Early Falconry Art in Portugal

I saw an interesting Roman mosaic last week at an archaeological site in southern Portugal. It depicts a falconer on horseback carrying a raptor on his gauntleted fist. It's difficult to determine the exact species, but the bird's long, barred tail suggests that it might be a Eurasian Sparrowhawk or perhaps a Goshawk. The tail is far too long for a falcon. There's also another bird flying above him. As far as I know, no evidence exists that the Romans ever practiced falconry—although Pliny the Elder once wrote about seeing people in Thrace (what is now Bulgaria) flushing birds for their trained hawks to catch. The mosaic dates from the 5th or 6th century A.D. and is inset in the floor along with several other mosaic illustrations in an area where people would walk to a baptismal font. (This is an early Christian site.) Later, when the Moors conquered the Iberian Peninsula, they built a village over the site. These mosaics had been buried for centuries. 

I also saw a falconry-related ceramic bowl in a small museum of Islamic art in Mertola, Portugal. It depicts a raptor grabbing the head of a gazelle as a dog attacks its body. Arab falconers used to train Saker falcons to chase gazelles, striking them repeatedly in the head, slowing them enough so their salukis could catch them. This piece is probably at least 1,000 years old.

On the death of my friend and mentor, Jack Hagan

In Memoriam

John W. Hagan

(1930 – 2013)

I just heard that my old friend Jack Hagan passed away earlier this week, on Monday, August 19. I first met Jack at a meeting of a newly formed club, the Santa Ana Valley Falconers’ Association, when I was in my early teens, and he became a great mentor to me in falconry as well as in wildlife photography. The club met weekly at Jack’s home in Santa Ana, California, and later at Jeff Sipple’s house in Cypress. Recently divorced, Jack was a professional photographer and also a collector of various reptiles and amphibians (which might explain the divorce). I remember he kept live rattlesnakes in aquariums in his garage and rare turtles in his bathtub. His house was often sweltering inside, to accommodate the tropical turtles.

Jack took some amazing photographs in the late 1940s of a Peregrine Falcon nest in Laguna Canyon. When he came back from the Korean War, though, the nest was empty, and the peregrines never nested there again. This was but one of the California peregrine nests he knew off that had been abandoned during the DDT era.

Jack was in his mid-thirties when the club formed, with thinning dark-brown hair and a pipe he puffed on constantly. He had the most calm, unflappable nature of anyone I’ve ever met. The younger guys in the club called him the “Old Man,” which always made him smile. He had certain catch phrases he would use in conversation. If you asked him a complex question, he would puff thoughtfully on his pipe and say, “This I do not know,” but would then go on to expound in great detail his theory on the topic at hand. He drove a classic Mercedez 300 SL sports car with gull-wing doors and usually flew goshawks.

Jack had an extensive collection of old falconry books, as well as some beautiful framed 19th-century falconry prints on the walls of his house. He told me I was welcome to come over anytime and read his books, which I often did.

Jack would later become the first president of the California Hawking Club, which, in some ways, sprang from the ashes of the Santa Ana Valley group, using the same logo, which artist Jeff Sipple designed.

The last time I saw Jack was in 2001 at the 30th annual field meet of the California Hawking Club, which was held that year in Bakersfield. I had moved to Upstate New York about a decade earlier and didn’t get to California much anymore. We—and several other charter members of the club, such as Jeff Sipple, Bob Winslow, and Mike Arnold—came to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the club’s founding. 

It was great to see Jack. He hadn’t changed much. His hair had gone gray, and somewhere along the way he had given up the pipe, but he was the same affable, good-natured Jack. I will truly miss him.