Falconry through the Ages

The use of specially trained Falcons and Hawks to capture birds or small mammals. It was practiced since ancient times in the Middle East. It was introduced to Europe especially to Britain in Saxon times. It was considered a sport. A status symbol among nobles of Medieval Europe and the Mongolian Empire. Falconry has been practiced for thousands of years.

Falcons are the swiftest of all birds. The peregrine being the biggest. Kings owned gyrfalcons, which are enormous birds. Princes owned peregrines. A common soldier might have owned a goshawk, which hunted well, but couldn't fly quite as high as the others. Trained gyrfalcons were very valuable. There is a story that some men kidnapped a king's son. The king gave the kidnappers 12 white gyrfalcons and they returned his son!

It took much patience to train these birds. A falcon is so wild and stubborn as one can expect from a wild animal, so much so that it would rather die than being forced to do whatever it did not want to. The trainer would tie a young falcon loosely to his gloved fist. Every time the bird would try to fly away, the man would gently pull it back and put it on his fist,where he held a piece of meat. The objective was to teach the falcon that it could eat and even sleep in safety while perching on his fist.

He had to walk around all day and sometimes all night until the bird got tired. Finally, the bird would quiet down enough to eat and fall asleep. The next method was the trainer teaching the falcon to come when he whistled. He taught it to accept having a hood on when on the trainer's fist. The hood was necessary to prevent the falcon from flying off the man's fist, chasing every bird or mammal it could see. When the trainer saw a bird in the sky that he wanted the falcon to
catch, he took off the hood.

The falcon soared high in the air. It caught the unlucky bird and brought it to the ground. Today there aren't many kings interested in this ' sport', and not many people hunt with Falcons. Some trivia regarding falconry : A mews is a birdhouse designed to house 2 birds of prey. Perlin is a falconer's term for a cross breed of a peregrine and a merlin. Digging into this subject is most interesting and enlarging one's general knowledge.

Sources : Wikipedia, Webster's encyclopaedia, Excerpts from Encyclopaedia Britannica, Pixabay