Prey with Me

Goshawks are among the most elusive of the tribe. They like to sequester themselves in old-growth pine forests, where their gorgeous plumage—gray lines rippling through a pure white breast—is reminiscent of snow falling on pine needles. Like snow, these birds are often deadly. Using field edges and hedgerows for cover, they can stoop at up to 40 mph to punch and tear the life out of rabbits, pheasants, even bigger birds like geese, as their full name, “goose-hawk,” suggests. In the Middle Ages, they were known as “the cook’s bird” because they were so efficient at supplying game for the dinner table. They are solitary by nature. To falconers, they have a reputation for extreme difficulty—for being moody, fierce, easily spooked, and easily lost. 

Helen Macdonald’s account of buying and training (“manning”) a goshawk in the wake of her father’s death offers a fascinating introduction to the art of falconry. At first, an untrained bird will “bate”—flap wildly in panic and attempt to get loose—whenever a new person approaches. Only by mastering stillness and the appearance of inattention, a kind of magical invisibility, will the falconer gradually become an accepted object in the bird’s landscape. Then the bird must learn to come and take food from the falconer’s gauntlet. On this association, between the glove and food, rests the invisible bond that will bring the bird back when it is being flown free. 

Birds of prey are like boxers and jockeys: Their weight is crucial. If Macdonald’s goshawk is too “high” (heavy) by even a few ounces, she will lack sufficient incentive to return accurately to the glove. If she is too “low” (light), she may be so frustrated with hunger that she swipes at her owner’s scalp with razor-sharp talons. Manning a goshawk, we learn as the narrative progresses, is a matter not only of science but also of developed intuition based on minute observation. 

As Macdonald tells us, “To train a hawk, you must watch it like a hawk, and so you come to understand its moods.” In the case of her hawk: 

Reading this book, we learn to see the countryside in the hyper-attentive present tense that Macdonald describes as the goshawk’s fighter-pilot worldview.

But Macdonald’s memoir is unusual. It is not merely a book about birds, history, and falconry. It is, foremost, a book about the experience of deep and prolonged grief: how it “bewilders” us and estranges us from human conversation, and how we channel our loss, often in ways we do not at the time recognize.

Macdonald’s father, a well-known photojournalist, died of a sudden heart attack at 67 while on an assignment. His death left Macdonald in crisis. Seeking solace, she embarks on a posthumous argument and a quest with deep roots in her childhood: She drives to Scotland to take possession of a young goshawk, whom she names Mabel (after the Latin amabilis, meaning “lovable”). There is a tradition among falconers that a bird named Attila will never catch any prey, whereas a hawk named Tiddles will be lethal. Macdonald is terrified that she will not be able to keep Mabel alive, let alone “man” her successfully. But her experience in training other birds proves equal to the task, and Mabel surprises everyone with her tractability, eventually becoming so relaxed that she plays with her owner, catching small balls of paper in midair and batting them back.

The argument that Macdonald conducts is with T. H. White, author of The Goshawk (1951) and, more famously, a number of fictions based on Arthurian legend, including The Once and Future King (1958), which inspired the musical Camelot. In The Goshawk, White recorded his epic struggle to tame a goshawk: a battle for mastery that involved keeping the hawk (and himself) awake for days at a time, alternately feeding it and depriving it of food. 

Eventually the bird escaped, never to return. White, confessing the novice mistakes he had made, described the bird, Gos, as his demon, as Caligula, Odin, Macbeth. Macdonald read The Goshawk repeatedly as a child and was determined to prove that a relationship based on love and kindness could succeed in manning a goshawk where White’s unhappy regime of mutual torture had failed. She is sensitive to White’s background—an abused childhood, disgust and despair at his homosexuality—and makes us feel for the unhappy schoolmaster who projected onto Gos his own desire for freedom.

Macdonald’s quest is more complex, but it also involves escape. In her first reaction to bereavement, she craves the unemotional concentration of the raptor: its splendid isolation, its professional partnership with death. Later, after her father’s memorial service—a moving turning-point in the narrative—she comes to realize that her obsessive hawking has been an attempt to bring her father back. 

Birds of prey are, in many mythologies, vectors between this world and the next. In Egypt, the falcon-headed Horus is a sky god and god of war whose eye is an amulet against harm. In Celtic folklore, Sir Orfeo loses his wife to fairyland for many years but is able to cross the barrier to find her again when he sees her with the fairy retinue hawking in the forest. Birds of prey, which drop fiercely from the sky like death itself, but which also can be persuaded to return to a lady’s hand of their own free will, can easily become ciphers for our need to master death, our longing to reach out to the beyond, where, in Macdonald’s childhood imagination, Gos was forever lost but not irrecoverable.

There are dark days in this story that all of us who have experienced bereavement will recognize. But the movement of the text is through struggle toward light. Macdonald realizes, in connecting with her hawk’s wild otherness, that she needs to seek human help and fellowship. When she finally lets go of Mabel to allow her the quiet, six-month molt that all hawks need to renew their feathers, she is, the story makes us understand, allowing the fierceness of her grief to be replaced by something calmer and more outward-looking.

As with all the best nature writers, Helen Macdonald is an exact and fastidious observer, whether she is describing her own dreams or a cloud formation. Her book is passionate in its attention to the detail of the seen universe, and many of her sentences produce a pleasure akin to that of poetry:

She observes, too, the behavior of others towards her when she is carrying Mabel, noticing that it is outsiders who approach her: an immigrant from Kazakhstan who misses the wild landscapes of home, a child. Ordinary British people will not break the polite barrier of normalcy to interact with an unexpected visitor. They resolutely behave as if they have not seen a strange woman and a strange, wild bird walking down a busy street. It is a powerful metaphor for how people often treat the grief-stricken. They see, but fear to acknowledge, the raptor in their midst.

My own expertise with birds extends only to watching them and cooking them. So, in order to have a practical opinion of Macdonald’s craft as an austringer (flier of hawks), I asked a professional falconer, Randal Carey, what he thought of her methods of manning Mabel.

“She did it right,” he said. “A lot of what she describes is exactly what I do without thinking.” But, I persisted, wasn’t it a little odd to keep a goshawk in your living room, watching TV, then have it chasing pheasants across rural Cambridgeshire? 

“No,” he explained. “Birds of prey, when they aren’t flying, just conserve energy. As long as they have food and shelter, they’re quite content. Mine watch TV, too,” he added, “especially if there’s anything that looks like hunting on.”

As if to prove his point, he brought a young Harris’s hawk into the lounge, where it proceeded to knock Christmas cards off the sideboard, put out the pilot-light in the gas heater, and steal food from the kitchen, rather like a boisterous puppy.

Randal told me how he had first become fascinated by falconry. He was 10 years old, a “South London streetraker” truanting from school. He took a train up to Windsor and was walking by the river there when he saw an aristocratic boy (a pupil at Eton) carrying a pet barn owl on his glove. The sense of awe never left him. 

Helen Macdonald is similarly skilled at evoking the relationship between bird-keeping and gender and social class in Britain. Falcons were traditionally regarded as the preserve of the nobility, partly because they require miles of open land on which to hunt: in effect, a country estate. Medieval hawk-handlers were yeomen, and their birds had lower status; this outdated hierarchy proved surprisingly durable. 

Goshawks, which need careful handling, were later tainted with the stigma of being fierce, foreign, and female. Macdonald notes that many male-owned hawks in the 1930s were called Jezebel, Swastika, or Salome. Their behavior was described as deliberately aggravating, sulky, perverse. 

“Oh my God, Mabel. You know what you are? .  .  . You’re a hormonal woman,” Macdonald wryly comments.

She also unpicks the myths that once associated falconry with the Übermensch and the kind of aggressive nationalism that made Hermann Göring a patron of the exclusive Nazi-era German Falkenorden (national falconers’ association). Now the demographic of those who keep birds of prey in Great Britain is much more diverse. There are bikers, teachers, former secret servicemen, and plenty of women. 

Macdonald herself is an offbeat character, a researcher in the history of science at Cambridge, with a no-nonsense approach to gutting a rabbit that is reminiscent of intrepid Victorian solo women travelers like Isabella Bird. By her own account, she is edgy, sometimes standoffish, a geek. But whether you like her or not, you believe her. There is a raw truthfulness to this memoir that catches at one’s throat like smoke and that brought tears to my eyes.

For, despite the ubiquity of the phrase, the death of a much-loved parent, spouse, or child is not something that one “comes to terms with.” It is utterly nonnegotiable. It is more like a meteorite that falls in the yard, taking a part of the house with it. Each day we see it there—shocking, alien, ugly—until eventually it is a familiar part of our landscape. But the impact never leaves us. 

This book is clear-eyed about death, admitting how far a great loss scatters the soul, and how longing for flight, the most potent of human desires, can be both an inspiration and a mirage.

Sara Lodge, a senior lecturer in English at the University of St Andrews, is the author of Thomas Hood and Nineteenth-Century Poetry: Work, Play, and Politics.