Page:The peregrine falcon at the eyrie (IA cu31924084757206).pdf/83

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HE most striking and entirely unexpected fact noticed was that after the first few days the Falcon turned over to the Tiercel the duties usually assigned to her sex—spending her time abroad hunting and bringing the quarry to the Tiercel, who remained at home to feed and look after the young. This hitherto unrecorded trait in their domestic life should, as I said before, commend the bird to Suffragettes in search of a totem. Moreover, the Falcon, whether actuated by hatred of man or not, showed me her version of the hunger strike, a fearsome thing as watched by mere man with one eye on his own future, for in the avian version it is the husband and helpless young that do the starving. What makes me believe that what I saw is the natural habit of the Peregrine is that in this crisis the Tiercel, though evidently anxious to feed the young, never attempted to do any hunting himself, although there were plenty of birds about. It would have been interesting to have seen whether in the end hunger would have driven him to hunt, and having appeased it he would then have fed the young. But the spell of instinct remained unbroken, for at the last the Falcon arrived with a bird. That the Peregrine does not always kill in mid-air is shown by rats, barnyard chicken and nestling shags appearing on the bill of fare. That the Tiercel did leave the island at times was shown by the fact that, like the Falcon, he at some time of each day betrayed by his bedraggled plumage that he had been having a bath.

Having no exaggerated veneration for the printed word which I too often find is copied from one text-book to another in default of original observations, I always try, like a model jury, to purge my mind of preconceived ideas, and in the case of the Peregrines my only working hypothesis was that the Falcon is bigger than the