I suspect the story of Puss has been somewhat embellished in the telling, and even Jon feels no particular desire to contradict it. Forest's falconry research does sound a bit casual by her own account, so I'm not surprised there are errors and implausibilities. But I think the pleasure of the hawking infodumping is the irrelevance, in some ways: when I was a child I devoured factual information for which there was no conceivable use, and the jargon was a very large part of the appeal.

I think when you reflect on Geoff and Jon's conversation in the light of the tensions that Geoff reveals after Jon's death it's really rather well done, actually: as well as giving us some more hawking information, it conveys the strain between them: they contradict and interrupt each other constantly, Jon makes that really rather bitchy remark about Geoff sloping off to fish (shades of Peter, shades of Ginty) when there was hawking work to be done, when in fact, as Geoff points out, it was that his uncle wouldn't let him near the hawks.