Free Falcon by Helen MacDonald Page B

gyrfalcons enjoy play- ing with tennis balls and footballs.
So how does one train a falcon? Early modern authors cap- ture the key perfectly. Through the falconer’s constant attention to the bird’s ‘stomacke’: that is, her appetite and physical con- dition. Indeed, in the most basic sense, falcons are trained through their stomachs – through associating the falconer with food. If a falcon isn’t hungry, is too high , she’ll see little point either in chasing quarry or returning to the falconer. Con- versely, should she be a little too thin, or low in condition, she’ll lack the energy to give that palpable sense of inner urgency in flight that is the watchword of truly exciting falconry. The con- ditioning of a falcon revolves around a terrifying number of
variables: the weather, the time of year, the stage in training, the type of food the falcon has eaten and how much exercise she has had. Falconers assess condition in a variety of ways. Some are quantitative: daily weighing, for example. Others involve tacit knowledges built from years of experience: feeling the amount of muscle around a falcon’s breastbone, the bird’s posture and demeanour, the way she carries her feathers, even the expres- sion on her face.
Taming and training a falcon is a serious and skilled busi- ness. Every autumn, falconers bring new falcons to their sheikhs and princes in the Gulf States. In long meetings, the quality and condition of each falcon are assessed, appraised and measured with fine exactitude. Falcons are tamed rapidly in this falconry culture; they are kept constantly on their falconer’s fist, or on perches nearby, totally immersed in everyday human life. While initially stressful, this method quickly promotes an unflappable tameness in the falcon. A similar method, termed ‘waking’, was commonplace in early modern Europe: the new falcon was kept constantly on someone’s fist until it overcame its fears sufficiently to sleep.
Western falcon training today is a far slower process. The untamed falcon is initially handled only while the falconer offers her food on the fist. Soon she associates the falconer with food and jumps to the fist from her perch. The distance she jumps for food is gradually extended and she soon flies to the falconer – first on a light line known as a creance and then free. In both Arab and Western falconry, free-flying falcons are trained to return to a lure, but more creative methods of retriev- ing falcons have existed: falconer Roger Upton recounts a story from the days when the only lights in the Saudi desert were campfires. Back then, one Bedouin falconer made sure he only ever fed his falcon right next to the fire. When this falcon
Highly ornate lures and hoods from the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian i
( r . 1493–1519).

became lost during hawking expeditions, she flew back, even at night, to the huge fire her anxious falconer built as a beacon for her return. Every spring he released her in the Hejaz mountains so she could breed, and every October he returned to the moun- tains, built a big fire and re-trapped her.
‘nothing so frequent’
For more than 500 years, falconry was immensely popular across Europe, Asia and the Arab world. It carried enormous cultural capital. Historian Robin Oggins describes early modern European falconry as an almost perfect example of conspicuous
consumption; ‘expensive, time consuming and useless, and in all three respects [serving] to set its practitioners apart as a class’. 12 Expensive it was. Extraordinarily so. In thirteenth- century England a falcon could cost as much as half the yearly income of a knight. Four hundred years later, Robert Burton maintained that there was ‘nothing so frequent’ as falconry, that ‘he is nobody, that in the season hath not a hawk on his fist. A great art, and many books written on it.’ 13 Some European gentlemen hawked every day, even on campaign or when conducting official business. King