Falcon (14 page)

self-sustaining and well-suited to the needs of modern man’.
³⁵
His position is shared by at least one academic ornithologist who told me that good falconry is a particularly enlightened form of animal–human relationship, so perfectly does it match the behavioural repertoire of the wild animal.

Yet as he pointed out, larger problems quite unrelated to one’s moral stance on hunting are associated with falconry. Perhaps the best known is that of the illegal taking of young falcons from the wild. Thieves exerted a serious toll on European falcon eyries in the 1960s and ’70s. Along with the activities of egg-collectors, these depredations exerted con- siderable pressure on populations threatened by pesticides. Today, with captive-bred birds readily available, eyrie thefts are thankfully much rarer in Europe; offenders are treated harshly by conservation organizations, falconry organiza- tions and the law alike. But sadly, this is far from being true elsewhere. Falcon smuggling, sometimes small-scale, some- times large and mafia-run, has had devastating effects on some saker populations in the former Soviet Union. At the same time, falconers were directly responsible for one of the most successful feats of conservation ever undertaken: the

restoration of the peregrine falcon to much of the United States in the 1970s. The story of the decline and recovery of the peregrine falcon is truly extraordinary. Thirty years ago, doomy predictions of the species’ extinction were common. Now the peregrine has been removed from the American Endangered Species list. Millions of dollars, thousands of people, universities, governments, corporations, even the military, were involved in its restoration. What makes such conservation success stories so compelling, so mesmerizing?

Falconry as a symbol of Arab cultural identity meets Bald Eagle as a symbol of American imperi- alism: a 2004 cartoon from

al-Jazeera.

Snow leopards. Giant pandas. Peregrine falcons. Bengal tigers. All are rare and spectacular animals, icons of environment- alism, stars of the small screen. Their faces are familiar from magazine covers and their lives are favoured subjects for nature writers. These are species bathed in an aura denied other, com- moner creatures. Put bluntly, they’re celebrities. They exist in the wild, but they live in glossy magazines. And the peregrine is right up there on the ‘a-list’, along with a select few other icons of extinction. Rarity is a slippery concept. Separating its biolog- ical from its cultural meanings is a difficult task. Animals on that a-list seem
made
of rarity, an identity-characteristic almost impossible to ‘think round’ to get to the animal itself. Just as the decline in house sparrows in Britain in the 1990s was masked by the species’ presumed ubiquity, so upturns in the fortune of celebrity endangered animals often fail to register on popular consciousness. In 2004, for example, a bbc webpage described peregrine falcons as being ‘now rare enough to share the same protection as the Giant Panda’, even though peregrines are commoner today in Britain than ever before.
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How does one become a celebrity animal? Both pandas and peregrines got their a-list status during the 1960s and ’70s. Pandas sent as diplomatic gifts from China were Cold War icons; their sex lives in Western zoos had ramifications far

beyond their conservation value. And peregrines? The threat to the peregrine in the 1950s and ’60s was real. An entire race of peregrines – the huge, dark
anatum
birds of the eastern us – became extinct and across a vast swathe of North America and Europe peregrine populations plummeted to frighteningly low levels. This disaster mightily increased a series of symbolic attri- butions previously accorded peregrines – ones relating to wilderness and primitivist glamour – and transformed the pere- grine falcon into a supreme icon of environmental destruction, a symbol of how science and technological progress had betrayed its promise to build a better world.

paradise lost

Part of the compulsion of the falcon conservation story as it is generally told is derived from its mythical structure. It’s a famil- iar one – a biblical one. Once, in a distant, Edenic past, it

Traders selling saker falcons in Beijing,
1909
. These may have been destined for falconry, but, despite govern- ment protection, falcons are still eaten in parts of China.

explains, humans lived in harmony with falcons, accorded them reverence. They were worshipped as gods or messengers to the gods. Later, they were treasured as falconry birds, the consorts of kings and emperors. Then came the Fall. Our bond with the wild was lost, and the downturn in the symbolic and biological fortunes of falcons was vast and desperate, first with the massive nineteenth-century raptor extermination cam- paigns, and second with the calamitous effects of pesticides on falcons in the 1950s and ’60s. But this is an Edenic story with an upside, of course, for we are telling it to ourselves: enlighten- ment and redemption have already occurred. A gradual understanding of the importance of these birds to natural ecosystems, coupled with a new attitude towards predators and nature as a whole, drove us to save them in the nick of time. Once again, it seems, humans understand and protect these special birds.

The Eden story is a powerful legitimating myth. It can be a force for good, energizing conservation action and promoting consideration of the ethics of human relations with the natural world. But like all myths it is a partial reading, obscuring facts that get in the way of the story. Falcons were indeed worshipped as manifestations of divinity in ancient Egypt. But the massive trade in live falcons for mummification ‘falls out’ of the story. In early-modern Europe, falcons were certainly the birds of kings. But what of the innumerable falcons that perished as they were shipped across continents by falcon traders? And while falcons were protected by law in the Middle Ages, with harsh punish- ments for commoners who dared to catch falcons or take their eggs, such laws evidence the exercise of power, not concern for the welfare of falcons. We should be wary of ascribing an enlightened view of nature to medieval kings simply because they wished to protect their own symbolic capital. And crucially,

the Eden myth masks clear and present conservation dangers. It would be crazy not to celebrate the return of the peregrine falcon after the dark ddt era, or fail to applaud the passionate hard work of those individuals and institutions that helped this happen. But delight should be tempered with a realization that we are not wholly redeemed; this is not the end of the story; habitat loss, pesticides and falcon smuggling are still endanger- ing falcon populations across much of the world, as the end of this chapter shows.

But the Edenic mythical structure of the falcon story is, how- ever, rooted in historical reality. This story can only be told at all because the cultural history of falcons has been indubitably marked by spectacular, vast changes in their symbolic fortunes.

the fall

By the nineteenth century, shooting held the sporting capital once accorded to falconry. ‘Shooting flying’ had become the test of the true marksman, the pursuit of elite sporting society. Shotgun retorts, not falcon bells, rang across European moor, crag and manor. Estate owners competed with each other to provide record bags of game for invited guns. And any animals that threatened to compete with guns for game were
persona non grata
. No longer the consorts of kings, falcons had become the worst of vermin. And so began an era of vast raptor exter- mination campaigns:

Sportsmen early learn that this hawk is exceptionally obnoxious to the amusement . . . it is a remorseless marauder and murderer, killing for amusement after satisfying its hunger completely. No man should be accounted a genuine sportsman with the gun who does

not instantly slaughter the Duck Hawk [peregrine] on sight.
²

Killing birds of prey was a condition of employment for nine- teenth-century British gamekeepers. On one Scottish estate, for example, new keepers signed an oath that they would use their ‘best endeavours to destroy all birds of prey, etc., with their nests, wherever they can be found therein. So help me God.’
³
Fallen falcon corpses were hung on gibbets, or sent to taxi- dermists who transformed them into trophies for display in domestic spaces: the bird of kings reduced to a bundle of bones and feathers swinging from a tree, or cured with arsenic and set behind glass. ‘Alas!’, wrote British falconer-naturalist J. E. Harting in his 1871 guide
The Ornithology of Shakespeare
, ‘that we should live to see our noble falcons gibbeted, like thieves, upon the “keeper’s tree”.’
⁴

A few balked at the slaughter. Scottish keeper Dugald Macintyre was, unusually, a falconer; he saw falcons as natural sportsmen sharing the skills, mores and spoils of his world. Wild peregrines, he explained, timed their stoops at quarry ‘just as a great shot times the arrival of his shot-charge at a dis- tant flying target’,
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and he thought they dispatched grouse far more humanely than humans. But viewing falcons as natural sportsmen didn’t preclude their killing. In many cases, it simply made them a more tempting target for nineteenth-century sporting gentlemen. Shooting a falcon granted him an oppor- tunity to pit his wits against an opponent that possessed sufficient commonalities with his own self-image to make the battle a worthy one. A duel, say. A shot peregrine sent to Roland Ward, taxidermist of Piccadilly, and then displayed in one’s house, was at once a trophy, a guarantor of one’s prowess and a metaphorical extension of oneself. The imperilled peregrines of

Henry Williamson’s 1923 nature-fable
The Peregrine’s Saga
clearly demonstrate this continuing alignment of falcon with modern aristocrat. Williamson’s peregrines are mirror images of a fading British aristocracy dealt a double blow by the First World War and harsh new tax regimens. Blood-lineages, power, history and nobility are what Williamson’s peregrines are made of: one peregrine family, ‘the Devon Chakcheks’, was ‘a family haughtier and more feared than any other in the West Country’; an ‘ancient and noble house’.
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Indeed, an ‘English King’ had once conferred an earldom on an ancestor of one of Williamson’s falcons.
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In the 1900s us Government scientists showed that not all raptors were game-bird slaughterers; some preferred to eat mice and frogs. Raptors could now be seen as either beneficial or pernicious, as having ‘good or bad habits’. Depression-era bird enthusiasts seized upon this with glee. They circulated leaflets that described hawks as ‘soldiers’ waging war against enemy rodents that ate American crops. ‘Protecting hawks’, they wrote, ‘will help prevent starvation’.
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But the peregrine’s American common name of ‘Duck Hawk’ won it no favours

A recently mounted peregrine falcon, from Montagu Browne’s
1884
Practical Taxidermy
. The cords, cards

and pins were removed after a few weeks.

from hunters in this period, however, and nor did the large falcons gain much from the results of economic ornithologist’s examinations:

Gray Gyrfalcon (
Falco rusticolus rusticolus
); 5 stomachs; 4 contained field mice; the other, remains of a Gull. Prairie falcon (
F. mexicanus
); good and bad habits about bal- anced; takes game birds and also pernicious rodents . . . Duck Hawk (
F. peregrinus
); harmful to water birds and poultry; takes also small birds; feeds to some extent on insects and mice but on the whole more harmful than useful.
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Killing ‘bad’ birds of prey was considered a morally and a bio- logically responsible act. The view was to persist well into the twentieth century. America’s foremost bird conservation organ- ization, the Audubon Society, shot birds of prey on their bird sanctuaries in the 1920s; in many European countries, bounties were still paid for dead raptors in the 1950s and ’60s. Conservation’s roots in game management were reflected in the policy of many organizations and governmental bodies. In 1958 a delegate at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature told Phyllis Barclay-Smith that she couldn’t be a bird preservationist if she advocated the protection of birds of prey.

the enlightenment?