"Mercedes Lackey - Flights of Fantasy" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lackey Mercedes)

can literally be found anywhereтАФ prey, for the most part, on insects, mice,
and sparrows for the former, and field rats, squirrels,
and rabbits for the latter. Redtails rarely bother with flying preyтАФthey are
built to hunt things that run. As such, they do farmers more service than
disservice.
Fascination with birds of prey seems to have been with us for as long as we've
walked upright. A recent T-shirt called "Evolution of a Falconer" suggests
that the hawk may have been adopted by early man almost as soon as the dog.
Certainly there is some justification for saying that there have been
falconers as long as there has been the written word. Falconers appear in
ancient Persian and Indian miniatures, on the walls of Egyptian tombs, and in
medieval manuscripts. There are falconers in every part of the world today,
even in places where laws make it incredibly difficult. There are falconers in
Japan, where ancient tradition favors the goshawk, and forbids commoners to
touch the bird with their bare hands. There are falconers in Mongolia, who
carry on their traditions of hunting wolves with golden eagles. There are
falconers in Af-rica, in South America, and in virtually every European
country. The tradition of falconry goes back so far in Saudi Arabia that the
Saudis cannot even recall its beginnings. And needless to say, there are
falconers spread all over North America.
There is, in fact, a falconer joke which tran-scends all boundaries and sends
falconers of every nation into snickers. "How can you tell a man who flies a
falcon? By the scratches on his
wrist where the bird decided to take a walk." (Falcons are smaller, by and
large, than hawks, and those who fly falcons use short gloves to protect their
hands from the talons.) "How can you tell a man who flies a hawk? By the
suntan that stops at his elbow." (Hawks tend to be larger, heavier, and grip
far more tightly with their feet; only a fool flies a hawk without a long
glove.) "How can you tell a man who flies an eagle? By the eyepatch."
(Self-explanatory.)
Kings and emperors have written volumes on falconry; hawks and falcons figure
prominently in myth. The Romans seem to have been of two minds about eagles;
they topped the standards of their legions with them, and identified those
standards with the great birds so closely that the standards themselves were
referred to as "The Eagles." On the other hand, it is from the Romans that we
get the myth of eagles carrying off babies. Zeus and Jupiter were both
identified with the eagle. The Arab world gave us the roc, a bird of prey so
large it carried off elephants.
As for history, New Zealand was once home to a flightless bird of prey called
the moa that stood over eight feet tall! But more impressive yet, at one point
in prehistory, South America bred flighted raptors the size of small
airplanes, which certainly were capable of carrying off, not just babies, but
full-grown adult humans! Could these birdsтАФor the dim memory of themтАФhave
given rise to the Native American tales of the Thunderbird? Certainly they
would have been
the only birds strong enough to dare the deadly air-currents of tornadic
supercell-storms, so that their appearance in the sky would have been heralded
by the flash of lightning and the roar of thunder.
ButтАФthis anthology is not about real birds of prey. This is about the
intersection of fantasy and reality, where raptors and other meat-eating birds