A wing and a prayer: how Helen Macdonald got a new lease on life from her goshawk

British writer and naturalist Helen Macdonald knew that when she set out to train a goshawk, death would be part of the equation. Goshawks are fierce predators, and taming one would mean participating in the slaughter of pheasants, rabbits and whatever else her hawk, Mabel, decided to hunt.

What Macdonald didn’t realise is that apparently ferocious raptors also enjoy a brisk game of catch.

“When people talk about goshawks, they tend to describe them as feathered shotguns, killers,” says the author of the award-winning memoir H Is for Hawk. “They’ll say you can feed a family on what they catch. But I discovered my goshawk was playful. We watched television and played games. I used to scrunch up papers and throw them, and she’d catch them and throw them back. We’d play for hours.

“My falconer friends were horrified. ‘You don’t play with goshawks!’ But they all do, they just don’t like to talk about it, which tells you more about the culture of masculinity than it does about goshawks. Animals are always much more than the fixed ideas we have of them.”

But H Is for Hawk is not merely a story about the relationship between a woman and a bird. It’s also a profoundly moving meditation on grief, the natural world and our place in it – and an attempt to make sense of a classic work of literature. After the sudden death of her beloved father in 2007, Macdonald – reeling over the loss, single, with no job and too much time on her hands – turned a long-held fascination with birds of prey into an obsession. She had studied and bred falcons but had never worked with the notoriously difficult goshawk. Inspired by a dream and the memory of T.H. White’s book The Goshawk – which chronicles the author’s disastrous attempts to train his bird and casts a wide, melancholy shadow over Macdonald’s book – Macdonald set out to learn about life and death on the wing, sometimes becoming almost as feral as her hawk.