H is for Hawk

by Helen Macdonald

To see goshawks.

Here’s the sparrowhawk. It’s grey, with a black and white barred front, yellow eyes and a long tail.

the goshawk. This one is also grey, with a black and white barred front, yellow eyes and a long tail.

Sparrowhawk: twelve to sixteen inches long. Goshawk: nineteen to...

Today their descendants number around four hundred and fifty pairs.

Goshawks in the air are a complicated grey

colour. Not slate grey, nor pigeon grey. But a kind of raincloud grey,

Here’s a word. Bereavement. Or, Bereaved. Bereft. It’s from the Old English bereafian, meaning ‘to deprive of, take away, seize, rob’. Robbed. Seized. It happens to everyone. But you feel it alone.

raptor, meaning ‘bird of prey’.

raptor, meaning ‘robber,’ from rapere, meaning ‘seize’.

Someone had picked her up, unconscious, put her in a cardboard box and brought her to us. Was anything broken? Was she damaged? We congregated in a darkened room with the box on the table and the boss reached her gloved left hand inside. A short scuffle, and then out into the gloom, her grey crest raised and her barred chest feathers puffed up into a meringue of aggression and fear, came a huge old female goshawk. Old because her feet were gnarled and dusty, her eyes a deep, fiery orange, and she was beautiful. Beautiful like a granite cliff or a thunder-cloud. She completely filled the room. She had a massive back of sun-bleached grey feathers, was as muscled as a pit bull, and intimidating as hell, even to staff who spent their days tending eagles.

Then, right then, it occurred to me that this goshawk was bigger than me and more important. And much, much older: a dinosaur pulled from the Forest of Dean.

their breathtaking stoops from a thousand feet, wind tearing through their wings with the sound of ripping canvas.

but his battle against boredom. The nine-hour solo missions. The twelve-hour solo missions. ‘Wasn’t that horrendous?’ I asked. ‘It could get a little lonely up there,’ he replied.

I knew that part of why I was cross was that I felt, for the first time, that my urge to train a hawk was for reasons that weren’t entirely my own. Partly they were his.

that my father and mother were to be found wrestling with a pistol, one on either side of my cot, each claiming that he or she was going to shoot the other and himself or herself, but in any case beginning with me.’ And then: ‘It was not a safe kind of childhood.’

Jesses are the soft leather straps that fit through the leather anklets on a trained hawk’s legs. Singular, jess.

Male hawks are a third smaller than the female so they are called tiercels, from the Latin tertius, for third. Young birds are eyasses, older birds passagers, adult-trapped birds haggards. Half-trained hawks fly on a long line called a creance. Hawks don’t wipe their beaks, they freak. When they defecate they mute. When they shake themselves they rouse

Breeding goshawks isn’t for the faint-hearted.

Try it, and you discover there’s a very fine line between goshawk sexual excitement and terrible, mortal violence. You have to watch your hawks constantly, monitor their behaviour, ready yourself for intervention

More often than not the female will kill her mate.

And then the female arrives. She’s huge. She lands on the edge of the nest and it shakes. Her gnarly feet make the male’s look tiny. She is like an ocean liner. A Cunard goshawk.

There was a short window of time, he found, in which the isolated chicks needed to hear the elaborate trills of adult song, and if that window was missed, they could never quite manage to produce it themselves.

The old falconers called the manning of a hawk like this watching

Patience is my only weapon. Patience. Derived from patior. Meaning to suffer

the patterns on her plumage will hide her in perfect, camouflaging drifts of light and shade. The tiny, hair-like feathers between her beak and eye – crines – are for catching blood so that it will dry, and flake, and fall away, and the frowning eyebrows that lend her face its hollow rapacious intensity are bony projections to protect her eyes when crashing into undergrowth after prey.

Feathers held tight to the body mean I am afraid. Held loosely they mean I am at ease.

Call a hawk Tiddles and it will be a formidable hunter; call it Spitfire or Slayer and it will probably refuse to fly at all.

Burqa, the word in Arabic. Hood.

Bird hawk.’

By this he means my goshawk might be better suited to fly at pheasants and partridges than rabbits or hares.

Carriage is what falconers call walking with a hawk to tame it,

Kazakh falconers, berkutchi, who fly golden eagles from horseback as they have done for thousands of

years. He has never seen the eagles, he says, because he lives in a city.

There are no breeds or varieties, because hawks were never domesticated. The birds we fly today are identical to those of five thousand years ago.

Perhaps runners are like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park,’ I tell her. ‘They can’t see things that aren’t moving.’

You won’t read the words ‘flying weight’ in antiquarian falconry books because the old falconers didn’t use scales. They assessed the condition of their hawks by feeling their muscles and breastbones and observing their behaviour with sharp and experienced eyes.

I would not train a hawk without a set of scales. When I used to fly merlins, tiny falcons with needle talons and frames so voracious and delicate they resemble heated Meissen porcelain, I weighed them three times a day.

Bells were traditionally attached to hawks’ legs on tiny leather straps called bewits, but a tail-mounted bell is much better for a goshawk,

they have an invariable habit of shaking their tails when they land.

White’s hawks in the wood weren’t sparrowhawks. They were hobbies: tiny dark-hooded migratory falcons with rust-red trousers and thin white brows. Fantastically rare in the 1930s, they are much commoner today.

Gos bates from him, first upwards to the rafters, then straight out of the open door. When White leaves the barn, the paintpot in his hand, he looks for Gos sitting on his perch. But the perch is empty. Gos is not there. His hawk is gone. Gos has gone and the frayed end of the twine lies snapped upon the ground.

I looked up at the top of my old bookshelves. There, dusty and unread for years, were all the animal books of my childhood. I’d loved these books. They were rich with wildness, escape and adventure. But I hated them too. Because they never had happy endings. Tarka the otter was killed by hounds. The falcons died of pesticide poisoning. A man with a spade beat to death the otter in Ring of Bright Water; vultures tore out the Red Pony’s eyes. The deer in The Yearling was shot, the dog in Old Yeller died. So did the spider in Charlotte’s Web and my favourite rabbit in Watership Down

So I suppose it wasn’t a surprise to eight-year-old me that Gos snapped his leash and was lost in the wind and rain. I greeted it with sad resignation. But it was dreadful all the same.

His soul is still tied up in the hawk. He can see that Gos is happy. He deserves to be free, thinks White, and wishes him well in his life in the wild. But death waits for Gos, White knows: his jesses and swivel, the accursed accoutrements of his former subjection, will get snagged on a branch, and he will struggle, and hang, and starve, and die.

There was the distant coc-coc-coc of a scared pheasant.

I had found my addiction on that day out with Mabel. It was as ruinous, in a way, as if I’d taken a needle and shot myself with

heroin. I had taken flight to a place from which I didn’t want to ever return.

It shows a soaring California condor, a huge, dusty-black carrion-eating vulture rendered nearly extinct by persecution, habitat destruction and poisoning from lead-contaminated carcasses. By the late 1980s only twenty-seven birds remained, and in a last-ditch effort to save the species they were trapped and taken into captivity so that their domestic-bred young could be used to repopulate the wild. Some people tried to stop this happening.

The other exhibit is perfectly simple. It is a bird lying on its back in a glass box in an empty room. Seeing it makes all my soapbox musings fade and fall away. It’s a parrot, a Spix’s macaw. There are none left in the wild now and the last captive birds are the focus of desperate attempts to keep the species alive. This one is long dead.