174 ART AND PRACTICE OF HAWKING 



of thin leather for making jesses and bewits. Or there may 

 be a compartment where ready-made jesses, bells, swivels, and 

 spare leashes are stored. The lures, well cleansed from all food 

 that has been attached to them, and the hawking gloves, can 

 have their proper place in the side-room. 



If the building inhabited by the hawks is large, the upper 

 part may be used as a loft wherein to moult them. If there 

 are hawks of different kinds to be moulted, it must be divided 

 into separate compartments, so that no two of very different size 

 may be together. And each individual goshawk must have a 

 room for itself. It would not be safe to turn falcons and tiercels 

 loose together, nor a female with a male sparrow-hawk. 

 Merlins and jacks may be left together, and in the same place 

 with male hobbies ; and probably peregrine tiercels with female 

 shaheens, lanners with lannerets, and perhaps barbarys. But it 

 is not very wise to risk the chumming together of any dis- 

 similar hawks at a time when they are all kept in specially 

 high condition, with no work to do, and ready for the mischief 

 which Dr. Watts assures us is a natural concomitant of idleness. 

 Of course if there is a living-room above the hawks, or above 

 the furniture - room, it may serve most conveniently for a 

 falconer's or under-falconer's bedroom, enabling him to be at 

 hand by night as well as day in case there should be anything 

 wrong, such as a hawk hanging by her jesses from the perch, or 

 a scuffle amongst hawks moulting in the same compartment. 



At six o'clock in summer, and as soon as it is light in winter, 

 the falconer should be in the hawks' room. If newly-caught 

 hawks are there, they will be in a compartment from which all 

 daylight has been excluded. Taking them one by one on the 

 fist, he will put on their hoods, and then, lighting a candle, or 

 admitting enough light, he will search for their castings under 

 the screen-perch. If any one of them which has had castings 

 the day before should not have yet cast, he must either put her 

 back on the perch in the dark, or else, if she is far enough 

 advanced in training for this, hand her over to an under-falconer 

 to be carried till she has performed that operation. Under 

 the place occupied by each hawk the pellet should be looked 

 for and examined before it is thrown away with the sweepings 

 of soiled sawdust collected under the perches. As the falconer 

 ascertains that each hawk has cast up a healthy pellet, well- 

 shaped and free from oily mucus, he will be doing no harm if 

 he presents her with a mouthful or two of food, by way of a 

 morning salutation, and just to show that there is no ill-will. 



