‘I can fly the pants off any songbird’: my week as an Eleonora’s falcon

Simon Barnes

‘I can fly the pants off any songbird’: my week as an Eleonora’s falcon

Each week, Simon Barnes hears what the past seven days have been like for a member of the animal kingdom

You’ll have seen a falcon before, I’m sure. A lone kestrel hovering beside the motorway. A lone peregrine on the Tate Modern building. Maybe even a lone hobby dropping like the wrath of God on an unseeing swallow. But if you want to see falcons in numbers, come to Mogador. Not lone at all. A good 2,000 of us.

Monday

Mogador is little chunk of rock about a mile off Essaouira on the Atlantic coast of Morocco and right now every decent ledge has its falcon. Including me, along with my mate; he’s about two-thirds my size so guess who makes the big decisions. Plus our two chicks. An awful lot of falcons.

Tuesday

Now I know what you’re thinking. How can the country round here support enough life to feed a ferocity of falcons? The answer is that it can’t. I spent some time today cruising on the mainland, catching and eating dragonflies on the wing. Kept me going but we need more. Much more. And where’s it going to come from? The sky?

Wednesday

Yes it is. That’s why we Eleonora’s falcons nest here, that’s why we nest right now, later than any other bird in the northern Palaearctic, and that’s why we nest together. Because every now and then food appears in the sky and does so in vast quantities. It’s called migration.

‘This is the time of the great autumn migrations. It’s a buffet supper with wings’

Thursday

A great flock of them today. Huzzah! Songbirds, flying south to their wintering grounds in Africa, songbirds braving exhaustion, cold, wind, shortage of food – and us. Up into the flock and catch, back again for more. I can fly the pants off any songbird that ever fledged. A bonanza day. This is the time of the great autumn migrations, numbers swollen by all those birds that hatched and fledged this year. It’s a buffet supper with wings: more than enough for 2,000, not just for today but for days after.

Friday

No flock today but I fed the chicks on fresh songbird all the same. I caught this one the day before. I didn’t kill him because I want my chicks to have fresh meat, nothing but the best. So I removed the flight feathers from both wings and the tail and trapped the helpless little thing in a crevice of rock. A larder with a living meal. And he went down a treat.

Saturday

It’s getting towards the end of the season and I’m beginning to think about the return journey to Madagascar. Can’t stay here all year: when the migration’s over there’s nothing to eat. So soon we’ll head back south, and we’ll bump into other Eleonora’s falcons who nest in other colonies all round the Med: anywhere you can find migrating songbirds in numbers. But you’ll be wanting to know about Eleonora. She was Queen of Arborea, on Sardinia, and in 1392 she passed a law protecting the nests of all birds of prey. Quite a lady. But then so am I.

Eleonora’s falcon CV

Lifespan Up to 20 years

Eating habits Dragonflies, songbirds

Hobbies Aerobatics, nutrition

Sexual preferences A small neat male