304 



FALCONRY 



sometimes seen, hawks of the very highest class that were doing 

 their best to catch them. 



The marked excellence of passage hawks at game hawking 

 was proved for the first time in recent years in the season of 

 1 869, when the two falconers John and Robert Barr, the one 

 in the service of the Champagne Hawking Club and the other 

 in that of the Marquis of Bute, met at Grandtully Castle by the 

 invitation of the Maharajah Dhuleep Singh. The team of 

 hawks was a very strong one, both of eyesses and of passage 

 hawks, the latter having been caught and trained for other 

 purposes, but soon in the skilful hands of John Barr well 

 entered to game. The report of this clever falconer to the 

 author of these lines was as follows : — ' We are having the finest 

 grouse hawking here that has ever been seen, killing three or 

 four brace of grouse a day, but our hawks are too good — they 

 kill every time they are flown, very often far out of sight, and 

 are not found the same day, and often are difficult to take up 

 after they have been left out one night.' This, no doubt, is 

 the fault of wild- caught hawks, if they are used for any kind 

 of hawking in which they cannot be ridden up to ; but for 

 swiftness, style, and deadly stooping, eyesses have no chance 

 with them. Haggards especially seem to take to waiting on 

 very well as soon as they are thoroughly well tamed, and 

 naturally they are most deadly at their stoop. In 1869 — the 

 year referred to above — John Barr had a very old haggard falcon 

 named ' Granny,' that was a splendid game hawk and also very 

 good at the heron. But the best of all his passage hawks was 

 a falcon called 'Aurora,' so small that ' all the talent ' assembled 

 at Valkenswaard voted her to be a tiercel when first she was 

 caught, until the veteran Adrian Mollen pointed out sundry 

 points of distinction and proved them all to be wrong, and that 

 she really was a tiny falcon. 



Of late years 'Sibyl,' 'Bacchante' (an old haggard), and 

 ' Elsa,' all the property of the Old Hawking Club, have proved on 

 the Caithness moors that, however trustworthy and good eyesses 

 may be, they cannot hold their own when tried against wild- 



