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clutch consists of three to five blotched, rusty brown eggs, which are incubated by the female for around a month. The young, or ‘eyasses’, hatch with a thin covering of grey or whitish down that is replaced by a thicker coat a week or so later. Feather growth is rapid, quills breaking through the down as young falcons exercise their wings and their hunting instincts. They are playful in the nest, grabbing sticks, stones and feathers in their feet, turning their heads upside down to watch buzzing flies and distant birds, pulling on the wings and tails of their irritated siblings. They take their first unsteady flights aged around 40 to 50 days, after which the parents teach them the rudiments of aerial hunting strategies by dropping dead or disabled prey from a height for the pursuing young to catch.
Young falcons begin killing their own prey and disperse from the territory after four to six weeks, after which their mor- tality is relatively high. Around 60 per cent of young falcons die in their first year, mainly from starvation. This fact is surprising to many commentators who see falcons as the most efficient predators alive. Surprises like this occur when biology doesn’t match mythology – that is, when real animals don’t match the ways humans perceive them. Bedouin falconers, for example, who only saw migrating falcons in the desert, never breeding pairs, quite reasonably mapped their own gender concepts onto the falcons they trapped: they assumed that the larger, more powerful birds were male and the smaller, female. But scientific understandings of falcons, too, can be strongly inflected or invisibly shaped by our own social preoccupations. And con- servation is riven by conflicts arising because animals possess

Fledgling, or eyass , peregrines, in a well-observed 1895 gouache by the Finnish artist Eero Nicolai Jarnefelt. The left- most bird is ‘mantling’ protec- tively over food; the other is calling with the typical hunched posture of a food-begging youngster.
different values for different cultures. Are falcons paradigms of wildness and freedom? vermin? sacred objects? a commercially valuable wildlife resource? or untouchable and charismatic icons of threatened nature? Investigating these different mean- ings has real-world implications. People conserve animals because they value them, and these valuations are tied to their own social and cultural worlds. The pictures and stories through which falcons are used to articulate and reinforce different cultural understandings of the world are myths , and they are the subject of the next chapter.
Mythical Falcons‌
Detective Tom Polhaus (picks up falcon statue): Heavy. What is it?
Sam Spade: The, uh, stuff that dreams are made of.
Polhaus: Huh?
(closing lines of The Maltese Falcon , 1941)
On a foggy November dawn in 1941, the feisty American bird- preservationist Rosalie Edge was woken by the frantic alarm-calls of city birds. She peered from her Manhattan window into Central Park. What had caused this commotion? Blinking back sleep, she realized that the stone falcon she could see carved from a rocky outcrop was no statue. It was alive. Suddenly, time stood still. She was transfixed. My soul, she wrote, ‘drank in the sight’ of this impossibly exotic visitor to the modern world. Was it, she breathed, the ghost of Hathor, wandered from the Metropolitan Museum and overtaken by sunrise? But no: ‘time resumed as the swift-winged falcon swept into the air . . . the enchantment was broken’. 1
Another ancient falcon worked its enchantments on Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet and audi- ences across America that year. The small black statuette of The Maltese Falcon casts its dark shadow across the screen at the very beginning of John Huston’s film noir , and the audience reads the barest bones of its history in scrolling text:
In 1539, the Knights Templar of Malta paid tribute to Charles v of Spain by sending him a Golden Falcon encrusted