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In the late 19th century, Westerners were delighted with the great variety of birds that thrived in Korea. Chief amongst them was the pheasant. Isabella Bird Bishop declared, “Pheasants are literally without number and are very tame; I constantly saw them feeding among the crops within a few yards of the peasants at their work.” According to William E. Griffis, “The skilled fowler understands perfectly how to imitate the cries of various birds, particularly that of the pheasant calling his mate. By this means most of the female pheasants are captured.”
In the 1880s, Griffis insisted that Korean bird-hunters never shot “on the wing” but instead ambushed the birds when they landed. To the Westerner, who only hunted with guns and dogs, this seemed strange. In 1921, an early American gold miner in northern Korea suggested that the reason Koreans did not hunt with guns was because the Japanese forbid them to own firearms. He wrote:
“The Koreans are not allowed any firearms, so do not do much hunting except a little with hawks. They catch hawks and starve them and then liberate them to catch pheasants and other birds. When the hawk catches the bird the hunter steps in and takes the bird away from the hawk. It sounds odd but you would be surprised how many they catch.”
But how accurate were these observation? Falconry has a long history in Korea as evidenced by a painting in a Goguryeo (37 B.C.-668 A.D.) tomb. Despite the Confucian belief that hunting was a trivial pursuit of men without virtue, many noblemen were quite fond of this form of entertainment ― including members of the royal family. Apparently Mt. Eungbon (said to resemble a falcon) was a favored spot for royal hunters.
In the 1930s, hunting for pheasants with falcons could only legally be done from the first of November to the first of April. One Korean hunter boasted to Sten Bergman, a Swedish zoologist, that in one season, with just one hawk, he managed to bag 300 pheasants. Perhaps not as impressive as the hunter who claimed “he sometimes got between twenty and thirty pheasants a day but had to walk or run 100 li (approximately 55 kilometers) to do it.”
Obtaining and training falcons was no easy matter. According to Bishop:
“To obtain them three small birds are placed in a cylinder of loosely woven bamboo, mounted horizontally on a pole. On the peregrine alighting on this, a man who has been concealed throws a net over the whole. The bird is kept in a tight sleeve for three days. Then he is daily liberated in a room, and trained to follow a piece of meat pulled over the floor by a string. At the end of a week he is taken out on his master’s wrist, and slipped when game is seen. He is not trained to return. The master rushes upon him and secures him before he has time to devour the bird.”
It was extremely important to get the falcon before it ate too much. Once full, the falcon would no longer hunt.
Once trained, these birds were very expensive. Bishop claimed that they brought as much as 9 dollars a bird a princely sum considering that servants could be hired for a couple of dollars each month.
Of course, such valuable and noble birds attracted less than honorable attention. According to professor Chun Myung-sun, the Korean idiom “shi ch’i mi tte da” meaning “to feign ignorance” has its origin in the theft of falcons. The falcons were marked with tags on their tails indicating their ownership, but occasionally, unscrupulous people removed them and then claimed the birds as their own.
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