210 CLASS AVES. 



cover their heads with a hood, which hinders them from seeing, 

 while it allows them to eat. The training is then commenced. 



The birds which are taken after they have left the nest, and 

 ean only hop from branch to branch, from which they are 

 called branchiers, receive the same education as the niais. 

 They are more difficult to train than these, though less so than 

 adults, with which, however, the falconers are obliged to con- 

 tent themselves when they can get no others, and which. a,re 

 taken in the following ways : — 



The hawk, the merlin, and the hobby, are taken in projecting 

 nets, laid as if for larks. They immediately descend upon the 

 calling birds, which are placed in the centre. Falcons and 

 gosshawks are also sometimes taken in the same manner ; but 

 as this never happens except when these birds are very hungry, 

 and in the immediate neighbourhood, the fowler desirous of 

 taking them provides himself with a tame shrike attached by a 

 buckle. This bird, which recognizes from a great distance the 

 various raptores hovering on high, and is but slightly agitated 

 when he sees a buzzard, rushes into the hunter's lodge Avhen he 

 perceives a falcon. The hunter then slips a pigeon under his 

 net, also held by a long cord, to leave him the power of fluttering 

 and exciting the falcon, which, when he attacks his prey bit- 

 terly, suffers himself to be drawn after it within the fall of the 

 net. Should this plan not succeed, the fowler (if he has one) 

 takes a tame falcon, which age and infirmity have rendered 

 useless, and attaches it to the end of a long and pliant twig, by 

 the feet, and fixes the other end of the twig in the ground. A 

 cord, beginning from the point where the bird is retained, passes 

 through the pulley which occupies the centre of the nets. The 

 hunter, who holds the extremity of it in his box, on a signal 

 given by the shrike, draws it, and the twig bending, obliges 

 the falcon to extend its wings as if about to pounce on a prey. 

 The wild bird then directly precipitates himself on the other, 

 and falls into the snare. 



The great horned owl is also employed in taking birds 



