GREENLAND FALCON, Hierofalco candicans
A rare accidental visitor from the far north.
A fine specimen of this beautiful Falcon shot many years ago on Lord Cawdor’s estate may still be seen in the Gallery of British Birds, at the South Kensington Natural History Museum. In the Zoologist, for 1850, Mr. James Tracy, of Pembroke, gives the following particulars of its capture: “The specimen from which Mr. Yarrell made the drawing in his excellent work on British Birds was killed on a warren on the estate of the Earl of Cawdor, was set up by me, and afterwards given by the Earl to the Zoological Society. It had been observed by my father, his lordship’s keeper, for eight or ten days, and had, almost on each day, killed and partly devoured a cock Pheasant. It was very shy, always perched on the highest rocky eminences, and, therefore, difficult to get at; but was accidentally come on and shot in the act of rising from a cock Pheasant it had recently killed.”
Mathew M.A. 1894, Birds of Pembrokeshire and its Islands
More about the Gyr Falcon in Pembrokeshire
Gyr Falcon – 1994
Falco rusticolus – Hebog y Gogledd – Vagrant One was shot at Stackpole prior to 1894 and preserved in the British Museum (Mathew 1894). The Museum have it recorded as a white-phase male owned by Earl Cawdor and later purchased from the Zoological Society (P. Colston pers. comm.). An immature captured alive at Boncath in March […]
Greenland Falcon – 1949
Species account from the Birds of Pembrokeshire, 1949, by Lockley, Ingram and Salmon.
