RAPUNZEL had it easy. On the barren Moroccan island of Mogador, falcons seem to imprison small birds by plucking out their feathers, or stuffing them in crevasses, so they can eat them later.

Eleonora’s falcons hunt larks, warblers, hoopoes and other birds migrating south. But not all caught prey have quick deaths.

In a census of the island’s falcons in 2014, Abdeljebbar Qninba of Mohammed V University in Rabat, Morocco, and his colleagues saw small birds missing their flight and tail feathers, trapped in deep cavities. Other birds were “jammed into a deep and very cramped hole… unable to move their wings or operate their dangling legs”, they wrote in the French journal Alauda.

Crippling and imprisoning prey might be a means of keeping fresh food nearby, so parents can stay on the nest or to give hungry offspring something to snack on.


But Rob Simmons of the University of Cape Town in South Africa suggests another explanation: “The birds’ prey may be simply escaping and finding refuge in holes in the cliffs the falcons nest in.”

(Image: Abdeljebbar Qninba)

This article appeared in print under the headline “Falcons imprison birds to eat later”