Wildbuzz | A miserable hobby for kings
Falconers have differing views on raptors like the Eurasian hobby, admired in the wild but disappointing in training, while fish suffer from unintended captures in Sukhna Lake.
Not all raptors were preferred by falconers/austringers in the pursuit of the “sport of kings”, even if the bird were an exceptional hunter in its virginal, unmanned state. Shakespeare, who accurately reflected the melange of traits characterising aquiline-beak birds, despised kites, kestrels, buzzards and hen harriers. Kestrels, though long-winged, were dismissed as “cowards” by the bard!
Falconers of the sub-continent were, similarly, masters in the art of knowing a bird. Due to intimacy with the captured raptor, their novel insights into behaviour were not to be found in standard ornithological literature. A vivid contrast was discerned by falconers in the wild and tamed state of the Eurasian hobby, an uncommon winter migrant.
The hobby, also known as the “chhotti bhyri” due to its miniature semblance to the larger Peregrine falcon, is a “superb aerialist”. The wild hobby’s skills in catching swifts in the air and then devouring them up there, earns it the title of “swifter than the swifts”. However, when it came to falconry, the trained hobby was just not willing to seamlessly adapt to fulfil the falconer’s requirements. It thus fell far short of the expectations generated by its wild flamboyance. Well, “mera jism, meri marji”!
In his book, “Musings Of An Afghan Falconer”, Dehradun-based nobleman Sirdar M Osman wrote, “The hobby resembles the Merlin somewhat, but is larger, darker in colouring, and prettier in appearance. In a wild state, it kills larks and such-like small quarry, hunting well, like the Merlin, but it is evil-natured and cowardly. The female hobby can be trained, but with much trouble. You can, however, train one easily to fly in company with a Merlin, and make it kill by means of the Merlin’s assistance. More than this is not to be expected of the hobby.”
Or, the dismissive comment of the Raj falconer, CH Donald, who in 1920 snorted: “In spite of its extreme rapidity of flight, from a falconer’s point of view, the hobbies are disappointing as they lack the dash and daring of a Merlin.”
Mermaids caught in a bad dream
Far removed from eye and imagination, fishes and eels lurk under the placid waters of the Sukhna Lake. These mermaids of deep unknowns, never the muse of poets, and clouded by tonnes of monsoonal silt had never before felt such an impact. It wasn’t nets or fishing rods with hooks hunting for them. It was a huge weed-trawling machine, and fishes were wrenched in as an unintended collateral collection.
The helper-assistant to the helmsman of the “aquatic plant harvester”, a teenaged boy of poor means, takes home virtually every evening a bag of fish sifted from sliced stems/leaves. Other than just dumping it, there is little else he can do with the “accidental fish harvest” than take it home for a protein spike.
The harvester pulled in an Amazonian sailfin catfish. What was it doing here, so far removed from the Americas?
A dead carp, with eyes as concentric circles of colour and entangled in snake-like eels, stared back at those curiously peering into the helper’s white jute bag. The eels were a dirty-moss green and speckled, against the carp’s silvery scales. The seldom-seen, unfathomable eels curled around the carp like the dark side of brooding half-moons.
The carp’s hued eyes were beguiling in the white bag. Pained eyes, seeking an answer that would never come. The stilled iris and pupil could be a painter’s impression of a cosmic black hole ringed by tints of nebulae or an epitaphial evocation of Percy Shelley’s line, “a dome of many-coloured glass, stains the white radiance of eternity.”
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