Helen Macdonald acquires the goshawk Mabel

Helen Macdonald’s acquisition of Mabel the goshawk begins as an act of grief and becomes a consequential choice between two individual birds. In early August, Macdonald travelled to Scotland with Christina to collect a captive-bred hawk. When the bird officially assigned to her proved not to be the one she wanted, she asked the breeder to exchange it for the younger, smaller goshawk. The request was granted. The encounter brought a particular animal into Macdonald’s life, but it also unsettled her inherited ideas about hawks, falconry, and the boundary between watcher and watched.

Background and decision

Before acquiring Mabel, Macdonald had preferred falcons. She had long remembered wild goshawks as silent and unnerving, and associated them with difficulty and death. Falcons, by contrast, seemed graceful and companionable, and the books she read praised the peregrine as the finest bird. Her reluctance was not simply a matter of taste: she had repeatedly decided that she would never train a goshawk.

The contrast between the birds also carried a social history. Flying falcons properly required extensive open land, such as grouse moors and large estates, resources more accessible to wealthy or well-connected falconers. Goshawks, which hunt in a rapid dash from the fist at closer range, could be flown in more varied places. Historical writing reflected this hierarchy: falcons were associated with aristocratic privilege, while the solitary goshawk trainer was disparaged. The birds themselves inherited the judgments made about their practitioners. Goshawks were repeatedly depicted as unruly and disagreeable, while peregrines were celebrated as noble and perfect.

Macdonald’s circumstances changed after her father died. In a period when familiar surroundings had begun to feel strange, she found a breeder in Northern Ireland with a young goshawk from that year’s brood. The bird was ten weeks old, small for a goshawk, and bred from birds of Czech, Finnish, and German ancestry. Macdonald arranged to drive to Scotland to collect her. She thought she wanted a small hawk, but did not feel that she had meaningfully chosen the individual bird. Her account presents the decision as something that had already taken hold of her: the hawk, in effect, had caught her.

The journey and exchange

The collection took place on a Scottish quayside after a long drive. Macdonald had travelled about four hundred miles with Christina, carrying £800 in cash. She waited for the ferry with a caffeinated drink and a cigarette, while the car still held her father’s belongings: film canisters, aspirin, a newspaper with his unfinished crossword, and winter gloves. The journey and the objects left in the car made the acquisition inseparable from bereavement. The hawk was not arriving in an empty life; she was entering one still materially marked by Macdonald’s father.

The breeder arrived carrying two large cardboard boxes. Their hawks had to be distinguished by matching leg-ring numbers to official documents, so the correct bird could be handed to each falconer. The first bird Macdonald handled was the younger and smaller one. The breeder hooded her, and the number check established that she belonged to another buyer. The larger, older goshawk was the bird designated for Macdonald. After the second bird had been checked and the money exchanged, Macdonald found herself unable to accept the allocation. The larger hawk did not feel like the bird she wanted, and she asked, hesitantly and at length, whether she could take the first one instead.

Her request challenged the expected arrangement between breeder and buyer. She could not make a persuasive practical case for the change; what mattered was her unmistakable distress at the prospect of leaving without the younger bird. After a pause, the breeder agreed. The exchange turned an initial assumption—that Macdonald was simply collecting the bird assigned to her—into an act of selection. Her choice was made face to face, in response to the individual hawk rather than to size or appearance alone.

Making a bond

Before the collection, Macdonald prepared jesses, the leather straps used to tether a hawk. She cut and shaped the leather, soaked it, stretched it, and dressed it. The work took on a significance beyond equipment: the jesses would connect hawk and falconer. As she made them, the impending exchange became real, and thoughts of her father returned with force. He had deliberately used incorrect names for falconry equipment, calling hoods hats and creances pieces of string. Macdonald had taken this for teasing. After his death, she understood the habit differently: in his work as a photojournalist he had called photographs snaps and cameras kit, a way of speaking that had not been mockery. The practical preparation for Mabel’s arrival thus became another occasion for recognizing her father’s affection.

The first feeding that established trust did not happen in the solitude Macdonald had imagined. Christina was present when the hawk first ate from her glove. Mabel initially watched the room carefully; after a sudden burst of movement, she settled to the food and ate. Macdonald’s response was excitement complicated by disappointment that the moment had arrived in daylight, with another person and a television playing, rather than in private. The scene nevertheless marked a change in their relationship: the bird accepted food from Macdonald, and Macdonald began to read her actions as the beginnings of a shared routine.

Macdonald named the hawk Mabel while feeding her small pieces of meat. The name derives from a word meaning lovable or dear, and stood deliberately apart from the ominous, grand names she associated with T. H. White’s goshawk Gos. Naming Mabel also returned Macdonald to her own name. As she spoke the hawk’s name, she reflected that the people outside the window all had names, and then said her own: Helen. The naming scene therefore connects recognition of the bird as an individual with a renewed, if strange, awareness of herself.

Consequences and significance

Acquiring Mabel initiated an intensive practice of attention. In the first days, Macdonald learned to judge when to approach or withdraw by watching the hawk’s posture and feathers. Small changes conveyed fear, ease, or other states, and the demand to anticipate Mabel’s responses made Macdonald increasingly vigilant. She describes this learning as a movement toward the hawk’s point of view: the trainer’s task was not merely to impose a routine but to notice the bird’s cues and adjust her own behaviour accordingly.

The relationship also challenged inherited assumptions about the character of goshawks. Macdonald encountered older accounts that called them sulky, contrary, or difficult, but found in earlier falconry writing descriptions of birds that were shy and self-willed while also capable of familiarity and affection. The difference suggested that human treatment helped shape how a hawk behaved and how observers interpreted her. In one early interaction, Mabel played with paper offered to her, grasping and crunching it while Macdonald joined in. The unexpected play exposed a limitation in the books’ descriptions: the bird could not be reduced to the frightening, intractable figure those accounts had prepared Macdonald to expect.

Mabel’s acquisition also began a working relationship in which the bird remained an active participant rather than a possession that simply fulfilled Macdonald’s intentions. Macdonald later learned to interpret Mabel’s attention during training and hunting, including a pheasant chase in which she had to work out the hawk’s position while searching below. In another period, she made paper and card toys and played catch with Mabel, a practice that surprised Stuart because he did not expect goshawks to play. These later interactions grew from the initial choice on the quayside: Macdonald had selected the smaller bird through an unplanned act of recognition, and the relationship that followed continued to revise what she thought a goshawk could be. For Macdonald, acquiring Mabel was at once a response to bereavement, a commitment to close observation, and the beginning of a bond that changed how she understood both hawks and herself.