lesser kestril, yet the colours of the young bird and female approach more to that of the Hobbies....”
“Fellowes says that it is very common in Asia Minor, building its nests under the roofs and sometimes even in the interior of houses.”
Jerdon also says that the claws are “fleshy.”
Dresser, in the Birds of Europe, writes:—“In many Turkish villages (as, for instance, Turbali) the place swarms with these hawks (F. Cenchris: Lesser Kestril).... Its eggs are placed without any nest under the eaves on the clay walls of houses and stables....”
[295] In Kirman, Persia, in the beginning of April, 1902, a flock of Lesser Kestrils roosted for some days in the trees in the Consulate garden.