Hawks and Falcons

Overview

Hawks and falcons are the daytime hunters of the sky. Wild, they take mice, hares, and birds, and now and then a farmyard hen. Trained, they hunt for people: a lord's falcon is a mark of rank, and a hunter's hawk brings meat to the pot. They are watched for omens, and their shape is borrowed by mages who need to see from above.

Appearance

A hawk of the woods is the size of a crow but longer in the tail, with short rounded wings for twisting between trees, a grey or brown back, a pale breast barred across with dark lines, and fierce yellow or orange eyes. A falcon is built for open sky: long pointed wings, a compact body, a dark slate back, and a dark "moustache" mark under each eye. The female of each is larger than the male, by as much as a third.

A hawk flies low and fast, with flaps and glides, and ambushes from a perch. A falcon climbs high and stoops on its prey from above in a near-vertical dive, folded wings hissing, and strikes it dead in the air. Both scream a thin, high keening near the nest. A trained bird on the fist smells faintly of the raw meat it is fed, and its bells and jesses chime and creak at every move.

Habitat and Range

Hawks keep to woods and woodland edges, falcons to open farmland, heath, crags, and the towers of towns, where they nest on ledges as if on a cliff. Both are found through the Cradle web, falcons most where there is height to nest and open ground to hunt below it.

Behaviour and Temperament

Hawks and falcons are solitary hunters outside the breeding season, patient on a perch and explosive in the strike. They tolerate people only when raised to it. A trained bird is never tame: it works for food and returns to the fist because the fist feeds it, and a bird flown hungry too often, or not hungry enough, does not come back.

Abilities

Their eyes are the sharpest of any beast, seeing a mouse in the grass from high above. Latent Spur can draw out what is already latent in that sight, so a hunting hawk gains keener night sight for one pursuit; it cannot turn the bird into something it is not.

Life Cycle

A pair nests in spring, in a tree or on a ledge, and raises two to four young. Fledglings taken from the nest, or young birds trapped in their first autumn, are the ones trained. A wild hawk may live ten years; a well-kept trained one longer.

Uses and Dangers

Falconers fly hawks and falcons at game birds, hares, and rabbits, and lords keep mews of trained birds as they keep kennels and stables. Feathers fletch arrows, and a falcon given as a gift is a lordly gift. The birds take chickens and pigeons, so farmers net their yards.

Lore and Belief

A falcon stooping is held a good sign before a hunt or a journey, and a hawk on a roof-ridge a warning that something is watching the house. The legendary infiltrator of Many-Shaping, who flows from falcon to hound to noble in one pursuit, has made every unknown falcon over a lord's hall a little suspect.

These are not the Storm-Hawks, whose wings are lightning; those belong to the Storm Heart, a Resonant Zone.

Falcon-thieves are hanged in most lordships, and the theft of a great lord's white falcon has started more than one feud between houses.

Where It Appears

• Morphic Magic
• Nature Magic