A brief history of falconry.

There is no clear path showing where exactly falconry began. The oldest recordings come from China, Japan, and the Arabic countries, but those places do not necessarily indicate the beginning, only where writing and painting were made. Aelian's _De Natura Animalium_ states that falconry was practiced in central Asia as early as 400 B.C. [1] I would guess from there it spread outward to Japan and India, came west to Turkey and then into southern Europe and northward to the British Isles.

Naturally, it began as a method of putting meat on the table when bows and arrows were not so reliable as a raptor for taking birds, and before the accuracy and power of guns made everything easy. The Mongols hunted (and still do) wolves for fur and self-protection, but just about everyone else went after mostly birds and rabbits. One of the old French names for 'goshawk' is "cuisinier."

The Middle Ages is the era, and western Europe and England the places, that popularly come to mind when thinking of falconry, with its rules about the eagle for the emperor, the merlin for the lady and the kestrel for the holy-water clerk and whatnot. Falcon trapping was an industry, a seasonal employment for northern Europeans, from the middle ages onward. After firepower turned falconry into a hobby, it became fashionable; revolution abolished the old rules and everyone could have a raptor, so much so that churches were forced to make rules about leaving the hawks at home if you wanted to attend services. A great wealth of books were written (and survive, thanks to the printing press) in the 16th and early 17th century.

Falconry began to lag in popularity and probably reached its low point in the early 20th century, where it was practiced by a relative handful in each country. Other developments -- cars, World War I and the Great Depression -- were more interesting, or at least more involving. It began to revive somewhere between England's thirties with a dedicated set of longwingers, and America's sixties, where odd lots looked into the past for a symbol of the nobility Americans could never possess.

This revival has brought to falconers giant hoods, bungee leashes, Dremel tools, Alymeri jesses, Coroplast Coulsen boxes, ferrets, nearly real lures, Layman exercises, radio telemetry and GPSs, balloons and kites, Gore-Tex hood braces, and squirrel chaps. The era brought DDT and falconers invented captive breeding to answer it. The Vietnam war unwittingly created one of the most remarkable inventions so well-loved by, and so essential to, modern falconers: the ziplock bag. But the greatest advance of all is in medicine and all it offers to raptors, whether it be setting a broken leg, artificial insemination, or inoculating against West Nile Virus.

Yet all the basics -- jesses and leashes, hoods, bath pans, block perches and bow perches, lures and whistles -- are essentially still the same. The methods of training are by and large the same. This is predictable, for raptors are still the same. I think, however, that on the whole falconers understand the psychology of raptors better than ever, and some talented people have been able to take advantage of that understanding and develop new methods of training.

[1] Wood, C. and Fyfe, F.M. _The Art of Falconry by Frederick II of Hohenstaufen_, Stanford University Press 1961, p. 561.