Falconry - Tumblr Posts

Birb.

Baby falcons are stupid cute. ❤️❤️❤️ I’m gonna miss this stage when he grows up.

*Amkit*

(*Eagle cry*) Maybe this can help with some supplemental hunting, just like the occasional sight in the steppes.

Wait for her to come!

This massive bird is a Stellars Sea eagle. They live in Alaska, Northwestern Canada, and Japan and are the largest eagles in the world. (Source)

the boy requests tidbits

he also sits on lap

he got smooched, and there is evidence

she flicked chicken juice on my face right after i took this

lanner falcons <3

Apologies about the Intense Birb Jumpscare!

Once again, I love the wildly different interpretations we got out of this prompt (I suppose 'white bird' with some royal connections gave us quite a few options :D)

Now, caladrius definitely rings a bell, but it wasn't at all what I thought it was going to be a gryfalcon...

It's the largest falcon species, of which one of the colour morphs is predominantly white, due to living in arctic tundra (I know that the bestiary authors specified it was completely white, but they also said that pelicans kill their chicks and bring them back to life, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ).

It also has a royal connection - as I mentioned in my post, the 15th Century Book of St Albans includes an essay about falconry, including a hierarchy of birds and the social classes that were permitted to fly them, and gyrfalcon is listed for Kings... The accuracy of this is, if we're honest, probably limited, particularly when you consider that the appropriate bird to be flown by a Baron is given as one of these...

(Okay, technically it says "Also ther is a Bastarde and that hauke is for a Baron", which could equally mean the somewhat more plausible 'Buzzard', but I know which is funnier ;) )

I also found out about the term 'Hierofalcon' today (a closely related subgenus of Falco which can often interbreed, includes Lanners, Sakers, and the Gyrfalcon), which sounds awesome :)

Oh, there she is again! 👀🦅

Bestiaryposting Results: Glugreng

My apologies for posting a bit later than usual -- I was on the road most of the day for eclipse-viewing purposes, so it's already nighttime as I start this. (Update: and also Firefox crashed multiple time over the process of writing this post.) Anyway, we've got another vaguely-described bird, but one that I think has some interesting details.

If anyone isn't sure what this post is about, you can find an explanation at https://maniculum.tumblr.com/bestiaryposting. If you want to see the entry from which the artists are working, here is the link:

And in general you can see all of this stuff as it posts at the tag "maniculum bestiaryposting", assuming Tumblr's search function wants to show it to you.

Art below the cut:

@silverhart-makes-art (link to post here) continues to post very impressively-rendered beasts. Here, since the only physical detail we have about this bird is "white", they've decided to take inspiration from the fact that it is kept by royal households. Medieval nobility did keep birds, usually for falconry, so here we have a raptorial design. And look, it's caught a fish! Good work, bird.

@pomrania (link to post here) observes that cataract-curing excrement is probably pretty valuable and worth collecting, so here we see a bowl with a dollar sign placed under the bird's perch. Honestly my favorite part of this is the very intense, extremely-close-up eye contact depicted in the middle there. Something about the bird needing (or just choosing) to get really up in one's personal space in order to do the curative "looking in the face" thing is charming to me.

@kaerran (link to post here) also went in the direction of "what kind of bird would be hanging around royal households" and landed on peafowl. There are a couple really clever design decisions here: it intentionally has very visible eyes so it's extra clear whether it's looking at you, and the "burning off the sickness" thing is represented as the feathers from its train being shed. (And thank you for including alt text.)

@sweetlyfez (link to post here) went in an interesting artistic direction, I think: since the entry was very clear that the Glugreng is "white all over", she rendered it entirely in thick white paint -- I think the texture is quite cool. Also I love the crown-collar-thing; SweetlyFez notes that she's only seen that in heraldry, and I think that is the only place it really appears. (I've seen at least one piece of marginalia that had an animal wearing a crown as a collar, but I'm like 80% sure that's someone's heraldic device being put in the illustrations for whatever reason.)

@cheapsweets (link to post here) jumpscared me a bit with this one. More very intense eye contact, but this time directed at the viewer. They also made the connection royalty -> falconry, and drew a bird of prey. For more details on their thought process, please see the linked post. I like the very intense eye contact conceptually, but also I keep scrolling down so it stops Looking At Me.

@coolest-capybara (link to post here) has again drawn something that makes me smile -- the art style is of course amazing, and the straight-on view of the pelican just looks so charmingly goofy. They note that pelicans have "so much convenient space to store all your pesky illnesses," and now all I can think of is a medical version of that "Put Baby In Pelican Mouth" post. (And thank you for including alt text.)

@strixcattus (link to post here) was inspired by the bestiary's decision to state that the bird is "white all over" and "has no black parts" in the same sentence. Weirdly specific, right? So they decided to explore in their post why this repetition might be necessary -- regular readers of these posts may recall that Strixcattus writes modern-naturalist-style reinterpretations of these animals. I'm not going to tell you what they came up with. Go read the linked post. Do it.

In fact, you should read all the linked posts, and consider following any or all of the wonderful artists who choose to participate in this weird little exercise.

All right, Aberdeen Bestiary time. A couple people said in their entry that they think they know what this one is, and I am excited to learn what their guesses were.

Now, since this artist tends to draw raptors in a very standardized way -- this just looks like their eagle but all white -- it's probably not possible to recognize the bird in question from this illustration. However, of course, there's a much larger problem in the way of recognizing this species:

This entry is the caladrius, which does not exist. It's another one of those mythical critters that didn't really catch on in the modern era -- or a strange misunderstanding of a real animal, like the salamander was, but honestly those aren't so much distinct categories as far as I'm concerned.

On the other hand, if you have similar Internet Experiences to me, you might have recognized it just now -- as soon as I saw the Aberdeen Bestiary illustration, I had a moment of "hang on, is that..."

The above is from the 2015 article "Two Medieval Monks Invent Bestiaries" on The Toast. You can check it out here:

(The author is now Daniel M. Lavery, but the byline on the linked article still says "Daniel Mallory Ortberg", probably because The Toast has been defunct for several years so nobody is updating these things.)

Anyway, the "bedbird" is indeed the caladrius. I was able to find the image from the Two Monks article by looking through the gallery attached to the "caladrius" entry on bestiary.ca (which has 94 examples, so it's clearly reasonably widespread). The bedbird comes from British Library MS Sloane 3544. And... I'm going to leave it up to y'all whether you think this should end with the "i've connected the two dots" gif or that quotation about the mystery no one thought was a mystery. It's late, goodnight.

I wanted to help people and animals. When I was very little I wanted to be a police officer (specifically forensics.. not that I knew what word was), or I wanted to be a vet, a paleontologist or an artist... Either way I wanted to work with animals and have a connection with them.. even at five I knew I couldn't make a living as an artist.

As an older kid I wanted to be a falconer. I wanted to work with Kārearea (NZ falcon), help with rehabilitation and breeding, and have a connection with my birds.. I wanted to live with ruru and kārearea and spend my life surrounded by birds of prey and baby chickens that were about to become raptor dinner... I wanted to move to the middle east learn ancient falconry techniques...but that won't happen now.. and my young self still cries for those dreams.

It’s amazing how they know to gut the food and feed the chicks the good parts.

If you wanted to hand-rear a kestrel (which I highly advise against it, even for experienced falconers, they’re extremely high maintenance and lil shits), you’d have to gut all their food for them, mince it up and then feed it to the chick. It’s not until later when you can actually start feeding them the fur and whole bones. This is because they will start to produce the pellet which contains all of the things they don’t need, which they regurgitate up. So this kestrel father is jumping quite a bit ahead.

Kestrel-dad not sure how to dad but he’s trying his best.