Falcon Read Free

Trapped in the autumn on migration across Arabia to wintering grounds in East Africa, the bird was known to Bedouin falconers simply as saqur ‘fal- con’. Sakers nest in steppe grassland and in open forests from eastern Europe across Asia. Like the gyr, they occur in a wide variety of forms. Plain-backed, brown, Western lowland birds become larger, more rufous in colour and barred in the Eastern highland forms. But this clinal distribution is only a broad trend; saker populations include spotted or barred, brown, grey, burnt orange, almost black birds and birds bleached by the sun to near white. The Altai falcon Falco altaicus is a dark gyr-like bird from the Russian Altai, known as Turul in Mongolia. In India and Pakistan the desert falcons are represented by the Lugger falcon Falco jugger , a soft-plumaged brown and cream falcon that preys on lizards as well as birds and small mam- mals. In the arid and semi-arid regions of Africa and southern

Hermann Goering’s white gyrfalcon, in an oil by falconer-artist Renz Waller.
A white gyrfalcon attacking a tundra swan. Scroll paint- ing on silk by Yin Xie, Ming period.

Europe, its counterpart is the steel-blue and salmon-pink Lanner falcon, Falco biarmicus . An avian specialist, the lanner often ambushes desert birds at waterholes and is renowned in falconry for its pleasant temperament. The sixteenth-century falconer Edmund Bert boasted that his trained goshawks were as ‘sociable and familiar as a lanner’. 3 Conversely, the North American Prairie falcon Falco mexicanus is a celebrated malcontent in falconry, known for its foul temper. It inhabits the plains and deserts of the American West. Although it bears a superficial resemblance to the saker falcon and is traditionally assigned to the desert falcon group, recent genetic studies

have suggested that the species is more closely related to the peregrine.
Australasia is home to a number of large falcons hard to assign to either desert falcon or peregrine category, such as the Black fal- con F. subniger and Grey falcon F. hypoleucos . Other Australasian falcons have evolved to exploit predatory niches elsewhere filled by hawks and buzzards, the hawk-shaped New Zealand falcon
F. novaseelandiae , in particular. Along with a few other large falcon species, these appear less often in this book because their cultural history is less rich than the species previously discussed, either because their relationship with indigenous commu- nities is lamentably undocumented or because they have little contact with humans at all. For example, the richly coloured,
The saker falcon, the traditional species of Arab falconry.
A 19th-century lithograph by Joseph Wolf of lanner falcons: an adult in front, an immature bird (eating a quail) behind.

huge-footed, Orange-breasted falcon F. deiroleucos is a species whose mysteriousness is, in part, a function of biologists’ difficul- ty in finding it in its remote South American forest habitat.
what is it like to be a falcon?
Claiming to understand the life-world of another person is philo- sophically suspect; for a different animal, the attempt is perhaps absurd – but undeniably fascinating. Our commonsense anthropomorphism suggests that the world the falcon experi- ences is probably rather like ours, only more acutely perceived. But from the available evidence it seems that the falcon’s sensory world is as different from ours as is that of a bat or a bumble- bee. Their high-speed sensory and nervous systems give them

extremely fast reactions. Their world moves about ten times faster than ours, so events in time that we perceive as a blur, like a dragonfly zipping past our eyes, are much slower to them. Our brains cannot see more than 20 events per second – falcons see 70–80; they are unable to recognize the 25 pictures-per-second moving image on a television screen. Seeing things closer together in time than we do allows them to stretch out a foot at full speed to grab a bird or a