I’d never believed in Baker’s falcons, because I’d met real ones before I’d ever read his book: cheerful, friendly falconer’s birds that preened on suburban lawns. But most of my bird-loving friends read Baker’s book before they ever saw a live one, and now they can’t see real peregrines without them conjuring distance, extinction and death. Wild things are made from human histories. When I was a child I hated what White had thought of his goshawk. But Gos’s hawkish ghost moved behind the patterned, living feathers of my own. And there were still darker ghosts behind him.
A few years ago I visited a friend who was at that time the president of the British Falconers’ Club. We chatted over tea and biscuits. We talked about the history of falconry for a while, and the history of the Club, and then he said, ‘Come and look at this.’ And he pulled open a cupboard, and there, right at the back, half-obscured by the usual household bits and bobs, I saw it.
‘Oh God,’ I said. ‘Gordon, is that it?’
He looked at me and nodded. ‘I hate it,’ he said. ‘I can’t bear to have it in the house.’
I crouched down and pulled it out. It was a bronze falcon standing on a vertical plinth, heavy, stylised, and slightly worn around its wings.
‘Shit, Gordon. This freaks me out,’ I said.
‘Me too,’ he replied.
The statuette was very valuable, and very beautifully made, but it was a thing that both of us wished had never been made at all.
In 1937 Gilbert Blaine and Jack Mavrogordato were invited to the International Hunting Exhibition in Germany. They travelled to Berlin with a display of British falconry: stuffed falcons on perches, falconry equipment, photographs, books and paintings. I suspect their last-minute attendance was partly diplomatic cover: travelling with them was Britain’s pro-appeasement Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, who’d been invited to the event for secret talks with Hitler.
There were no more than fifty falconers in the whole of Germany, but the symbolism of falconry was flourishing in the Reich. On the cover of the exhibition catalogue a stylised, naked übermensch held a golden hawk upon his fist. The national falconer’s association, the Deutscher Falkenorden, had been given state patronage, and a vast half-timbered State Falconry Centre, the Reichsfalkenhof, had recently been built in the forest at Riddagshausen. In Berlin Blaine and Mavrogordato walked through halls whose walls were hung thickly with thousands of antlers and draped in red banners sewn with swastikas. They admired the German hawks, falcons and eagles sitting on perches in the halls, but they were less impressed by the open-air falconry demonstrations. They watched a saker falcon catch a tethered pigeon, and an eagle thrown at a rabbit so tame it sat nibbling grass until the eagle landed.