PASSAGE HAWKS TRAINING 289 



Many passage falcons are very stupid and troublesome to 

 enter to the lure just at first. The process of taming and 

 training them seems to have completely transformed their 

 nature and driven all recollection of their past life out of their 

 minds. It is very curious to notice how the young eyess, 

 which has no fear at all of man or nervousness at its sur- 

 roundings, will, almost to a certainty, seize and kill in- 

 stinctively the first live pigeon shown to it, though it has never 

 killed a bird before ; while the passage hawk, which has, 

 perhaps, chased and killed hundreds of wild birds during its 

 life, and has subsisted on nothing else, will sometimes sit and 

 blink stupidly at a pigeon within a few feet of it, as though it 

 had never seen such a creature before. A little patience will 

 overcome this difficulty also, and as soon as the hawk will 

 seize and kill a pigeon within doors, and feed quietly upon it 

 without fear of the falconer, she may be tried out of doors on a 

 long string with the pigeon similarly confined. Should she 

 behave equally well this time also she may be trusted to fly 

 loose. A good deal of care must be exercised the first few 

 times she is flown, for if any little thing should go wrong and 

 upset the hawk's equanimity it may become a difficult matter 

 to take her up at once ; and if she is at large, even for an hour 

 or two, out of control, her wild ways will at this stage return to her 

 with great rapidity. She should be very sharp-set, and for the 

 first trial it will be quite enough to call her from the fist of 

 an assistant (who must not be a perfect stranger to her) about 

 a hundred yards to the falconer. One or two stoops will be 

 enough, and she should then be allowed to feed on the lure. 

 As soon as the hawk behaves well and flies keenly, the use of 

 live pigeons should be abandoned, and the hawk trained to the 

 dead lure. In former days it was supposed that passage hawks 

 could not be trained to dead lures until they had been in work 

 for a long time, but we have proved this to be a fallacy, and 

 that it is, with care and good management, quite as possible to 

 get passage hawks to come to the dead lure as it is to train 

 eyesses to it. The early education cannot in either case be 



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