Page:The Natural History of Ireland vol1.djvu/62

 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 Ruthven, from the 10th 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 offer 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.

OTlaherty, in his West or H-Iar Connanght, written in 1684, remarks, when describing the Isles of Arran, off Gahvay bay : — "Here are ayries of hawkes," to which the editor (Mr. Hardiman) in 1840, 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.