Falcon (2 page)

The 60-odd species of the falcon family Falconidae superficially resemble but are probably only distantly related to the other diurnal birds of prey such as hawks, eagles and vultures; some researchers think they are more closely related to owls. They are very variable in shape and habit. From the garbage-can raiding, raucous, vulture-like caracaras to the secretive tropical forest falcons, all share certain features, such as a bony tubercle in the nostril and a unique moult pattern, which mark them as members of this family. And taxonomically nested within the Falconidae are the ‘true falcons’ of the genus
Falco.
These species are thought to have evolved relatively recently, perhaps seven or eight million years ago when climatic changes opened up millions of acres of new savannah and steppe grassland. A rapid, explosive radiation of forms occurred to take advantage of these open landscapes.

Falco
is often subdivided into four groups: the largely insec- tivorous hobbies, the tiny, bird-killing merlins, the kestrels, and the group with which we are directly concerned, the large falcons, which can be further divided into two groups, the pere- grines and the desert falcons. Both are fast-flying, dark-eyed, active hunters of open airspace. The peregrines specialize in avian prey, while the desert falcons also take mammals, reptiles and insects. In common with many bird-catching raptors, both groups show reversed size dimorphism (rsd): that is, females

A young peregrine in flight, showing the long-pointed wings and dark cheek markings so typical of the genus
Falco
.

are considerably larger than males. Evolutionary ecologists have been trying to account for this for years. Perhaps females prefer smaller males because they present less of a threat to themselves and their young. Or perhaps aggressive female com- petition for males who hold the best breeding territories has selected for large females. Another theory sees rsd as allowing the exploitation of a wider range of prey – with males specializ- ing in catching smaller, more agile birds and females in catching larger, less manoeuvrable ones, but this does not explain why females, rather than males, should be the larger of the two. Tiercel
,
the falconry term for a male falcon, is from the Old French
terçuel
, derived from the Latin
tertius
meaning a third; males are generally about a third smaller than females.

Western science counts around ten species in this large falcon group, but exactly how they are related and whether par- ticular forms should be considered full species, subspecies or mere races of other species is a scientific conundrum. Such con-

fusion is not helped by the discovery that captive-bred hybrids between some species, such as gyrfalcons and saker falcons, are fully fertile. But what is the point of worrying about precise defi- nitions of species, one might ask; falcons existed for millions of years before we started fretting about how to classify them. But these taxonomic decisions have real-world implications. Conservation requires stable definitions of the things we are trying to conserve; species or other units must be legally defined. Many falcon populations are threatened by loss of habitat or by direct persecution, but these population types may ‘fall through the net’ of Western taxonomy, as in the case of the saker falcon, a species in which the non-coincidence of scientific and folk taxonomies is distinctly problematic. Western science describes two to five subspecies of the saker. Arab falconers, however, use a complex taxonomy based on size, colour and conformation, such as
ashgar
(white),
aukthar
(green),
jerudi
(barred),
hurr shami
(red), and so on. In post- Soviet Russia, illegal smuggling of particularly favoured colour forms for the Arab falcon market exerts disproportionate pressure on populations that cannot be granted greater legal protection than others because they remain outside the scientific categories of Western conservation.

the peregrines

The peregrine, wrote W. Kenneth Richmond, is a bird of ‘perfect proportions and finely cut features, daring and intelligence, spec- tacular performance in the air and matchless execution in the chase – it has them all, a natural aristocrat’.
¹
Here the falcon sounds more like a John Buchan hero or a Second World War fly- ing ace, but the effusive fashioning of this falcon into the discourse of nobility has a long heritage. In Iran and Arabia, the peregrine is

Portrait of an adult peregrine falcon. This wild female is looking through an office window in Toronto
, Canada
.

called
Shaheen
, Farsi for ‘emperor’. Pero López de Ayala, Chancellor of Castile and medieval Spanish authority on falconry, thought it ‘the noblest and best of the birds of prey, the lord and prince of hunting birds’.
²
And 700 years later the American ornithologist Dean Amadon rather oddly conflated concepts of adaptative fitness with sheer admiration when he called it the finest of falcons and assumed it must therefore be the most highly evolved of the
Falco
group. The name ‘peregrine’ comes from the Latin
peregrinus
‘wanderer’; if we assume the mantle of a geopolitician, and measure success by the extent of territory held,
Falco peregrinus
is the most successful bird alive. Except for Antarctica, Iceland and some oceanic islands, the species is found on every continent and in a huge variety of forms. These range in colour from the pallid, white-fronted morph of the Chilean pere- grine
F. p. cassini
to the dark Madagascar peregrine
F. p. radama
. Peregrines from humid, tropical latitudes tend to be darker and more richly coloured than those from arid or northerly regions. Desert peregrine types include the tiny blue and rust-coloured broad-shouldered Barbary falcon
F. pelegrinoides
from North

Africa, and in the mountains of Iran and Afghanistan, the red- naped Shaheen
F. p. babylonicus.
In Iran this bird is called the
Shaheen-e kuhi
, the shaheen of the hills, as opposed to the
Shaheen-e bahri
, the shaheen of the sea, the migratory Arctic peregrine that winters on the Iranian coasts.

Young peregrine falcons have streaked under- parts, as seen in this early 19th- century Indian watercolour in the Tanjore style.

A grey-phase gyrfalcon tail feather.

the desert falcons

The largest falcon, and arguably the most impressive, is a member of a softer-plumaged subgroup of
Falco
known famil- iarly as the desert falcons, for these species generally inhabit arid regions. The gyrfalcon
Falco rusticolus
is a hulking great bird; females are nearly the size of a small eagle. Gyrs live in the arctic and sub-arctic where prey can be scarce and water is locked into ice for much of the year; they are well adapted for the exigencies of this habitat, with thick, deep plumage and shaggy lower- breast feathers that entirely cover their feet when they sit; they will bathe with relish in freshly thawed snow. They hunt mainly ptarmigan, lemmings and Arctic hares, but they will eat fish and scavenge from frozen carcasses.

Gyrs have a number of colour-phases broadly correlated with their geographic origin. The
obsoletus
birds of boreal North America are almost black. Grey and silver forms are found throughout their range. From northern Greenland and Kamchatka come brilliant white birds with black-barred scapu- lars and wing feathers, called
candicans.
In seventeenth-century Spain these birds were called
Letrados
because the marks on their backs looked like the marks of a pen. The gyrfalcon’s size and beauty have granted it high status in all falconry cultures; in medieval Europe it was particularly favoured for flights at large quarry such as the Red Kite (
Milvus milvus
) and Crane (
Grus grus
)
.

Today gyrs are occasionally given as gifts to Gulf States dignitaries by governments and oil companies, but from the eleventh century until the eighteenth they were among the most valuable of diplomatic gifts. In 1236 Edward i of England received eight grey and three white gyrfalcons from Norway. He immediately sent four of the grey gyrs to the King of Castile,

apologizing that he could not send white falcons, for only recently he had lost nine of his own. And they were frequently used in diplomatic negotiations. Charles vi of France sent Norwegian gyrfalcons to Bajazet as a ransom for the marshals de Boucicault and de la Tremoille after the battle of Nikopol in 1396, while the Duke of Burgundy brought about the liberation of his son, the Duke of Nevers, by sending his Turkish captors twelve white gyrfalcons. In the 1930s Herman Goering planned to release white gyrs in the German Alps. He was convinced that this, the largest and most powerful of falcons, must have had its ancestral home in Germany. The ideological underpinnings of this ecological introduction are, to say the least, uncomfortable, and Renz Waller’s portrait of Goering’s own white gyrfalcon bathed in mountain sunlight is disturbingly true to the artistic conventions of National Socialist portraiture.

Another desert falcon, the saker falcon
Falco cherrug,
is the traditional bird of Arab falconry. Trapped in the autumn on migration across Arabia to wintering grounds in East Africa, the bird was known to Bedouin falconers simply as
saqur
‘fal- con’. Sakers nest in steppe grassland and in open forests from eastern Europe across Asia. Like the gyr, they occur in a wide variety of forms. Plain-backed, brown, Western lowland birds become larger, more rufous in colour and barred in the Eastern highland forms. But this clinal distribution is only a broad trend; saker populations include spotted or barred, brown, grey, burnt orange, almost black birds and birds bleached by the sun to near white. The Altai falcon
Falco altaicus
is a dark gyr-like bird from the Russian Altai, known as
Turul
in Mongolia. In India and Pakistan the desert falcons are represented by the Lugger falcon
Falco jugger
, a soft-plumaged brown and cream falcon that preys on lizards as well as birds and small mam- mals. In the arid and semi-arid regions of Africa and southern