236 FALCONRY 



the innumerable invitations which they receive to show their 

 friends something of their favourite diversion, because the 

 country where their host would seek to fix the venue is not 

 merely bad, but impossible for the sport. This is rarely under- 

 stood. In other sports the best can be made of a bad country : 

 foxes can be hunted over plough lands, if not with the same 

 success as attends the sport in the wide pastures of the Mid- 

 lands, yet with satisfaction to those who are enterprising enough 

 to carry on the pursuit under grave difficulties. In the absence 

 of covert birds may be driven, and so on. But in a country 

 unfavourable to that sport falconry cannot be carried on at a//, 

 and any crude attempts to do so must result in the disap- 

 pointment of all concerned and in the depreciation of what 

 is, under more favourable circumstances, one of the wildest 

 and noblest of all the field sports in which man has ever 

 indulged. 



Hawking can only be carried on in a perfectly open country, 

 that is to say, open enough for the particular flight that is to be 

 followed. Thus partridge hawking can be pursued wherever 

 the fields are large and the fences small without much hedge- 

 row timber. Magpies require a rather more open country and 

 entire absence of trees of any kind, while rook hawking can 

 only be practised successfully in a perfectly open country, such 

 as the downs of Wilts or Berks, or Newmarket Heath. It is 

 therefore clear that only the residents in certain favoured 

 localities can follow this amusement with the same facilities as 

 are ready to hand in the case of most other field sports, and 

 on the other hand a man must be really deeply * bitten ' who is 

 willing to leave his home and his ordinary avocations in order 

 to follow his favourite amusement in suitable yet distant local- 

 ities. Yet there are many such enthusiasts left even in these 

 degenerate days. Falconry has never for a single hour been 

 extinct in Great Britain ; and there are probably at the present 

 time more hawks in training, well and ably trained too, both 

 by amateurs and professionals, than ever there were since the 

 beginning of the century. 



