You may recall that the previous raptor post drew heavily on pious English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins to relay the beauty and power of these birds. But there’s enough to be said about mankind’s fascination with raptors to fill a plethora of books — the ancient sport of falconry, for a start, is one of the oldest examples of partnership between man and beast, and has become deeply woven into our culture.

As kids, my sister and I were smitten by a book called My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George, in which a 12-year-old boy runs away from New York to live self-sufficiently in the Catskill Mountains. It was just the kind of tale we thrived on: like Robinson Crusoe or The Swiss Family Robinson, it evoked fantasies of living off the land, building a cosy shelter, maintaining a rugged self-sufficiency. And of course, the boy captures and trains a Peregrine Falcon, Frightful, to be his chum and hunt for him.

Another childhood eye-opener was A Kestrel for a Knave by Barry Hines, transposed to film as Kes by Ken Loach. It was a sad book, so no surprise Loach took to it. But it explains a lot about training and feeding a kestrel, which was easier to understand than the travails of impoverished late-60s Yorkshire.

A later discovery, The Goshawk by TH White, reveals a similar mass of detail as he tries to domesticate his bird — and almost comes to share its wild, predatory mentality. His detailed account of training the bird according to ancient falconry lore is riveting — especially the technique of denying the bird (and himself) sleep, which takes him close to madness. And you can find more falconry lore in his better-known Arthurian novel sequence, The Once and Future King. (After all, a merlin is a small raptor, right?)

Then there’s J.A. Baker’s masterpiece, The Peregrine, which follows a similar trajectory: obsessively tracking a pair of falcons as they hunt the Essex marshes, he comes to understand the birds’ stark life-or-death psyche. And along the way, his description of the birds’ prowess on the wing are stirringly intense.

“Bar-tailed godwits flying with curlew, with knot, with plover; seldom alone, seldom settling; snuffling eccentrics; long-nosed, loud-calling sea-rejoicers; their call a snorting, sneezing, mewing, spitting bark. Their thin upcurved bills turn, their heads turn, their shoulders and whole bodies turn, their wings waggle. They flourish their rococo flight above the surging water. Screaming gulls corkscrewing high under cloud. Islands blazing with birds. A peregrine rising and falling. Godwits ricocheting across water, tumbling, towering. A peregrine following, swooping, clutching. Godwit and peregrine darting, dodging; stitching land and water with flickering shuttle. Godwit climbing, dwindling, tiny, gone: peregrine diving, perching, panting, beaten.”

Perhaps one of the most intriguing aspects of reading these books is the realisation that language from the ancient sport of falconry pervades our entire lexicon. When Macbeth says, “Come seeling night, Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day”, he is referring the the practice of stitching the eyes of a falcon shut preparatory to training it — an effective metaphor for the darkness he wishes would obscure any pity he may feel as he plots the murder of Banquo.

Raptors’ phenomenal eyesight — they can spot a tiny mouse as they hover high over the earth — means their entire universe is constructed on the visual plane. This is why their eyes are seeled and why they are hooded (‘hoodwinked’) when not being flown — it incapacitates them. And why a sharp-sighted person is called ‘hawkeye’, no?

But falconry terminology is even more pervasive. Like when Macduff hears that Macbeth’s henchmen have murdered his wife and children, and likens them to a mother hen and her chicks carried off by a kite.

All my pretty ones?
Did you say all? O hell-kite! All?
What, all my pretty chickens and their dam
At one fell swoop? (4.3.256)

We still say “one fell swoop.” And we still say “haggard”, which began as a term for a bird caught as an adult and therefore harder to train. And “under my thumb” and “wrapped around your finger“, apart from making great song titles, come from the use of jesses or thongs which are wrapped around the birds’ feet to help control them. As does “end of my tether.”

Come to think of it, many of these surviving phrases refer to dominating the bird, bending it to our will — which is what you have to do if you are to establish that symbiotic relationship. But somehow through all this, it seems the birds’ wild spirit is never broken, just controlled.

W. B. Yeats depicts a breakdown of the ancient symbiotic bond between raptor and hunter to signify the disintegration of the established order in his poem The Second Coming:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold . . .

Finding these nuggets of falconry lore in our everyday lexicon is a reminder of a world long gone, when animals lived intimately with us and participated in our daily struggle to survive. But to the Kulin people of Victoria, Wedge-tailed Eagles were the reassuring presence of the creator, Bunjil, who, having made the world and everything in it, transformed into a Wedge-tail to watch over and protect his people. The pair that circle high above Gillamatong are the latest in an antediluvian lineage to whom the human-wrought changes happening below are meaningless.

While our language does a great job of keeping alive the idioms we derive from our interactions with raptors, seeing living exemplars every day, watching dispassionately over the land as they have done for so long, has me hoping fervently that they’ll be up there for millennia to come.