Bird of the Month: Hobby

The Hobby

by john mcewen illustrated by carry akroyd

Britain has been the seasonal home of the hobby since time immemorial.

‘When things were looking bleak for the Western Powers in the last war, Field Marshal Alanbrooke took a short leave to this country. He did not attend conferences at the War Office or with the War Cabinet. He retired to a wood in southern England and watched and filmed a pair of nesting hobbies,’ wrote Henry Douglas-Home on the final page of his bird memoir, The Birdman.

Like the osprey, the hobby (Falco subbuteo) is a summer migrant, but can arrive as early as February and depart as late as November.

Hobbies breed from late May to July in southern England and across Europe, as far north as Finland and into Russia, before returning, like most of our summer migrants, to Africa, favouring the plains of East and South Africa. About 2,000 summer here.

The long – in flight, sickle-shaped – wings, especially of the tiercel (male), can make it look like a large swift. Songbirds, insects and beetles are its quarry; sometimes even swifts, swallows and martins – which, to take on the wing, demand exceptional speed and agility. The ornithologist James Fisher (1912-70) called the hobby ‘the finest interceptor of all British birds’.

It is often seen over water, a favourite hunting and drinking haunt for the insect-dependent swift and swallow tribes, and has a taste for dragonflies.

Carry Akroyd describes one hunting in Cambridgeshire: ‘On a really windy day, we were walking along a sunny drain side in the sheltered lee of the birch wood at Holme Fen. Obviously all the dragonflies were doing the same thing and a hobby was repeatedly going past us up and down over the drain, catching them.’

The name comes from the French verb hober, ‘to stir’, which is indeed what a hobby creates when hunting.

One of its names is ‘riphook’, as well as ‘hobby’ and ‘robin’, diminutives of Robert. When Thomas Helton translated Don Quixote (1620) he interpreted the Spanish for hobby, alcotán, as ‘robin ruddock’. Dulcinea in the novel leapt astride her mount as lightly as a hobby perches: ‘Then said Sancho: “By Saint Roque! Our mistress is as light as a robin ruddock and may teach the cunningest Cordovan or Mexicanian to ride on their jennets.”’

Peter Adolph (1916-1994), inventor of the flick-and-kick table-top football game, Subbuteo, first wanted to call it The Hobby after the bird but, when Waddingtons refused, they settled for its species epithet, ‘subbuteo’.

In his foreword to the first volume of David Bannerman’s The Birds of the British Isles, Alanbrooke wrote, ‘I sometimes doubt whether I should have retained my sanity … had I not had an interest capable of temporarily absorbing my thoughts, and of obliterating the war.’

It was a revelation when he read Viscount Grey’s Fallodon Papers with regard to the First World War, that ‘the continuance of the beauty of Nature was a manifestation of something great and splendid which not all the crimes and follies and misfortunes of mankind can abolish or destroy’.