19th century

The 19th century is a turning point in the book’s history of British goshawks and falconry: it brings the disappearance of the birds from Britain into view while exposing the class and gender assumptions through which falconers described them. The period’s hunting culture and writing both shaped the human world of the goshawk, recasting a once-familiar hunting bird as vermin and a difficult, unruly creature.

Decline and disappearance

Goshawks had once bred across the British Isles. Their decline followed changes in land use and hunting: enclosure restricted ordinary people’s ability to fly hawks, while accurate firearms made shooting more fashionable than falconry. Gamekeepers’ persecution then compounded the effects of habitat loss. By the late 19th century, British goshawks were extinct. The account therefore locates extinction not in a simple change in the birds themselves, but in altered access to land, hunting practices, and human attitudes toward a former companion animal.

The book also places this history alongside the older falconry tradition. Goshawks could be flown in many places because they made short dashes from the fist at close range; falcons, by contrast, needed wide open expanses such as grouse moors, partridge estates, and extensive farmland. That practical difference made falconry with goshawks more available than falconry with falcons, while the spaces associated with falcons were easier for wealthy and well-connected people to command. The changing status of goshawks thus belongs to a wider history of who could hunt, where they could do it, and which forms of hunting carried prestige.

Falconry writing and social hierarchy

Helen Macdonald recalls learning falconry through old books, many written by aristocratic sportsmen and addressed to boys. Their descriptions offered instruction in hawk-training but also transmitted assumptions about class, empire, and gender. As a child, she absorbed a world in which English falcons were celebrated above foreign birds, hunting belonged to privileged landscapes, and women were largely absent. The manuals did not merely preserve practical knowledge: they helped define which people and birds counted as noble, accomplished, or worthy of admiration.

The historical standing of the solitary goshawk trainer, or austringer, was markedly lower than that of the falconer. A medieval writer mocked austringers as solitary and physically awkward, and later falconry writing continued to give goshawks a poor reputation. Helen describes the contrast as a hierarchy: falcons were associated with aristocratic privilege, while goshawks and their handlers were cast as rough, disagreeable outsiders. These judgments made social distinctions appear to belong to the birds themselves, as if a species’ character naturally matched the status assigned to its human practitioners.

Gendered accounts of the goshawk

Nineteenth-century falconers often described goshawks through a vocabulary of bad temper, sulkiness, and difficulty. Helen reads these portrayals as gendered: the hawks were assigned qualities that male falconers considered threatening in modern life, including wildness, power, independence, and strength. Training then offered a double fantasy of possession: the falconer could identify with those qualities while also attempting to civilize the bird. In this reading, mastery of the hawk joined masculine self-fashioning to an imperial idea of conquest.

The descriptions of the bird’s supposed temperament also shifted responsibility away from the handler. Nervousness, anger, or refusal could be treated as evidence of an inexplicable, hysterical nature rather than as a response to rough or inconsiderate treatment. Helen compares this attitude with 17th-century falconry accounts, which describe goshawks as shy and fearful but also sociable and capable of affection when treated with kindness. That earlier emphasis on the keeper’s conduct makes the later stereotype look less like a neutral observation than a historically specific way of explaining and controlling the bird.

The period’s afterlife

The 19th century remains present in Helen’s own education as a body of writing she first admired and later learned to question. Her falconry books had taught her technical details, but they had also narrowed what she expected a goshawk to be. When she later sees a goshawk play, the behaviour unsettles the inherited picture: playfulness had been missing from the books and from her own expectations. The episode gives the history a concrete consequence. Descriptions do not simply record a bird; they can limit what observers notice about it.

The book also places the British tradition within a longer argument about privilege and access to land. A 1942 American hunting article contrasts common-law access to hunting in Maine with Britain’s more restrictive land system, while acknowledging that the exclusion of ordinary people also applied in Britain. This later comparison does not erase the distinctions associated with the 19th century; it shows how durable they remained in accounts of hunting. In the book’s wider history, the period is therefore both ecological and interpretive: goshawks vanished from Britain, while the language used to classify them continued to shape how people imagined wildness, authority, and the right to hunt.