FALCONRY IN INDIA 41 



yards the hawks, when close up to the object of their 

 chase, give up the pursuit, and fly to trees hard by. 

 I ask their owner why they did not secure the peacock. 

 He repHes : " They would have taken it had it been a 

 hen. They are not used to the male bird. Alas, my 

 best hawk, which would take the cock, died last week ! " 

 Let me here remark that I have never yet come across 

 a falconer whose best hawk had not recently died. 

 This is the inevitable excuse for the apparently in- 

 variable failure of the falcon to secure its quarry. To 

 cut a long story short, neither of those goshawks secured 

 anything that day. Later, the sparrow-hawk was sent 

 after an unfortunate myna (Acridotheres tristis), which 

 it secured after a chase of perhaps a dozen yards. Its 

 talons struck the myna in the neck, and it soon killed 

 it, not, however, before the poor little creature had 

 emitted some heart-rending shrieks. The goshawk 

 must occasionally catch something, or it would not 

 fetch so large a price, and would not be so popular a 

 bird with falconers in Northern India, but I imagine 

 that on most days the hawking party returns without 

 having secured anything. 



Let me now give a brief account of hawking with the 

 Bhairi, or peregrine falcon (Falco peregrinus). The 

 scene, this time, is a huge expanse of flat plain in the 

 Punjab, near the River Jhelum. The hawks belong to 

 a European. We have ridden for several hours, not 

 having succeeded in putting up quarry of any kind. 

 As the falconer seems to have anticipated this, and as 

 he has with him on trial a new peregrine, which he 

 wants to see at work, an unfortunate crow, which was 



