Mabel the goshawk & me
I’m walking up a farm track with my goshawk, Mabel, on a frosty winter morning. Her black talons grip my glove, her crest is raised, barred tail fanned, pale eyes glaring and wings slightly open in anticipation of flight. It is a timeless scene. Anatolian falconers were flying goshawks exactly like this one 4,000 years ago. The thought makes me shiver.
Falconry, the art of training hawks to catch wild game, is practiced in many countries and in many forms: it was recently added to Unesco’s Representative List Of The Intangible Cultural Heritage Of Humanity. Only 10 per cent of the world’s falconers are women, but our numbers are growing fast. Though male falconers are mostly highly supportive, we have to deal with comments the likes of: our place is in the kitchen or raising children; women are born to nurture rather than hunt; our brains are diff erent; we can’t be ‘real’ falconers.
Try telling that to Rebecca O’Connor, a dedicated master falconer, author and animal trainer from California, who hunts wild duck with her highfl ying peregrine falcon. Or Lauren McGough, a woman so obsessed with eagles she left home as a teenager to live with falconers in Mongolia, riding into the mountains with the men to hunt foxes with a golden eagle.
‘Lauren, you are a good falconer,’ one of them told her. ‘But if you were a man, you would be amazing!’
As a teenage girl learning to be a falconer, McGough was dismissed and patronised. But, as she says, ‘if you put in the work, get your boots dirty and turn a hawk into a wellrounded, successful hunting partner, it doesn’t matter what your gender is, where you are from, or how old you are; you earn respect from your peers’.
Back in the 1950s British falconry was an almost exclusively male and rather secretive aff air. Lord Tweedsmuir described its practitioners as ‘a small and tenacious sect’. The fi lm Kes and growing media interest in famous falconers such as James Robertson Justice helped it soar in popularity.
In the 1980s I was an ordinary schoolgirl, far from the aristocratic men who populated my falconry books. But I felt able to follow my dreams partly because of three famous falconers: Jemima Parry-Jones, who perfected the art of falconry displays and who has, as director of the International Centre for Birds of Prey, bred more species of raptors than anyone else; Emma Ford, who opened the world’s first dedicated falconry school with her husband Steve, and the gifted falconer and pointerbreeder Diana Durman-Walters. These women are excellent fi eld falconers, have taught and written books on falconry, and inspired a generation of people like me.
1. and 2. Helen with Mabel 3. Mabel poses for the camera
The most extraordinary woman falconer of the 20th century was surely Frances Hamerstrom. Born in 1907 to a prominent Boston family, she fl ed from high society and married her life-partner Frederick when she was 24 – on one of their fi rst dates she swam naked out into a lake to retrieve a duck she’d shot. She was the fi rst woman to train and fl y a golden eagle and the fi rst female wildlife biologist; she wrote 12 books and over 100 scientific papers. She and Frederick saved Wisconsin’s greater prairie chicken from extinction and raised four children in a crumbling farmhouse with no running water. I had the honour of meeting her at a scientifi c conference in 1996. Although elderly and slightly frail, her uncompromising, extraordinary genius was as bright as ever.
These trailblazing figures, however, are only reconquering lost ground: in medieval and early modern Europe, women’s falconry skills were renowned. ‘The inferior sex excels at the hunting of birds,’ wrote John of Salisbury in the 12th century.
Training and flying hawks was an essential part of a noblewoman’s education, and the fi rst printed book on falconry, The Book Of Saint Albans from 1486, is attributed to Dame Juliana Berners. Falconry is often called the sport of kings, but Queen Eleanor of Provence fl ew goshawks and Queen Eleanor of Castile hunted with gyrfalcons. Catherine the Great was an exceptionally keen falconer; so was Elizabeth I, and her cousin, Mary Queen of Scots, even managed to persuade Sir Ralph Sadler to take her on hawking expeditions during her imprisonment, much to Elizabeth’s fury.
Our sport is exacting, diffi cult, hugely time-consuming and sometimes hugely stressful, so why do we do it?
‘Quite simply, it’s wild,’ says Rebecca O’Connor. ‘Life is so chock-full of the domestic. There are mortgages, dry-cleaning, doctor’s appointments and spreadsheets. You don’t know wild until you’ve equal parts sprinted and stumbled across rough terrain chasing the terror of a lost hawk, only to pause and realise you are utterly lost. Scraped, gasping and half-delirious, it is in this place where things happen that change your life. That is what is truly wild.’
Her words ring true. In our modern world the intimate, ancient partnership between human and hawk can bring extraordinary insights and rewards. Later on that winter morning, I’m shivering, full of adrenalin, crouching by my goshawk as she plucks fur from the rabbit she’s caught, and thinking it’s ridiculous to consider this a man’s sport – because the goshawk doesn’t care what I am, and because right now, sharing her life in all its feral, raw intensity, I hardly feel human at all.
H Is For Hawk, by Helen Macdonald, is published by Jonathan Cape, priced £14.99.
Falconry, the art of training hawks to catch wild game, is practiced in many countries and in many forms: it was recently added to Unesco’s Representative List Of The Intangible Cultural Heritage Of Humanity. Only 10 per cent of the world’s falconers are women, but our numbers are growing fast. Though male falconers are mostly highly supportive, we have to deal with comments the likes of: our place is in the kitchen or raising children; women are born to nurture rather than hunt; our brains are diff erent; we can’t be ‘real’ falconers.
Try telling that to Rebecca O’Connor, a dedicated master falconer, author and animal trainer from California, who hunts wild duck with her highfl ying peregrine falcon. Or Lauren McGough, a woman so obsessed with eagles she left home as a teenager to live with falconers in Mongolia, riding into the mountains with the men to hunt foxes with a golden eagle.
‘Lauren, you are a good falconer,’ one of them told her. ‘But if you were a man, you would be amazing!’
As a teenage girl learning to be a falconer, McGough was dismissed and patronised. But, as she says, ‘if you put in the work, get your boots dirty and turn a hawk into a wellrounded, successful hunting partner, it doesn’t matter what your gender is, where you are from, or how old you are; you earn respect from your peers’.
Back in the 1950s British falconry was an almost exclusively male and rather secretive aff air. Lord Tweedsmuir described its practitioners as ‘a small and tenacious sect’. The fi lm Kes and growing media interest in famous falconers such as James Robertson Justice helped it soar in popularity.
In the 1980s I was an ordinary schoolgirl, far from the aristocratic men who populated my falconry books. But I felt able to follow my dreams partly because of three famous falconers: Jemima Parry-Jones, who perfected the art of falconry displays and who has, as director of the International Centre for Birds of Prey, bred more species of raptors than anyone else; Emma Ford, who opened the world’s first dedicated falconry school with her husband Steve, and the gifted falconer and pointerbreeder Diana Durman-Walters. These women are excellent fi eld falconers, have taught and written books on falconry, and inspired a generation of people like me.
1. and 2. Helen with Mabel 3. Mabel poses for the cameraThe most extraordinary woman falconer of the 20th century was surely Frances Hamerstrom. Born in 1907 to a prominent Boston family, she fl ed from high society and married her life-partner Frederick when she was 24 – on one of their fi rst dates she swam naked out into a lake to retrieve a duck she’d shot. She was the fi rst woman to train and fl y a golden eagle and the fi rst female wildlife biologist; she wrote 12 books and over 100 scientific papers. She and Frederick saved Wisconsin’s greater prairie chicken from extinction and raised four children in a crumbling farmhouse with no running water. I had the honour of meeting her at a scientifi c conference in 1996. Although elderly and slightly frail, her uncompromising, extraordinary genius was as bright as ever.
These trailblazing figures, however, are only reconquering lost ground: in medieval and early modern Europe, women’s falconry skills were renowned. ‘The inferior sex excels at the hunting of birds,’ wrote John of Salisbury in the 12th century.
Training and flying hawks was an essential part of a noblewoman’s education, and the fi rst printed book on falconry, The Book Of Saint Albans from 1486, is attributed to Dame Juliana Berners. Falconry is often called the sport of kings, but Queen Eleanor of Provence fl ew goshawks and Queen Eleanor of Castile hunted with gyrfalcons. Catherine the Great was an exceptionally keen falconer; so was Elizabeth I, and her cousin, Mary Queen of Scots, even managed to persuade Sir Ralph Sadler to take her on hawking expeditions during her imprisonment, much to Elizabeth’s fury.
Our sport is exacting, diffi cult, hugely time-consuming and sometimes hugely stressful, so why do we do it?
‘Quite simply, it’s wild,’ says Rebecca O’Connor. ‘Life is so chock-full of the domestic. There are mortgages, dry-cleaning, doctor’s appointments and spreadsheets. You don’t know wild until you’ve equal parts sprinted and stumbled across rough terrain chasing the terror of a lost hawk, only to pause and realise you are utterly lost. Scraped, gasping and half-delirious, it is in this place where things happen that change your life. That is what is truly wild.’
Her words ring true. In our modern world the intimate, ancient partnership between human and hawk can bring extraordinary insights and rewards. Later on that winter morning, I’m shivering, full of adrenalin, crouching by my goshawk as she plucks fur from the rabbit she’s caught, and thinking it’s ridiculous to consider this a man’s sport – because the goshawk doesn’t care what I am, and because right now, sharing her life in all its feral, raw intensity, I hardly feel human at all.
H Is For Hawk, by Helen Macdonald, is published by Jonathan Cape, priced £14.99.