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. _ 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 seerns 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 .t 

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

 I 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 ^ 

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

 llseize and kill a pigeon within doors, and feed quietly upon it 1 

 P^ithout fear of the falconer, she may be tried out of doors on a • 

 -Jong string with the pigeon similarly confined. Should she ^ 

 l^^jjave equally well this time also she may be trusted to fiyV 

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

 ptimes she is flown, for if any little thing should go wrong andV 

 J upset the hawk's equanimity it may become a difficult matterj 

 Ito 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 tp , h e^ 

 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 beO 

 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 j 

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

 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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