Free Falcon by Helen MacDonald Page A

hand in order that they should fly to the right to seek their prey:
the left represents temporal things, the right everything that is eternal. On the left sit those who rule over tempo- ral things; all those who in the depths of their hearts desire eternal things fly to the right. There the hawk will catch the dove; that is, he who turns towards the good will receive the grace of the Holy Spirit. 10
The trailing leg-straps by which the falconer holds the falcon are called sabq in Arabic, and are made of plaited silk or cord. Their Western equivalents, jesses , are made of soft leather. At home their ends are attached to a metal swivel to stop them

A plate from Diderot and d’Alembert’s 1751 Encyclopédie showing the mews (above) and falconry equipment (below): a screen
perch, two Dutch hoods, a rufter hood, turf blocks and a cadge for carrying falcons into the field.
In the United Arab Emirates, falconer Khameez calms a young falcon in training as he picks it up from its wakr ,
or perch.
twisting, and the swivel in turn to a leash. This leash is tied to a perch or block using the falconer’s knot – for obvious reasons easily tied and untied with one hand.

For centuries, small silver or brass bells attached to the fal- con’s legs or tail have been used to locate the falcon while out hawking, their plangent tones audible for half a mile or more downwind. In the 1970s American falconer-engineers devel- oped a tiny radio transmitter that could be attached to a falcon’s tail or leg. With a range of scores of miles, telemetry systems have dramatically reduced the possibility of losing a fal- con. Telemetry was greeted with enthusiasm by falconers in the Gulf States, for whom falconry continues to be a vibrant and popular cultural practice. Conversely, many European falconers viewed this new invention with distaste. A minority pursuit compared to more modern hunting methods, European falcon- ers have tended to validate and define falconry in terms of its rich cultural tradition and long history. They commonly assert
historical precedent as a legitimating device, and threats to its established, traditional modes of practice tend to be perceived as a threat to falconry itself. Yet these anti-modernist misgiv- ings seem to have been largely overcome. Today many falcons are flown with a modern radio transmitter attached almost invisibly to the tail – often right next to a Lahore brass bell, manufactured in Pakistan to a design of immense antiquity. Plus ça change .
training falcons
The falconer’s first impression of a new falcon, sitting hooded on her perch, is one of unalloyed wildness. The slightest touch or sound and she’ll puff out her feathers and hiss like a snake. Falcons are trained entirely through positive reinforcement. They must never be punished; as solitary creatures, they fail to understand hierarchical dominance relations familiar to social creatures such as dogs or horses. As Lord Tweedsmuir wrote in the 1950s, secure in his impression that falcons were an avian aristocracy:
No hawk regards you as a master. At the best, they regard you as an ally, who will provide for them and care for them and introduce them to some good hunting. You only have to look at the proud, imperious face of a peregrine falcon to realise that. In reality you become their slave. 11
Despite Tweedsmuir’s characterization of the falcon as a death-dealing dominatrix, falcons can become rather affection- ate. In the Gulf States, some falcons jump from their indoor perches and run to the falconer should he call their names. British falconer and author Philip Glasier had a tiercel peregrine
This 1430s water- colour drawing by Pisanello shows a young falcon wearing a brace- less hood and extra-large hack bells

that slept on his bookshelf and jumped onto his bed in the morning to wake him by nibbling his ear; another British fal- coner, Frank Illingworth, had a peregrine that took rides around the garden on the back of his dog;