H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald: A review

H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Helen Macdonald, as she tells it in H Is for Hawk, was an awkward, unlovely, unpopular child. But though her life in the outside world may not have been so auspicious, she had a rich interior life that allowed her to escape from all that. She had an obsession: birds.

She was fascinated by birds in general, but the ones which held the strongest attraction for her were the raptors, the magnificent killing machines of the avian world. She read everything she could find about the birds and about humans working with those magnificent killing machines and training them in the sport of falconry. Her most passionate desire was to be a falconer when she grew up.

Helen, unlike many of us, had parents who did not discourage her obsession. They accepted it as normal and encouraged her in it. Her father, a professional news photographer, took her into the fields and woods to observe birds and to look for raptors. He taught her to focus as through a lens, in order to put herself outside the frame and maintain distance from the subject.

Helen was especially close to her father. He was the much-loved, much-adored center of her life, the person who gave her her grounding in the world. When he collapsed and died unexpectedly on a London street while working, Helen's world also collapsed. She had lost her center and didn't know how to find her way. She was floundering. She retreated to her world of obsession.

She had long worked with hawks in various types of situations, but she had never owned one or trained one on her own. At length, she decides that this is what she must do. She will train a hawk. But not just any hawk - a Goshawk, one of the most high-spirited and difficult to train birds of prey.

She receives her bird, which she names Mabel, and just like that, she has found a new center for her being. The training begins.

As she works with Mabel, she rereads an old book by T.H. White called The Goshawk. It recounts his experience in trying to tame and train a Goshawk. He had no idea what he was doing and his "training" methods were more like torture. Macdonald is appalled by his book but also mesmerized by it and by what it tells her about the man.

She reflects on the man and his life as an outsider, a repressed homosexual, a sadist. She ruminates on the connections between the man's personal life, the influence of World War II, his experience with the Goshawk, and how all of that came together to impact and shape his writing about the tales of King Arthur in The Sword in the Stone. She weaves all of these topics together and they become the prism through which she looks at her own life and her experience of grief, and, in the end, she pulls it all together and begins to make sense of it so that she can get on with that life.

This is a highly praised and much-honored book and, in my opinion, it deserves all of that. It is an amazing, almost unclassifiable book. It is a memoir and yet at times it reads with the urgency of the best fiction. I wouldn't necessarily describe it as a page-turner though. It is slow in parts, but there's nothing wrong with that. It just gives one time for reflection, time to absorb what one is reading.

My only quibble with the book was a certain irritation and impatience with Macdonald herself. She completely gives herself up to grieving. She's able to do that because she is single with no family depending on her. She does have a mother (the widow of her father who died) and a brother and yet she is so self-absorbed with how the death of this man has affected her that she seems to have no understanding or empathy for what it has meant to these other people who loved him. Her grief insulates her and cuts her off from other human relationships. In the depths of mourning, she is as much a loner as T.H. White ever was.

In the end, this is a book about Nature, the human and the avian kind, and about the profound and complex relationships that can develop between two species. I could never be a falconer, because I believe wild birds should be free. In fact, it distresses me to see an animal caged or tied up. But there is no discounting the effect that working with Mabel had on Helen Macdonald. At a time when she was spinning out of control, it helped her to find her way back, get her life back on track. H Is for Hawk. H is also for healing. 


View all my reviews

This week in birds - #202

A roundup of the week's news of birds and the environment:

Eastern tiger swallowtail butterfly on blueberry bush.

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This is my absolute favorite story of any kind from this week: We know that octopuses are very intelligent and very curious creatures, which means that they don't necessarily take easily to confinement. Such was certainly the case with Inky the octopus, a famed resident at New Zealand's National Aquarium. When a maintenance worker left a gap at the top of his enclosure, Inky didn't hesitate. He squeezed through that gap, headed for a six inch drainage pipe and squeezed through that, making it all the way out to the Pacific and freedom! Godspeed, Inky.

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Despite the fact that snowpack in the Sierra Nevadas is greater than it has been in recent years, it is still only 87 percent of the long-term average and that is bad news for a drought-ridden California. The increased snowpack is not expected to be sufficient to offer real relief from the drought.

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But there is good news for Chesapeake Bay's blue crab population and for the critters that feed on them (including humans). That population has grown by 35 percent and this is expected to be a "robust" season for the crabs.

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The Yellow-eyed Penguin of New Zealand is unique among penguins in that it is a forest dweller. That fact makes it harder to see and, to some extent, harder to protect. The incredibly shy bird is also extremely endangered.

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Scientists are always fiddling with things and revising things that we think we "know." This includes the tree of life. A recent revision shows that the true lords of creation on Earth are bacteria. They’ve been on the planet for billions of years and have irrevocably changed it, while diversifying into endless wonderful and beautiful forms.

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Good news for bees and for the planet. The chemical company Ortho has announced that it will remove neonicotinoid pesticides from its line of products. It will remove the substance from three of its products by 2017 and from five more by 2021.

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An important component of citizen science projects is that they should be systematic in their approach. A new paper in the journal Nature Conservation shows how systematically placed, grid-based transects can help projects monitoring butterflies by reducing habitat bias.

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In 2011, the National Fish and Wildlife Service started reintroducing Whooping Cranes in Louisiana. The new flock was planned as a non-migratory population. There is good news on that front. It was announced this week that a pair has hatched a chick! This is the first wild Whooping Crane chick to hatch in Louisiana in decades. 

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Wind energy is a renewable resource and, as such, sounds like a green energy dream. But for birds and flying mammals, wind farms can be a nightmare. American Bird Conservancy has a list of the 10 deadliest such sites. 

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When there are no mammalian hunters to bother them on islands, birds can gradually lose the ability to fly. This can prove catastrophic when such hunters show up later. Case in point: the Kakapo, a ground-dwelling parrot on New Zealand. 

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The Great Barrier Reef is facing the worst bleaching event in history and this may prove to be a tipping point for the reef and the marine life around it.

Bleached coral literally looks like it has had chlorine bleach spilled all over it.

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The Southwestern Willow Flycatcher was given protection under the Endangered Species Act in 1995, but the Fish and Wildlife Service this week published a paper that states that there is "substantial information" that the bird is not a true subspecies. If it loses that designation, it could lose its protection. 

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I recently read Helen Macdonald's acclaimed book H is for Hawk, in which she detailed her efforts to train a Northern Goshawk. She alludes to Eurasian Sparrowhawks in the book and seems to indicate that they would be easier to train. Here's another view; one that claims they are the "toughest birds to work with."

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We know that tigers are in trouble and that their survival in the wild is far from assured. Here are six reasons why that should concern us and why we should worry about those magnificent beasts.

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If there is any good news as a result of the occupation by armed domestic terrorists of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Oregon earlier this year, it is this: The occupation brought increased public interest in the refuge and in the spring Harney County Migratory Bird Festival held there. The festival began this week and many of the events were sold out in advance!

Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald: A review

I would have bought the book for its cover alone, a picture of a swift in flight. I have a lifelong love of swifts, those magical birds that live their lives entirely on the wing, except for when they are nesting and brooding eggs or chicks. They eat, drink, mate, and even sleep in the air. They have tiny little feet that are too weak for perching but are able to cling to the vertical side of a chimney or similar opening and in such places, they build their nests and rear their young until they too are ready to take to the air. Macdonald's swift is the Common Swift of Europe. On this continent, we have the Chimney Swift which nests in my part of the world, and the Vaux's Swift of western states. There are slight differences between them but all three live their lives in the air. Macdonald's new book, a collection of essays about nature and our relationship to it, includes an appreciation of the swift in the essay which gives the book its title, "Vesper Flights." 

Macdonald's last book was H is for Hawk which told how she coped with her grief over her father's death by sublimating it into the training of a magnificent Goshawk for falconry. Through that process, she learned a lot and not just about hawks. She learned lessons about herself and, more widely, about the human species. In this book, she broadens her outlook to much of nature and once again she learns that studying nature can teach her lessons about her own species. Her varied topics include riffs on fungi, migration patterns, hares, global warming, birds' nests, and even goats. But through it all, there is a sense of sorrow and an overarching theme that might be stated as an elegy for the world of nature that we know as the sixth known great extinction in the history of our planet inexorably continues.

In one of the most affecting essays, Macdonald writes of the meadow that she knew as a child, the meadow that inspired her to take up her life's work as a naturalist. She revisited the meadow occasionally through the years of her adulthood until one year she went there and the meadow was gone. It had been turned into lawn. She writes:

"When habitats are destroyed what is lost are exquisite ecological complexities and all the lives that make them what they are. Their loss is not about us, even though when that meadow disappeared, part of me disappeared, too, or rather passed from existence in a memory that even now batters inside my chest. Look, I can't say to anyone. Look at the beauty here. Look at everything that is. I can only write about what it was."

When contemplating the lessons of nature and the violence done to it, Macdonald admits she is often overcome by emotion. She writes that she wept at seeing that her meadow and all the lives it held had been destroyed. She weeps also when she holds a falcon egg to her face and makes a clucking sound and hears that the chick inside that is near hatching responds to her. Feeling sad over the turn of her life she sits down next to a river and after a while, a swan walks out of the river and sits down beside her its feathers touching her leg and she finds the release of tears. And then there is the joyous experience of watching birds in flight, of watching animals be themselves in nature.

The subjects of her essays, most of which are quite short, often only a few pages, are, as I said, varied but they do tend to be heavily weighted toward the world of birds as in her descriptions of birdsong and its uses or in the quick cobra-like strike of a heron stabbing at a fish or the flight of the Common Swift.  In all of these, Macdonald expresses her gratitude that this "other" world exists and goes its own way independent of humanity. It's a gratitude that I share.

My rating: 5 of 5 stars  

My favorite books of 2016

It is the solemn duty of every blogger who writes about books to compile a year-end list of the best books read that year. Since I am nothing if not a dutiful blogger, I have been agonizing for days over my list.

As of today, I have read 88 books this year and the majority of them were terrific reads. Those who follow the blog know that I rate my books on a scale of one to five stars, using the Goodreads definitions; one-star meaning "not good" and five-stars meaning "exceptional." I had a few one- and two-star reads this year, but most of them were three stars or higher.

In compiling my list, I narrowed the 88 books down to four- and five-star reads, because often there's very little daylight between four and five stars. But that list proved much too unwieldy. I couldn't give you a list with more than forty books on it! So, in the end I selected just the five-star reads. Even that list had nineteen books on it, but I simply couldn't choose among them, so here they all are - my favorite books read in 2016 with links to my reviews of the books.

The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante: This was the second in Ferrante's highly (and justifiably) praised Neapolitan Quartet series. In my opinion, it was even better than the first book.

H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald: Macdonald wrote this memoir of her lifelong obsession with birds, particularly with raptors, and with her work in attempting to train a Goshawk, supposedly one of the most difficult raptors to tame and train. 

The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante: This was the fourth and final book in Ferrante's Neapolitan series. I was sorry to see it end.

The Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin: This was the first in Le Guin's fantasy Earthsea Cycle books. It was a wonderful beginning. 

The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes: I am a big fan of Julian Barnes and I always look forward to his books. In this one, he takes the bare facts of Dimitri Shostakovich's life and gives us Shostakovich's interior dialogues, his explanation and justification of his life.

Before the Fall by Noah Hawley: A blockbuster summer read that was much more than just a thrilling page-turner. Hawley ruminates on the role of the media in modern life and presciently touches on the issue of fake news.

LaRose by Louise Erdrich: Nobody does it better than Louise Erdrich, in my opinion, and this story of a conflicted man who tries to make amends for accidentally killing a child by offering the grieving family his own child as a replacement is one of her best.

Emma: A Modern Retelling by Alexander McCall Smith: Smith caught the personality of Jane Austen's delightful Emma and translated her smoothly into a modern setting. This was one of several retellings of Austen or Shakespeare classics that I enjoyed this year.  

Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler: Another retelling, this one of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, and it's by the wonderful Anne Tyler, another personal favorite. How could I not love it?

Sense and Sensibility by Joanna Trollope: And, yes, still another reinterpretation of an Austen classic makes my list. This was actually the first book published in The Austen Project and it set a high standard for all those retellings that followed. 

Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow: Chernow's book, published twelve years ago, has had a revival of interest because of the hit Broadway musical which is based on it. It had languished on my bookshelf for twelve long years and I finally got around to reading it this year. Wonderful book! It reads almost like a Dickens novel.

Nutshell by Ian McEwan: Ian McEwan is a writer of perfect little gems of books in which not a single word can be extracted or changed without altering the meaning. This was another one, an imaginative retelling of Hamlet with Hamlet being represented as a fetus!

A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman: This was an under-the-radar Swedish novel that unexpectedly became an international bestseller. It featured an irascible curmudgeon as its main character, Ove, and the reader would have to have a heart of stone to end the book without loving him.

Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood: This was another one in the Hogarth Shakespeare series, a retelling of The Tempest, that I had been impatiently waiting for all year. It was worth the wait!

Commonwealth by Ann Patchett: Many of my favorite writers had new books out this year, which is one of the reasons it was such a terrific year of reading for me. One of those favorites is Ann Patchett and her story of the Keating and Cousins families and their intermingling lives was wonderful and gave the reader a lot to think about.

My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout: Strout's ability to delineate and explore the motivations in the lives of conflicted women is well known. Like her wonderful Olive Kitteridge, this one drew me in and I didn't want to leave Lucy Barton.

Moonglow by Michael Chabon: If you held my feet to the fire and forced me to name my favorite of all the wonderful books that I've read this year, this would be it. Chabon's fictionalized memoir of his own family's experiences has everything that one could wish for in a book, and like Ian McEwan's books, one would not want to extract or change a single word of it.

Here I am by Jonathan Safran Foer: Foer's tale of the unlovable and unraveling Bloch family of Washington, D.C., juxtaposed with upheaval and catastrophe in the Middle East and the possible destruction of Israel is a tour de force of imaginative storytelling.

Swing Time by Zadie Smith: And of my favorites, this one would be a very close second. Smith's portrayal of the lives of two young girls raised in poverty but in very different personal circumstances rang true for me in every aspect. Smith just gets better and better as a writer.

And there you have it, my creme de la creme of 2016. I can unreservedly recommend any one of them to lovers of good writing, and there were so many others that just barely missed making the list. One can only hope for another such fascinating year of words in 2017.  

This week in birds - #148

A roundup of the week's news of birds and the environment:

Bald Eagles are already nesting, and in the Northeast, where they've had massive snowfalls this winter, the birds are having to contend with some harsh winter weather. A pair of the birds nesting in a state park in Pennsylvania had a particularly tricky time of it. The snow covered the sitting bird right up to the eyes. Both parents take turns brooding the eggs, so it is unclear if this is the mother or the father, but whichever it is, it is certainly a portrait in parental devotion. There are two eggs in the nest under the bird and all that snow. The eggs are expected to hatch in about two to three weeks - that is, if the parents are able to keep them warm enough until then. I'm betting on the birds.

Here's a video of the bird getting rid of some of that snow. But, as you can see, the snow was still falling.




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The picture that has been burning up the Internet this week is this one, of a weasel riding on a woodpecker's back.

Picture courtesy of Martin Le-May
The picture is evidently authentic and depicts a real event. You can read about it here.

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A report from the U.S. Forest Service published in "The Journal of Wildlife Management" details how forest management practices can affect the species of birds that live in them.

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A report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences postulates that drought caused by climate change has been instrumental in fomenting the civil war in Syria.

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The Myanmar Jerdon's Babbler, thought to have been extinct since 1941, has been rediscovered on a recent expedition in the country.

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And there has been another "rediscovery," this time in Cuba. One of the world's most threatened waterbirds, the critically endangered Zapata Rail, has been sighted once again.

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Arctic sea ice is thinning faster than expected. It is down 65% since 1975.

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The population of Common Cuckoos in the U.K. has plummeted by more than 50% in the last twenty years. Scientists are tracking the birds on their migration routes to try to find information that will help preserve the species.

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"Beetles in the Bush" has a post about identifying flower ants.

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New Jersey has approved a drastic expansion of its state bear hunt, which will feature a longer season, expansion into new areas, and the use of bow and arrow.

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The Northern Goshawk has been in the news recently because it is featured in a new book that is getting a lot of comment, H Is for Hawk. The goshawk is a mighty hunter that uses a variety of strategies to capture its prey.

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Australia's largest owl is the well-named Powerful Owl. One of its number has been entertaining spectators recently in a suburban Canberra park.

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Colombia has proposed a protected wildlife corridor that would reach across South America from the Atlantic Ocean to the Andes Mountains.

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Around the Backyard:

Eastern Bluebirds and Carolina Chickadees are still putting the finishing touches on their nests in their respective boxes. Egg laying should begin soon.

I was away from my yard for a couple of days and, when I returned today, the American Goldfinches had disappeared. I'm sure there are still at least a few around but I didn't see them while I was watching today.

The Chipping Sparrows are still here in large numbers. They have been the surprise of the winter, in that they have been the most numerous species at my feeders this season.

There are still some Cedar Waxwings here as well but not nearly in the numbers that we are used to at this time of winter. I see small flocks of less than 20 birds only. 

This week in birds - #314

A roundup of the week's news of birds and the environment:

Mississippi Kite photo by Greg Lasley.

A pair of Mississippi Kites has taken up residence in my neighborhood. I see them circling over my yard or hear them calling almost every time I am outdoors these days. They feed mostly on medium- to large-sized insects but their diet may also include small reptiles or amphibians and even small birds and bats. 

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The American Meteorological Society issued its State of the Climate report which confirmed that 2017 was the warmest year ever recorded that did not include an El Niño event.

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And in the current year, the extreme weather of July made it clear that climate change's impacts are no longer subtle. In spite of that, media outlets in general continue to be negligent in reporting the connections between these extreme events and global warming.

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The present administration in Washington is officially proposing rolling back clean car standards. The change would weaken the Obama-era clean car emissions and fuel efficiency standards and would limit California's and other states' authority to set tougher standards. 

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Meanwhile, a find by archaeologists studying the Mayan civilization is throwing more light on historical climate change. The sediment under a lake in Mexico gives evidence of a more than century-long drought which was probably instrumental in bringing down one of the most advanced civilizations of its time.

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The current ferocious wildfires in California may not be an aberration but prophetic of the state's future. In spite of that, some in the areas being burned will still insist that climate change is not impacting the intensity of the fires and that, actually, climate change does not exist.

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Killer whales in the Salish Sea of the Pacific Northwest face killer toxins in their environment. The poignancy of their situation was brought home recently by the story of the orca mother who refused to give up her dead calf. She carried the dead baby with her for more than a week.

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Helen Macdonald, author of the wonderful book H is for Hawk, writes about the pleasures of watching Nightjars flying at dusk.

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And our favorite insect blogger, "Bug Eric," bemoans the paucity of insects around Colorado Springs this summer but he does find happiness in watching wasps go about their business. 

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They may look like green algae but actually they are plant-worms and they rotate in circular congregations along Atlantic beaches in the summer.

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But in Florida, a real algae, a toxic red tide, is killing sea creatures as well as making humans sick.

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Some birds are specialists and require a particular environment to survive, but birds, in general, are very adaptable creatures and, given enough time to make the adjustment, they are able to accommodate to new situations. A recent study of California birds gives evidence of this, showing that they are adjusting, sometimes in remarkable ways, to a changing climate. 

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Raptors such as Golden Eagles continue to suffer persecution from landowners in Scotland and the continued existence of many of them is in doubt.

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The largest King Penguin colony in the world, whose home is on a island in the southern Indian Ocean between South Africa and Antarctica, has lost 90% of its population according to a new study. Satellite images indicate perhaps 60,000 pairs left, down from 500,000 breeding pairs thirty years ago. 

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The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department has warned that the Bentsen-Rio Grande Valley State Park, one of the jewels of public lands on the southern Texas border, could be forced to close if the current administration gets its way and builds a wall through the middle of it.

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A new publication gives information about the habitats of the more than 400 species of bees found in Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont.

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New legislation introduced in the Senate last week by Hawaiian Sen. Mazie Hirono and three Democratic colleagues calls for the use of native plants in projects such as roadside landscaping or landfill restorations on federal lands wherever possible. It also promotes the hiring of more botanists for U.S. Department of Interior projects ranging from environmental restoration to pollution abatement.

Poetry Sunday: Frost at Midnight

Helen Macdonald, author of the best-seller H is for Hawk, said in an interview that I read with The New York Times that this is her favorite poem, so, of course, I had to look it up and read it. I can certainly understand why it would be her favorite. It's a lovely poem.

The voice of the poem seems to be the poet himself and that voice speaks a quiet and personal restatement of the enduring themes of English Romanticism. We see the effect of Nature on the imagination; the relationship between children and the natural world; the contrast between liberating country life and that in the city; and, finally, the relationship between adulthood and childhood, as the adult remembers his past. 

The imagery is striking and will be instantly understood by any parent who has ever stood by his or her baby's cradle and watched the child sleep. 

Frost at Midnight

by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The Frost performs its secret ministry,

Unhelped by any wind. The owlet's cry

Came loud—and hark, again! loud as before.

The inmates of my cottage, all at rest,

Have left me to that solitude, which suits

Abstruser musings: save that at my side

My cradled infant slumbers peacefully.

'Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs

And vexes meditation with its strange

And extreme silentness. Sea, hill, and wood,

This populous village! Sea, and hill, and wood,

With all the numberless goings-on of life,

Inaudible as dreams! the thin blue flame

Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not;

Only that film, which fluttered on the grate,

Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.

Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature

Gives it dim sympathies with me who live,

Making it a companionable form,

Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit

By its own moods interprets, every where

Echo or mirror seeking of itself,

And makes a toy of Thought.

                      But O! how oft,

How oft, at school, with most believing mind,

Presageful, have I gazed upon the bars,

To watch that fluttering stranger ! and as oft

With unclosed lids, already had I dreamt

Of my sweet birth-place, and the old church-tower,

Whose bells, the poor man's only music, rang

From morn to evening, all the hot Fair-day,

So sweetly, that they stirred and haunted me

With a wild pleasure, falling on mine ear

Most like articulate sounds of things to come!

So gazed I, till the soothing things, I dreamt,

Lulled me to sleep, and sleep prolonged my dreams!

And so I brooded all the following morn,

Awed by the stern preceptor's face, mine eye

Fixed with mock study on my swimming book:

Save if the door half opened, and I snatched

A hasty glance, and still my heart leaped up,

For still I hoped to see the stranger's face,

Townsman, or aunt, or sister more beloved,

My play-mate when we both were clothed alike!

         Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side,

Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm,

Fill up the intersperséd vacancies

And momentary pauses of the thought!

My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart

With tender gladness, thus to look at thee,

And think that thou shalt learn far other lore,

And in far other scenes! For I was reared

In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim,

And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.

But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze

By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags

Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,

Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores

And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear

The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible

Of that eternal language, which thy God

Utters, who from eternity doth teach

Himself in all, and all things in himself.

Great universal Teacher! he shall mould

Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.

         Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,

Whether the summer clothe the general earth

With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing

Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch

Of mossy apple-tree, while the night-thatch

Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall

Heard only in the trances of the blast,

Or if the secret ministry of frost

Shall hang them up in silent icicles,

Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.