38 FALCONID/E. 



pany.* The chase was continued so long, that two of my friends, 

 whose taste inclined more to fishing than to hawking, resumed their 

 avocation, though, as sportsmen, highly enjoying the chase at first ; 

 but the third, who communicated the circumstance, possessing 

 trained falcons himself, witnessed it to the last, and described the 

 swoops made by the wild bird as bolder, and its flight certainly 

 more swift, than that of any trained one he had ever seen.f 



My friend was told that these peregrine falcons destroy numbers 

 of rooks ; and he remarked many of the feathers of these "birds, 

 at the chief feeding -ground to which their prey is borne to be 

 eaten ; a hill top at the opposite side of the lake from their eyrie. 

 They are said to persecute the gray crows, whenever these come 

 in their way, — " between the wind and their nobility," — though 

 apparently not caring for them as food. Every day on which my 

 friend went in the direction of Loch Ruthven, from the 10th of 

 August until the middle of September, he saw the old pair of 

 peregrines, their blue backs marking them as such, from the 

 height at which he looked down upon them. From the latter period 

 until the end of October, when he left Aberarder, they were not 

 seen by him, The general belief, however, in that neighbourhood, 

 is, that the old birds remain all the year there, but that the young 

 leave it about the end of September. 



Trained Peregrine Falcons. % — Some of our north of Ireland 



* When any quarry, pursued by one of these falcons, gains even the surface of 

 the water, it is almost invariably safe, in consequence of its being unnatural for the 

 species to strike at any object on that element. But it would appear that necessity 

 will sometimes compel a departure from this rule, as an accurate observer informs me, 

 that he once saw a peregrine falcon stoop to a flock of razorbills, or guillemots, sit- 

 ting on the water at the Gobbins, and bear one off to its eyrie near the summit of the 

 cliff. The prey was obviously larger than the hawk. Macgillivray alludes to this 

 species carrying a greater weight than itself, in his Hist. Brit. Birds, vol. iii. p. 307. 



f One of his own falcons, when at liberty, flew at and put into a pipe, — as 

 harriers offer do a hare in hunting, — a full-grown curlew. The same falcon was 

 beaten by a sea-gull (Z.canus?), which, duriug a pursuit of about half an hour's 

 continuance, it could not seize, owing to the suddeu turns, ("twirlings," as it was 

 expressed,) of the gull, that screamed loudly all the time. 



\ OTlaherty, in his West or H-Iar Connanght, written in 1684, remarks, when 

 describing the Isles of Arran, off Gahvay bay : — " Here are ayries of hawkes," to 

 which the editor (Mr. Hardiman) in 1840, adds in a note, that "they were formerly 

 trained in Iar-Conuaught for iield-sport, and were held in high esteem. Morogh 

 na Maor O'Flahcrty, of Buuowcn, in Conamara, by his will, dated 13th April, A.D. 



