The book of nature is the best. 63 
CHAPTER VI. 
GENERAL REMARKS ON THE PEREGRINE. 
“HE most striking and entirely unexpected fact noticed 
was that after the first few days the Falcon turned 
over to the Tiercel the duties usually assigned to her 
sex—spending her time abroad hunting and bringing the quarry 
to the Tiercel, who remained at home to feed and look after 
the young. This hitherto unrecorded trait in their domestic 
life should, as I said before, commend the bird to Suffragettes 
in search of a totem. Moreover, the Falcon, whether actuated 
by hatred of man or not, showed me her version of the 
hunger strike, a fearsome thing as watched by mere man with 
one eye on his own future, for in the avian version it is the 
husband and helpless young that do the starving. What makes 
me believe that what I saw is the natural habit of the Peregrine 
is that in this crisis the Tiercel, though evidently anxious to feed 
the young, never attempted to do any hunting himself, although 
there were plenty of birds about. It would have been interesting 
to have seen whether in the end hunger would have driven him to 
hunt, and having appeased it he would then have fed the young. 
But the spell of instinct remained unbroken, for at the last the 
Falcon arrived with a bird. That the Peregrine does not always 
kill in mid-air is shown by rats, barnyard chicken and nestling 
shags appearing on the bill of fare. That the Tiercel did leave the 
island at times was shown by the fact that, like the Falcon, he at 
some time of each day betrayed by his bedraggled plumage that 
he had been having a bath. 
Having no exaggerated veneration for the printed word which 
I too often find is copied from one text-book to another in default 
of original observations, I always try, like a model jury, to purge 
my mind of preconceived ideas, and in the case of the Peregrines 
my only working hypothesis was that the Falcon is bigger than the 
