Falconry: Who Needs It?

Reading a book not long ago about popular sports of the past, I was interested to note how few of them have succeeded in keeping their grip on the public taste. They had their day and vanished never to be heard of again. I suppose about the only one that has survived into our modern age is haberdashery. You still find dashing the haber going on. But what of knurr and spell? Or boxing the compass? Or mocking the turtle? (A cruel sport, this last. The players stood in front of their turtles and made wisecracks about their faces, and the competitor who was the first to get his turtle good and sore won the chukker.)

It is the same with hawking, or, as it was sometimes called, falconry. I don't know how well up you are on falconry, but it was all the rage in Shakespeare's time. You find numerous references to it throughout the plays, and there seems no doubt that everybody was doing it, though where the fun came in it is not easy to see. All it consisted of was going around with a falcon (or hawk) attached to your wrist and unleashing it when another bird, as it might be a heron, came along. The hawk (or falcon) then flew after this other bird and clobbered it. Then you whistled it back and started all over again. Monotonous is the word that springs to the lips, but, as I say, in Shakespeare's time they were crazy about it.

Today all that is changed. The motto of the modern sporting crowd is, "Golf and the world golfs with you, Hawk and you hawk alone." And I would not advise you to do that. A man going about Long Island or Bucks County with a large bird on his wrist would provoke laughter, and not very nice laughter, either.

One feels, reading about these old sports, that some of them might well have retained their appeal today, but one can readily appreciate why falconry passed out. Some say that the enclosure of waste lands and agricultural improvements did it, but I cannot agree with this theory. A hawker does not hawk less eagerly just because he has bought the latest thing in self-propelling plows. Nor would a really enthusiastic falconer stop falcing because someone had enclosed the waste lands. He would simply hop over the fence and carry on regardless.

The school of thought which says that the decay of falconry was due to the introduction of fire arms into the sporting field is on firmer ground. Obviously, once guns had come in, it was merely a question of time before falcons were handed their hats and hawks thrown on relief. There was and always had been a flaw in falconry, a serious drawback to the sport, and every thinking man saw it in a flash. It was that the hawk got all the fun and applause, while the human being who had put it through college and was paying its board and lodging was merely an extra, supporting the star. To all intents and purposes he might just as well have been painted on the backdrop. Naturally, when guns were invented and a man could go out and shoot two or more of his friends in the leg before lunch, people were not going to be content with just standing there watching a bird take bows. Tired of playing second fiddle, they grabbed for their guns, and from that moment falconry was doomed.

Another reason why the sport waned in favor was that it was essentially undemocratic. It did not cater to the man of small means who is the backbone of every national game. "Falcons and hawks," says one writer, "were allotted to degrees and orders of men according to rank and station – for instance, to the Emperor the eagle or vulture, to royalty the jerfalcon, to an Earl the peregrine, to a yeoman the goshawk, to a priest the sparrow-hawk, and to a knave or servant the useless kestrel."

Anyone could have told them that that sort of thing would not do in a progressive age. One can readily imagine the chagrin of the unfortunate knave who had to stand by and listen while the Earl bragged about how Percy, his peregrine, had gone round that morning in two over par, getting a three (three herons) on the long seventh, conscious the while that the handicap of Kenneth, his own kestrel, still stuck immovably in the late twenties, its game, in spite of tutoring from the local pro, showing absolutely no signs of improvement.

All this, of course, was in Europe. America from the very start left the thing severely alone, preferring more sensible pastimes like bowling and pitching horseshoes. But even in Europe falconry on anything like its former scale would be impossible today. For one thing, modern civilization has grown too complex. There are too many people doing too many different jobs. How would the committee looking after the thing satisfy everybody in these times? There would not be enough different kinds of bird to go around.

True, the clergyman could still be allotted his sparrow-hawk and Grace Kelly's young man his jerfalcon, but what sort of a bird would you assign, for instance, to the treasurer of the bricklayers union, to a manufacturer of poppet valves, to a trainer of performing seals, to the floor-walker in the hosiery department at Bloomingdale's, to the jet pilot who has made the first non-stop flight round Jackie Gleason or, for the matter of that, to a man who writes essays on the decay of falconry?

It is no use kidding ourselves. There would be a lot of talk and discussion ... a few indignation-meetings in Union Square ... possibly a couple of paragraphs in Winchell's column ... but when all the smoke had cleared away, you, gentle reader, would find yourself stuck with a futile sap of a kestrel that did nothing but eat and sleep, and so should I. They would lump us all together under the heading of "Knaves," and not a thing to be done about it.

And even if you had it good and drew a goshawk, what would you do with it? Where would you keep it? In your apartment? I don't see how. Certainly not in the kitchen, for the cook would be complaining that she had her hands full looking after her own kestrel. Scarcely in the living room or bedroom, with wives as fussy as they are. The bathroom would seem the only place, and to that there are the gravest objections. Anybody who has dragged himself wearily into the bathroom after having been up late the previous night at a college reunion and found a goshawk sitting on the edge of the tub will testify that there are some things which can be faced with a stiff upper lip and some that cannot.

But we still assume that the bird has consented, howbeit with an ill grace, to allow itself to be bedded out in the closet where you keep your umbrellas. What then? The question of its training now arises, and this is no part-time job. For do not run away with the idea that falconry was simply a matter of inciting a hawk to maltreat birds of other species and just loafing around while it did it. The thing went far deeper than that. In order to prepare the party of the first part for its assaults on the parties of the second part a careful system of education was required. The moment the bird entered the home, you were up on your toes with scarcely enough spare time to read the evening paper.

"The following," says one authority, "is an outline of the process of training hawks," and he then proceeds to fill a dozen closely printed pages, a perusal of which gives the reader the impression that the only thing you did not have to do was to teach the bird Sanskrit and the use of the trap drums. Everything else was provided for. After a good grounding in childhood with a governess, followed by Groton or Lawrenceville, the hawk would be in a condition where four years at one of the Ivy League colleges would probably leave it equipped with a fair education. Though in some cases, where the bird, though painstaking, was a little slow at retaining, a private tutor during vacations might be considered advisable.

You can see the trouble this would cause in the home. Endless worry and anxiety. "No, you can't buy that mink stole," the father of the family says to his weeping wife. "I'm not making a million a year, and you would insist on sending the goshawk to Harvard. And what happens? He flunks the romance languages exam."

And on top of all that there was the matter of feeding. "The hawk," says our author, "will often be induced to feed if a beef steak is drawn over its feet." To my mind, this is asking too much of a man. If ever I am allotted a kestrel, I shall take a strong line. "Yes," I shall say, "I am perfectly willing to bring this obscene bird its beef steak on a plate with a little watercress and an order of French fried potatoes on the side, and I am even prepared to take it to The Colony or 21 on its birthday. But having done this, I submit that I have done my part. I may be foolishly proud and independent, but I will not brush its feet with raw meat. We Wodehouses have our self-respect. If the fatheaded fowl can't distinguish between an informal dinner and a pedicure, let it eat cake."

But, as I say, it is most unlikely that I shall ever be called upon to perform this degrading task. There is little chance in these enlightened days of goshawks and myself meeting on a social footing. They, so to speak, will take the high road and I'll take the low road. For falconry has had it, and will not come back. Apart from all the other causes of its desuetude, if desuetude is the word I want, the very vocabulary of the sport would have been bound to destroy it sooner or later. Your enthusiast can put up with a certain amount of slang in connection with his favorite game, but there are limits. A pastime inextricably mixed up with words like cere, brail, creance, frounce, jonk, imping, mew, pannel, ramage, seeling, tiercel, varvels and yarak could never hope to live.

The result of this compulsory double-talk was that the sports writers rebelled. They refused to report the big meetings. Those were the days when the haughty nobles were not only haughty but extremely quick on the draw, and they took offence readily. When the news reached Bleek's Coffee House that Redde Smithe, a well-known journalist of the day, had been divided into two Redde Smithes with a battle-axe for saying that the Earl of Piccadilly's peregrine had mantled (when actually it had raked out), the other reporters notified their editors that the job was not worth the risk.

So, lacking the support of the press, falconry drooped and died. And I would like to say that I am bearing up all right, and so, I think, should you. Let's forget about the whole thing.