Gyrfalcon - Interaction With Humans

Interaction With Humans

The Gyrfalcon has long associated with humans, who have found them useful primarily for hunting and the art of falconry. It is today the official bird of Canada's Northwest Territories. The white falcon in the crest of the Icelandic Republic's coat of arms is a variety of Gyrfalcon.

In the medieval era, the Gyrfalcon was considered a royal bird. The geographer and historian Ibn Said al-Maghribi (d. 1286) described certain northern Atlantic islands west of Ireland where these falcons would be brought from, and how the Egyptian Sultan paid 1,000 dinars for each Gyrfalcon (or, if it arrived dead, 500 dinars). Due to its rarity and the difficulties involved in obtaining it, in European falconry the Gyrfalcon was reserved for kings and nobles; very rarely was a man of lesser rank seen with a Gyrfalcon on his fist.

In the 12th century AD China, swan-hunting with Gyrfalcons (海东青 hǎidōngqīng in Chinese) obtained from the Jurchen tribes became fashionable among the Khitan nobility. When demand for Gyrfalcons exceeded supply, the Liao Emperor imposed a tax payment-in-kind of Gyrfalcons on the Jurchen; under the last Liao emperor, tax collectors were entitled to use force to procure sufficient Gyrfalcons. This was one cause of the Jurchen rebellion, whose leader Wányán Āgǔdǎ annihilated the Liao empire in 1125, and established the Jīn Dynasty in its stead.

Gyrfalcons are today expensive to buy, and thus owners and breeders may keep them secret to avoid theft. They can and often do fly long distances, and falconers may fit a radio-tracker to aid recovery. Wild Gyrfalcons are not much exposed to disease, and as a result have immune systems that are naive to many avian pathogens found around human environments. As a result, many Gyrfalcons taken from the wild quickly die of disease.

Falcons are known to be very susceptible to avian influenza. Therefore an experiment was done with hybrid gyr-saker falcons, which found that 5 falcons vaccinated with a commercial H5N2 influenza vaccine survived infection with a highly pathogenic H5N1 strain, whereas 5 unvaccinated falcons died. Since both wild and captive gyrfalcons are valuable (for wildlife conservation and falconry, respectively), this means they can be protected from bird flu by vaccination.