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  FALCON

  ‘While presenting the falcon as a creature superbly adapted to its environment, Macdonald’s scientific but lyrical study also celebrates its mythical, cultural and iconic significance.’ – The Times

  ‘[a] marvellous book’ – The Spectator

  ‘This is a wonderful book. It is not a falconry text, nor is it a falcon biology or a conservation one. Macdonald’s slim volume is far more ambitious: it is an attempt to capture and indeed explain the essence of the falcon. This is simply a most beautifully considered social history of the genus Falco . . . it informs and provokes in equal measure . . . Macdonald writes beautifully and with a refreshing clarity.’ – The Falconer

  ‘accompanied by sumptious illustrations, Helen Macdonald gives us not just the natural history but the cultural history as well . . . Even for the non-ornithologist this book provides fascinating insights. Essential reading for the enthusiast.’ – The Tablet

  ‘What Macdonald does with Falcon is bring all of herself to the subject. She breathes life into the work; pulls the lives of falcons and people together into a rare three-dimensional portrait. The effect is beautiful and lasting.’ – North American Falconers Association

  ‘a pleasure to read . . . a trained historian of science and a passionate falconer, Macdonald’s personal experience and knowledge bear fruitfully on this elegant account. The book is a must for anyone interested in animals.’ – British Journal of the History of Science

  ‘The book’s author – the historian of science, avid falconer, and gifted writer Helen Macdonald – succeeds brilliantly . . . a smart, engaging and multidisciplinary account that vividly brings her subject to life.’ – Journal of the History of Biology

  Falcon

  Helen Macdonald

  reaktion books

  Published by Reaktion Books Ltd

  Unit 32, Waterside

  44–48, Wharf Road

  London N1 7UX, UK

  www.reaktionbooks.co.uk

  First published 2006, reprinted 2015

  This edition first published 2016

  Copyright © Helen Macdonald 2006

  Preface copyright © Helen Macdonald 2016

  All rights reserved

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers

  Page references in the Photo Acknowledgements and

  Index match the printed edition of this book.

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by Bell & Bain, Glasgow

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  eISBN: 9781780236896

  Contents

  Preface to the 2016 Edition

  Introduction

  1 Natural History

  2 Mythical Falcons

  3 Trained Falcons

  4 Threatened Falcons

  5 Military Falcons

  6 Urban Falcons

  Timeline

  References

  Bibliography

  Associations and Websites

  Acknowledgements

  Photo Acknowledgements

  Index

  Pisanello, Young Falcon, c. 1435, watercolour drawing.

  Preface to the 2016 Edition

  YOU DON’T HAVE to have read H is for Hawk to read this book. It works entirely on its own. But if you have, there are things in its pages you’ll find familiar. The man in one photograph holding a white gyrfalcon is my dear friend Erin, who burned a Christmas tree with me on a snowy Maine lawn the winter after my father died. And you’ll encounter other things you’ll remember here, though they’re discussed in finer detail, such as J. A. Baker, T. H. White, Nazi hawks and the opening scene of the film A Canterbury Tale. Falcon has far more in-depth discussion of the cultural history of falconry and birds of prey across thousands of years, along with musings on anatomy, physiology, hunting strategies, flight mechanics and conservation philosophy and practice. But at heart, just like H is for Hawk, this book is about how we use nature as a mirror. About how encounters with animals are always to some extent encounters with ourselves and with who we think we are. That unconscious trap is the one I fell into when I trained my goshawk, even after having written this book. That’s how invisible and strong it is.

  How did Falcon come about? Back in the early 2000s I was working on my doctoral dissertation at the University of Cambridge. I never finished it. I wrote this book instead. Which was surprising, because I considered myself a dedicated academic. I loved my university department, my city; loved that every morning I could walk through tree-lined streets to one of the world’s great libraries and spend the day bathed in the dusty almond and vanilla scent of aged paper, surrounded by piles of journals and books, happily checking references and taking notes on articles and texts while pigeons clattered on the roof-tiles above the desks in the North Wing.

  My dissertation was on the history of science. Specifically, it was about the history of natural history and how we relate to the natural world. It was also about how we draw boundaries between things we consider to be science and things we don’t. Those borders are more permeable than we generally suppose. Investigating how they are made and policed tells us a lot about the nature of science, about how we approach knowledge, and about ourselves. My lifelong obsession with birds of prey had spurred me to investigate these questions in the context of the cultures that surrounded them in the twentieth century: raptor conservation, falconry, amateur natural history and birding. I thought it would be an ideal PhD topic. It was. But, as it turned out, I wasn’t an ideal PhD student.

  As part of my dissertation research I spent several months in the Archives of Falconry at the World Center for Birds of Prey in Idaho. The Archives hold everything from medieval manuscript letters to modern first editions; from sealskin parkas to a stuffed goshawk once owned by Hermann Goering. As I pored over the collections, assisted with great kindness by the Archives’ curator, Colonel Kent Carnie, I became more and more bewitched by the things I found. Here were obsessions, myths, fragments from distant cultures and missives from long-lost ways of life; works by people who had spent their lives in thrall to creatures they viewed in near-religious terms. Parts of me that weren’t just an academic historian began to whisper that there were extraordinary things here I couldn’t fit into my thesis, and that grieved me. And there was something else. Increasingly I was feeling sad that many of the elegant and thought-provoking theories and concepts I’d encountered in academia, things that helped me to understand why we see the natural world the way we do, weren’t more widely known. Couldn’t be, because most of us aren’t granted access to the kinds of places and forums where such things are written and discussed. And that seemed very unfair to me. It still does.

  Back in England, still musing on this, I had a chance meeting in the university library tearoom with Jonathan Burt, the editor of Reaktion’s Animal series. He suggested that I write this book. Over coffee and a sandwich I told him I would. And I did. I wrote it for everyone, not just for historians and cultural theoreticians. I wrote it at home, in libraries, in cafés and on trains. I even wrote it on a family holiday in Italy, typing on a wobbly table crusted with dried tomato sauce in a lakeside hotel. All the anecdotes and stories that I rejoiced to include in this book – tales of the Mafia threatening to drive a falconer out of New York City because his falcon was a threat to their pigeon-flying activities, stories of fan dancers, jet pilots, astronauts and the diplomatic shenanigans of early modern royalty – these were things that didn’t fit in my PhD. But they fitted here. And weaving facts and anecdotes and images together to discuss aspects of our place in the world through the lens of our
relationship with falcons – that was a fascinating and deeply absorbing task.

  I chose to write about falcons rather than hawks because, as I say in H is for Hawk, they were the birds I most loved and was most familiar with; placid, devastatingly beautiful aerial predators. They’re not much like goshawks, though much of their cultural history is shared with these powerful and highly strung accipiters. But oddly enough, it was an encounter with a goshawk after this book came out that, in retrospect, was part of the complicated mesh of happenstance that brought me to Mabel, my own goshawk.

  It was in the autumn of 2006, in Uzbekistan, a few short months before my father died. I’d driven with a group of other fieldworkers in a Russian jeep down to the banks of the Syrdarya river in Andijan province, where water described a lazy loop through poplar forest and feathery grey tamarisk. Once we’d pitched our tents, I went for a stroll in the hot, blank forest sunlight. It was very still and quiet; just the constant pattering of dry, falling leaves. My feet crunched on salt-crusted mud and across leaf litter sparking with grasshoppers and sinuous silver lizards. After a mile or so, I found myself in an open clearing and looked up. And that is when I thought I saw a man standing in a tree. That’s what my brain told me, momentarily. A man in a long overcoat leaning slightly to one side. And then I saw it wasn’t a man, but a goshawk. Moments like this are very illuminating. I’d never thought before, much, about the actual phenomenology of human–hawk resemblance, which must have brought forth all those mythological hawk–human bonds I’ve studied for so long, the ones I’d written about in this book. Everything I’d written about this strange symbolic connection between hawks and human souls felt as if it had a different kind of truth, now, one forged of things other than books. I looked up at a hawk in a tree, but I saw a man. How curious. This goshawk must have been 80 feet away, so dark against the bright sun I couldn’t see whether he was facing me or the river. His short head and snaky neck craned: he was looking at me. I raised my binoculars to my eyes as slowly as I could, half-closing my eyes so my lashes fringed the glare. There. There he was. The glare wasn’t so bad. I could see his edges very clearly. The light was very bright. But I could also faintly see the horizontal barring on his chest feathers. This was an adult male goshawk, and he looked very different from the ones at home. He had a dark, dark head with a flaring pale eyebrow, and the bars on his chest were close-set and far from the thick, broken lines of European birds. Imagine tracing – with a ruler – each horizontal line of a narrow-ruled notebook with a thick, dark-grey felt-tip pen. That’s what his front looked like, through the glare. And he was standing on a bare branch and making up his mind what I was, exactly, and what he should do about it. Slowly, he unfolded his wings, as if putting on a coat, and then, rather quietly and leisurely, he took to the air, one long leg and loosely clenched foot trailing as he went. I was astonished by how long-winged he was, and how much he looked like a big – albeit long-tailed – falcon. His shape was very different from the goshawks at home. This was a migrant hawk, one who had travelled down mountains and across plains to find himself here and at home.

  It wasn’t until that dark year with my own hawk Mabel that the visceral truth that we use nature as a mirror of our own needs became something I understood, rather than merely knew. But even so, that sighting of a goshawk in Uzbekistan was the start of my education, the start of understanding the difference between knowing something intellectually and feeling it deep in your bones. That migrant goshawk, and that momentary lapse of focus that made me see him as a person, not a bird – I wonder, now, if he was also part of the reason I cleaved to a goshawk after my father’s death. And I wonder if there would have been any Mabel at all had I not thought so long and so hard about the meanings of raptors as I wrote this book.

  The falcons that fly in these pages shine a light upon human culture as much as they do upon their own biology and behaviour. I am passionately of the opinion that it is crucial for us to try to understand what lies behind the meanings we have given, and continue to give, to wild animals, including hawks and falcons. It’s a project that teaches us about human minds and cultures and the complicated workings of social history, natural history, art and science. But most of all, and now more than ever before, it is essential that we look long and hard at how we view and interact with the natural world for other reasons. We are living through the world’s sixth great extinction, one caused entirely by us, through habitat loss, climate change, chemical contamination of ecosystems by pesticides and herbicides, and urban and agricultural development. Piecing together how and why we see landscapes and creatures as we do, how we value them and why we think we should protect them – these are questions whose importance is far and above mere academic interest. They are questions to which the answers are simply about how we can save the world.

  Gouache of a gyrfalcon from a mid-15th-century Persian album of paintings and calligraphy.

  ‘Ringed with the azure world’: peregrine falcon and skydiver.

  Introduction

  IN 1998 KEN FRANKLIN TRAINED a young female peregrine falcon called Frightful to follow a free-falling speed-suited skydiver out of an aircraft door at 16,000 feet. In a series of dives, high-speed film footage showed the falcon in her element, tucking her head deep into her collarbones, feet sleek beneath her feathers, moulding herself into the perfectly aerodynamic profile of a raindrop. At speeds of over 100 miles an hour, the minutest alterations to her body shape or wing profile gave punishingly exaggerated effects; she looked, as Franklin later described, shrink-wrapped, mummified. And just as it seemed impossible for her to fall any faster, she’d change her shape again. Shrugging one shoulder sharply forward to slice through the molecules of resistant air, she dropped away from the astonished cameraman, cutting the sky in two at a velocity of over 200 miles an hour.

  Falcons are the fastest animals that have ever lived. They excite us, seem superior to other birds and exude a dangerous, edgy, natural sublimity. All this means nothing to falcons, of course; these are our own concepts. Though real, living animals, falcons can’t be seen except through what anthropologist Franz Boas described as your Kulturbrille, the invisible mental lens your own culture gives you through which you see the world. All encounters with falcons are in a strong sense encounters with ourselves – whether the falcons are real or imaginary, whether seen through binoculars, framed on gallery walls, versified by poets, flown as hunting birds, spotted through Manhattan windows, sewn on flags, stamped on badges, or seen winnowing through the clouds over abandoned arctic radar stations.

  Animals are so malleable a repository for human meanings that some modern critics see them as existing almost entirely within the realm of human representation. But falcons are not merely imaginary receptacles for symbolic meaning. They live, breed, fly, hunt, breathe. Pigeons have no illusions that falcons are merely empty signifiers filled with meaning by humans. And as living animals, real falcons constrain, undercut and sometimes resist the meanings people have attached to them.

  The broad-shouldered, solid form of a falcon sitting silently on a dead tree or a rocky outcrop has an unmistakable, magnetic gestalt and, when it takes flight, a power and ease in the air that does strange things to the susceptible viewer. In their presence, confessed 1950s nature writer W. Kenneth Richmond, ‘we may as well acknowledge the fact that we are inferior beings . . . Terror and beauty, cold silver and hot blood are fused in them to produce the natural aristocrat’, before adding defensively, ‘at least so it has always seemed to me’.1 Falcon watching might be addictive, but the lure of falcons can become far more than a vocation. Writer Stephen Bodio knew a man who showed his trained falcon to visiting Jehovah’s Witnesses. ‘This is what I worship,’ he told them proudly.2 Such unexpected religiosity reaches its highest pitch in The Peregrine by J. A. Baker. This classic of natural-history writing is a diary of one man’s obsessive quest for wild peregrines across the winter landscapes of East Anglia. An ecological Confessions of St Augustine or modern-day Gra
il-search, these are at heart the diaries of a soul’s journey to grace, a man looking for God. The style is episodic and ornate: Baker searches for the peregrine day after day, every sighting imbued with deep personal significance. He finds traces of where the peregrine has been – old kills, a few feathers. He searches for the right clothes, the right rituals and actions to allow him to get ever closer, suffering privations and hardships on his way. He envisions the landscape as animated entirely through the falcon’s power, creating life from the still earth by conjuring flocks of birds into the air. He assumes humility – and these become the diaries of a man seeking to become invisible, growing so familiar to the falcons he sees on his daily treks that they trust him as part of the landscape he and they both move upon. And finally, at the end of the book, as night falls, an epiphany. Baker is gripped by a sudden certainty that he would find the peregrine by the coast – an irresistible inward call that sends him out into a bleak near-night on a quest through a desolate landscape. And there he finds the falcon. He slowly approaches until he stands right before it. It is roosting in a thorn bush. It accepts his presence, closes its eyes and returns to sleep. And Baker is fulfilled.

  The white gyrfalcon, for millennia the most revered and sought-after falcon of all. Trapped on the coast of Greenland as part of a study of falcon migration, this female is about to be released by field biologist Erin Gott.

  What is this animal that provokes so much emotion? In the first chapter I sketch out some of the biological and ecological dimensions of falcons, and in the rest of the book explore how people have responded in such a curiously strong manner to something that, after all, is just a bird.