Note 506 — Chapter XXXIV · EYESS SAKER AND GAZELLE[491]

Only passage sakers are, in India, flown at hubara. They are usually flown out of the hood, but in districts full of ravines they are trained to “wait on.” The author, like most natives of India also, seems to think that hubara can be killed only on the ground. As already mentioned in the above note, to fly houbara successfully sakers must be in high condition, i.e., they must be kept well exercised and well fed, a simple fact that most Eastern falconers forget. I have seen Arab falconers stuffing their newly caught sakers with suet and skin. In Arabia Deserta by C. M. Doughty we read, “The Gate Arabs had robbed more than a dozen young falcons.... Their diet was small desert vermin, lizards, rats, insects ... on finding naught they maintain them with a little dough; in the nomad life they pluck for them those monstrous bluish blood-sucker ticks which cleave to the breasts of their camels.” The translator once gave a school-boy a trained lagaṛ: when pocket-money and meat failed, the boy fed it on boiled rice. Even after this treatment it flew and killed a wild raven.