Literary H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald

[bfisher]

I saw the most astonishing thing in my backyark today. I was in my kitchen at lunchtime when I saw a large bird land in my backyard. First I thought it was an injured bird;it was very windy today with the aftermath of Hurricane Patricia. Then I realized it was a raptor with a bird it had captured. It was there about 40 minutes eating.

I don't know what kind of raptor it was. It was the right size for a peregrine falcon, and my house is 5 km from an active Peregrine nesting site. I did manage to get a few pictures - very low quality since I was using a simple camera and shooting through the window, as I didn't want to disturb the bird.

[issybird]

Wonderful pictures; thank you! Bookpossum knows birds; she may be able to identify it (although North American birds are somewhat out of her usual flight paths!).

[Bookworm_Girl]

Those are amazing photos. I can't imagine seeing something like that in your backyard. Thanks for sharing!

[bfisher]

I always have lots of squirrels and chipmunks there, frequently rabbits in residence, sometimes racoons, occasionally a skunk passing through , and lots of birds. I once saw a Great Blue Heron standing on the roof of the house behind mine, but I never expected to see a raptor having lunch in my backyard. If I hadn't been looking out my kitchen window waiting for the kettle to boil to fill my teapot, I'd never have seen it drop to the ground. First we thought it was injured, due to the strange way it was moving, until we realized it was trying to subdue its prey. My neighbour a few numbers up the street has feeders in her back yard, and there are always flocks of birds sitting on her roof, and often flying up in alarmed flocks. From the colour of the feathers that were left, I think the victim was one of them.

Ottawa is a fairly good place for seeing a variety of birds, because of the greenbelt, but you still need the luck to be looking at the right time. This summer my wife saw an osprey take a fish out of the Ottawa River; I was sitting next to her and missed it completely.

[Bookpossum]

Wow! What an experience - I'm very envious!

issybird is quite right and you are rather out of my flight path but of course this got me intrigued so I have done a bit of googling. The best one I have been able to come up with at short notice (we are about to dash off to the beach for a few days) is a Cooper's Hawk. I'll attach a shot I pulled off the web.

I'll be interested to hear if you are able to get a more expert ID than mine, which wouldn't be hard.

[fantasyfan]

Originally Posted by Bookpossum

Wow! What an experience - I'm very envious!

issybird is quite right and you are rather out of my flight path but of course this got me intrigued so I have done a bit of googling. The best one I have been able to come up with at short notice (we are about to dash off to the beach for a few days) is a Cooper's Hawk. I'll attach a shot I pulled off the web.

I'll be interested to hear if you are able to get a more expert ID than mine, which wouldn't be hard.

Great pictures! I never seem to be able to get such excellent candid shots! Thank you for sharing them.

I'll pass on an interesting experience though. We have lots of song birds in our area with Magpies being generally at the top of the dominance pyramid. But we live close to the sea and once we heard an almighty thump on the roof of the sun room. We ran out and saw a huge black-back gull! It has a wing span of 5 1/2 feet and while not a raptor is fiercely predatory, fearless, and aggressive. It has a huge sharp yellow bill. The one sitting on our roof was being teased by a couple of magpies--which appeared miniature in contrast. We wondered why they were taking such a chance but we now believe they were keeping him away from their nests. In the end he flew away, probably to get easier prey (which includes ordinary seagulls.)

[bfisher]

Thank you so much, Bookpossum.

I believe you are spot on with Cooper's Hawk. The size, colour, habit and habitat all fit. Thanks for posting the picture. I never expected to see the hawk again, but while I was making the morning coffee today, it perched for a couple of minutes on a telephone cable in the back lot line. It was facing away from me, but the shape of the tail and the bars on the tail match your picture.

[Bookpossum]

Good, I'm so glad you were able to see it again, and the descriptions of the bird and its habitat fitted. That's a lovely back view you got of it.

Interesting to hear about your Gull, fantasyfan. Yes,smaller birds always mob big ones to chase them away, especially if they have eggs or chicks on the go.

I can see we are going to have a birdwatching subgroup of the book club!

[BenG]

I think it is a Cooper's. The only other bird it could be is a Sharp-Shinned Hawk.

http://feederwatch.org/learn/tricky-...-shinned-hawk/

[Bookpossum]

Yes, I found the Sharp-shinned first, but thought Cooper's looked a better match.

[fantasyfan]

One of the things which bothered me about the book was why Macdonald spent so much time on the tormented T.H.White who was clearly incompetent as a trainer for a Goshawk. I'll just pass on a few thoughts which occurred to me as the book progressed. They represent my own personal response to the double layer of the narrative.

In the end I came to the conclusion that she and White were more similar than seems the case on the surface. Both are haunted by a father. Helen loved hers but his death was a terrible blow which left her emotionally and socially incapacitated. She uses Mabel as a means of escape--an escape from the horror of mortality which has taken one of her most profound relationships. Thus, her love for the hawk allows her to function in a different world but still one which causes her to become dysfunctional on a human level.

White had a terrible loveless childhood which left him emotionally scarred. He feared his father and even suspected that the latter wanted him dead. Thus, on a deep level, White isn't really interested in the art of Falconry; he wants to train Gos to love him. Gos becomes a replacement for a relationship he needed but never had. Further, White lived in a period when his intrinsic Gay orientation was not widely socially accepted. So is it not possible that Gos also becomes a sublimation on this level as well? Macdonald seems to think so.

In the end Gos flies away. White has failed but is able to transmute the experience into literature and Helen in her book, dramatises the recovery of her own identity, no longer feeding on the nature of Mabel for self-hood.

While I'm not at all interested in Falconry i(n fact, I rather disapprove of the practice}, I found that the struggle of Helen to find herself and the rather pitiable efforts of White to find love quite absorbing.

[Bookpossum]

Interesting thoughts fantasyfan. I agree with you about falconry as I don't like that whole thing of taming a wild creature, especially when it's for pleasure rather than from necessity.

I found the sections on White and Gos distressing and couldn't bear to read the book. It had obviously had a profound effect on Macdonald as a child. I think she wanted to do well with Mabel in a way to make it up to Gos for the way White had mistreated him, even though he had wanted to do it well.

[Bookpossum]

Actually, since writing that, I have thought of at least one example where falconry is put to good use. In wildlife rescue centres that rehabilitate raptors that have been injured or orphaned before they have learned to hunt, their handlers use falconry techniques to train them to be self-sufficient when they are returned to the wild. I'm going to visit such a place in New Zealand in a few weeks' time.

[fantasyfan]

Originally Posted by Bookpossum

Actually, since writing that, I have thought of at least one example where falconry is put to good use. In wildlife rescue centres that rehabilitate raptors that have been injured or orphaned before they have learned to hunt, their handlers use falconry techniques to train them to be self-sufficient when they are returned to the wild. I'm going to visit such a place in New Zealand in a few weeks' time.

Yes, that is indeed a case of Falconry techniques having value!

[sun surfer]

bfisher, those photos are very interesting; it's amazing that happened in your backyard!

In the end I liked the book despite certain aspects of it. I'm left with the feeling that Macdonald partially decided to train a goshawk to eventually write a book about it. Nothing wrong with that really except that she played the decision off as a more emotional one devoid of the lure of future literary prospects, which ties back to the other little things I noticed here and there in the book that I didn't really buy. Regardless, the writing itself was great.

As some of you may already know, this book is currently up and in voting for the Goodreads yearly book awards. It's in the general non-fiction section, which I think is odd since there's a separate autobiography/memoir section.