Shaheen is a naturalist's account of an association between the author Paul H. Jones and a saker falcon in the wilds of Turkey during the early nineteen seventies, before the scourge of DDT affected many species of falcons throughout the world. The author/illustrator gives us an inside view of falconry and all its trappings, little changed since the Middle Ages. In this account, taken from his own diaries, he describes with considerable skill his efforts to hunt game in scattered locations throughout Turkey, in its dry zones, its mountains and its frozen wastes. There were many losses of Shaheen during the hunt. One example. Peter and I walked back into the village with the hooded falcon on my arm. The crowd below in the square, seeing the bird again, shouted with excitement and delight. It was time to celebrate; the impossible had happened, the lost had been found. Winter was over, spring blossomed in the trees; these strange tourists proved it. Children skipped in the street, men smiled under their caps, and women giggled shyly. In the end, in striving to find a mate for his tiercel, Jones loses the newly caught falcon and releases Shaheen which has been his hunting companion for a year and a half.
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The Falconer Journal
2008, pg 112
Review by John Loft
University of Nottingham-School of Geography
In the hardback book of 158 pages, the Canadian author gives us an autobiographical account of the four years ('67-71') he spent in Ankara, Turkey, Working for the U.N., in which time he took a sakret from a rock eyrie and kept it through one moult until his leaving the country forced him to whistle it down the wind. The title indicates that the record of events is based on a diary, as it was bound to be after an interval of nearly forty years. The narrative moves through a series of episodes, exciting, amusing, informative, or even rather dull, but allrelated with relish. Jones must have recorded every last detail of his dealings with the sakret or else have an astonishing memory but, either way, he is able to rediscover his own past in a convincing way that enables anly interested reader to share in some measure the experience of the iunfamiliar world. Turkey's people, landscapes, customs, history, and way of life are sketched in as a necessary background to the sakret's brief story. It would be a sad book without it. (A map showing all the places with strange names that he visited would have been a help, though). Happily, he holds my interest. It is not a book that is easy to put down.
The two dozen or so pen-and-ink illustrations, not all of birds, were drawn by the author. He seems to be a competent draughtsman and the best of his sketches deftly catch a falcon's looks and poses but the worst of them should have been left out.
I ought to explain at the early stage that shaheen is the Turkish word for falcon so that the reader will understand the strange choice of title for a book about a sakret, and after that I must let any falconer reader know that the sakret was the author's one-and-only hawk ever, apart from an eyass saker that was lost after a month when she broke free, having been put to weather, unmanned, on a creance that gave her fifteen yards to move in. You're quite right: it's a chapter of mistakes as well as accidents.
The eyass, fresh from the eyrie, was at first kept loose on an adequate aviary and gradually persuaded a step to the fist for food, at which stage Jones took his annual holiday. On his return, equipped now with a hood and some information, he continued with his unorthodox system of training, which I shall not particularize but skip at once to the time when, by generally doing the opposite of what the books advised, he arrived at the stage of calling it to the lure. It just shows what imagination, application, and patience can do. For its first free flight it was thrown off impulsively at a flock of linnets passing twenty yards upwind. The sakret disappeared over the brow five hundred yards away downwind. After the panic it returned from 2,000 feet.
The story thereafter records many similar occasions when the hawk was thrown off at a venture or allowed to take off in its own time. The author deserves all credit for persistently trying to find quarry and catch it. The amazing thing is that, being loosed so often and allowed so much aimless liberty, the sakret was recovered, again and again, sometimes at considerable distance from the point of loss. It was out for a total of 35 nights in one season, and not always in the same area. Jones believed that it was killing for itself. Strangely, he never tells us how, or if, he controlled the amounts of meat he fed it. If you would like to ponder the reasons for the boomerang qualities of the eyass of the saker species, read the book.
The very first sentence will rock you back: Not much is known of the saker falcon and little has been written about its usefulness for falconry. What? But pause a moment. In the 1960's that was a fair comment. Yet in ignoring the passage of time lies the chief defect of the book. Then, there was room for a book that introduced falconry to a public that was mostly ignorant about it, but there isn't now. Then, Jones could justifiably have been pleased with, even proud of, his achievement, but now he should have learnt what can be done and how it should be done, so that the only way now open to him was to write apologetically (but the only mistake he admits is the one he made in losing the saker) or to emphasize that he is writing about times past and how different they were. |
