Gould was anxious to illustrate examples of Wolf's magnificent Birds of Prey in The Birds of Asia and hoped to include Eleanora's Falcon which was named and described in 1839. However, he was not aware of the exact distribution of this falcon which is now known to belong mainly to the Mediterranean countries and islands of north-west Africa. As Gould did not publish any works on Africa's birds and it was not appropriate for The Birds of Great Britain or The Birds of Asia he was unable to include Eleanora's Falcon in these publications. Gould's earlier The Birds of Europe would have provided a suitable location but it was published in 1832-1837, before Eleanora's Falcon was known.
Wolf's watercolour depicts the falcon, with its characteristically very long wings, in a dark phase of plumage.
The species was named by an Italian zoologist, Giuseppe Gené, after the mediaeval princess, Eleonora of Arborea (fl.1386-1403), a national heroine of Sardinia. She was famed for the establishment of a code of laws, including the protection of hawks and falcons by prohibiting the taking of young from the nest.
A pair of Eleanora's Falcons are illustrated by Wolf in The Ibis, 1869, pl.XVI, and reproduced in A.H. Palmer's Life of Joseph Wolf, 1895.
DISTRIBUTION: Southwestern Palearctic: Canary Islands, small islands along the coast of northwestern Africa, and small islands in the Mediterranean Sea east to Crete, Cyprus and Cyclades. Winters south to Tanzania and Madagascar