38 
FALCONIM. 
pany.* The chase was continued so long, that two of my friends, 
whose taste inclined more to fishing than to hawking, resumed their 
avocation, though, as sportsmen, highly enjoying the chase at first ; 
but the third, who communicated the circumstance, possessing 
trained falcons himself, witnessed it to the last, and described the 
swoops made by the wild bird as bolder, and its flight certainly 
more swift, than that of any trained one he had ever seen.f 
My friend was told that these peregrine falcons destroy numbers 
of rooks ; and he remarked many of the feathers of these birds, 
at the chief feeding -ground to which their prey is borne to be 
eaten ; a hill top at the opposite side of the lake from their eyrie. 
They are said to persecute the gray crows, whenever these come 
in their way, — “ between the wind and their nobility,” — though 
apparently not caring for them as food. Every day on which my 
friend went in the direction of Loch Euthven, from the 10 th of 
August until the middle of September, he saw the old pair of 
peregrines, their blue backs marking them as such, from the 
height at which he looked down upon them. From the latter period 
until the end of October, when he left Aberarder, they were not 
seen by him. The general belief, however, in that neighbourhood, 
is, that the old birds remain all the year there, but that the young 
leave it about the end of September. 
Trained Peregrine Falcons . % — Some of our north of Ireland 
* When any quarry, pursued by one of these falcons, gains even the surface of 
the water, it is almost invariably safe, in consequence of its being unnatural for the 
species to strike at any object on that element. But it would appear that necessity 
will sometimes compel a departure from this rule, as an accurate observer informs me, 
that he once saw a peregrine falcon stoop to a flock of razorbills, or guillemots, sit- 
ting on the water at the Gobbins, and bear one off to its eyrie near the summit of the 
cliff. The prey was obviously larger than the hawk. Macgillivray alludes to this 
species carrying a greater weight than itself, in his Hist. Brit. Birds, vol. iii. p. 307. 
f One of his own falcons, when at liberty, flew at and put into a pipe, — as 
harriers ofter do a hare in hunting, — a full-grown curlew. The same falcon was 
beaten by a sea-gull (L. canus?), which, during a pursuit of about half an hour’s 
continuance, it could not seize, owing to the sudden turns, (“ twirlings,” as it was 
expressed,) of the gull, that screamed loudly all the time. 
* O’Flaherty, in his West or H-Iar Connaught, written in 1684, remarks, when 
describing the Isles of Arran, off Galway bay: — “Here are ayries of hawkes,” to 
which the editor (Mr. Hardiman) in 1846, adds in a note, that “ they were formerly 
trained in Iar-Connaught for field-sport, and were held in high esteem. Morogh 
na Maor O’Flaherty, of Bunowen, in Conamara, by his will, dated 13th April, A.D. 
