People hunted with birds in Cyrus the Great’s time and place (6th cent BC, Mesopotamia).* Just another of many things I’ve learned recently while working on my next book. Trying to figure out what bird to give him, I spent the better part of Friday night learning what kinds might have been found in his area. 
I’ve narrowed my favorites to two: the Saker falcon, “a great favorite with falconers,” (pictured here) which can be almost pure white; or the golden eagle, a huge bird that mates for life and can be used in teams to hunt even large game, and there’s an Iranian subspecies of it. The eagle is more impressive in size, but I’m not sure that it’s as versatile as the Saker falcon. Oh, and the Greater Spotted eagle is pretty cool (loses its spots with age to become quite dark) but seems to need to go north of Cyrus’ Fars province to breed… hmmm, which could add an interesting element to the story. Anyway, I’d love to know which you think would be best, or if there’s another I should be considering!
* People routinely cite the image of a falconer and archer found on a bas relief in Sargon II’s Assyrian palace at Khorsabad (now in the Louvre) as the earliest representation of falconry; but some ancient literature suggests it goes back much further even than Sargon’s eight century BC. (See Dominique Collon’s “Hunting and Shooting” article in Anatolian Studies 33, pages 51-56).
