Hobby

Hobbies are small migratory falcons whose appearance in Three Parks Wood draws T. H. White away from Gos and into an attempted capture. Their swift aerial movement inspires his fascination, but he misidentifies them as sparrowhawks; the gap between what the birds are and what he believes them to be shapes the episode’s practical failure and its significance as a diversion from his training of Gos.

Identification and Appearance

White first sees the birds racing around a tree, wingtip to wingtip, in a steep bank that recalls aircraft circling pylons at an air race. Their speed and precision make them seem to him like an aviator’s dream. He knows they are not kestrels and hopes they might be peregrines, but settles on sparrowhawks. The account later identifies them as hobbies: small, dark-hooded migratory falcons with rust-red trousers and fine white brows.

That retrospective correction changes the meaning of White’s plan. The birds he imagines he is pursuing are not the sparrowhawks he thinks he has recognized. The book also places their rarity in time: hobbies were fantastically rare in the 1930s, whereas they are much commoner today.

Hunting and the Failed Method

Hobbies catch small birds and insects in mid-air. White, believing the birds to be sparrowhawks, makes a bow-net intended to catch one on the ground: he bends a stripped ash wand into a U, attaches leather hinges, and covers the frame with knotted strawberry netting. His plan is to bait it with a tethered blackbird and pull the net over a hawk drawn down to earth.

The method depends on a kind of approach the hobbies’ hunting does not offer. As the account explains, a blackbird tethered to the ground would not have been an effective way to trap these aerial hunters. White nevertheless builds a hide from poles and branches, sets the trap fifteen feet away, and scatters dust and leaves over it to conceal it. The detailed construction gives the pursuit a practical, experimental quality, even as the mistaken identification has already made its premise unsound.

White, the Hobbies, and Gos

The hobbies have occupied White’s thoughts since he first saw them a month earlier. Their novelty becomes a craze he calls his insensate El Dorado, and the pursuit takes attention away from Gos. White tells himself that he is trying to catch a bird for Peter Low, a former pupil who had lost a pet sparrowhawk. He also tells himself that training Gos has become too easy and that catching another bird would test him against something harder.

Helen Macdonald offers a more searching interpretation: she sees the quest as White’s final test of Gos. In her reading, White has won someone’s love but is unsure whether it can be trusted, and so turns his attention obsessively elsewhere. This is presented as Macdonald’s retrospective understanding, not as an explanation White himself gives. The hobbies’ narrative importance lies partly in this contrast: their imagined capture supplies White with a new challenge at the very moment his existing relationship with Gos calls for sustained attention.

Narrative Significance

The episode sets the visible attraction of the hobbies—their speed, aerial skill, and resemblance to aircraft—against the mistaken assumptions that guide White’s response. His net, bait, and concealed hide show the effort he devotes to bringing the birds within reach; their actual hunting habits expose how little that effort fits the animals he is pursuing. The hobbies thus appear not only as objects of fascination but as independent wild birds whose behavior resists White’s plan.

Their pursuit also illuminates the unstable boundary between practical falconry and personal projection in Macdonald’s account. White frames the attempt as a test of skill and as a favor to Peter Low, while Macdonald reads it in relation to his neglect of Gos. The supplied account establishes the preparation and motivation for the trapping attempt but does not state its outcome.