10 PRACTICAL FALCONRY. 
make your guests as snug as possible. Cut up raw beofsteak into 
small pieces, and feed with a rather blunt stick or strong straw. 
Vary the diet with pigeon, hen, and sometimes rabbit. The last 
is not supporting, but isan excellent change amongst stronger food, 
and is used in the real eyrie. I have looked into that nursery larder 
myself, You may feed these very young birds three times a 
day, but twice a day will soon ‘be sufficient. If you rear them, I fear 
—as I have already said—they will turn out screamers,* and make 
your head ache in after days. Also they may grow up with sodden- 
looking eyes, and without the life and briskness of birds taken at 
a later period. At any rate, all these things often happen when 
shepherds and such people have taken the nest too soon, in order to 
be well beforehand, and have kept the birds themselves for a fort- 
night or more, feeding them, no doubt, on all manner of filth. There 
would be one advantage perhaps to the young falconer in having 
birds of this sort—he could have no possible difficulty in putting 
them out to hack. Tpey would become perfectly tame; they would 
go, step by step as it were, from the inside of the outhouse to its 
roof, from its roof to the house-top, and so on; and they might be 
out at hack a very long time. 
Take the second case, in which the birds reach you in their best 
stage. Bell and jesse them at once; place them on the platform; 
feed them with the stick or the end of your finger, as they will bear 
either, for the first two days, sounding a whistle the while, as 
indeed you should do in our first case. Then lose no time in 
introducing them to the lures, which place on the platform, so held 
or tied that they can’t be dragged into a corner, and the meat eaten 
in the dusk. Stand by during the meal, and now and then offer your 
tit-bit of steak at the end of a straw. That, however, is not of 
*This, however, is not invariably the case. Not long ago I heard of a 
bird taken from the nest when very young which did not scream at all. 
