Mabel the goshawk

Mabel the goshawk is the hawk Helen Macdonald chooses and trains after years of preferring falcons and distrusting goshawks. Her arrival begins a relationship shaped by careful handling, setbacks, and small signs of trust. As the bird gradually attends to her surroundings and accepts food from Helen Macdonald, the narrative also questions the inherited descriptions of female goshawks as difficult, irrational, or inferior to more prestigious falcons.

Identity and Background

Before choosing a goshawk, Helen Macdonald had regarded the species with apprehension. She associated goshawks with death, difficulty, and life in dense woodland, while she loved falcons for their speed, ease in flight, and sociability. The contrast was not only a matter of personal taste. Falconry with falcons required extensive open country, such as grouse moors and large farmland estates, making it more accessible to people with wealth or connections. Historical writing accordingly presented falcons as noble birds and their possession as an aristocratic privilege.

Goshawks occupied a lower place in that hierarchy. The solitary trainer of goshawks and sparrowhawks, known as an austringer, had been mocked in older writing as antisocial and ungainly; the birds themselves were described by later falconers as coarse, difficult, and ill-tempered. Helen Macdonald had absorbed some of this tradition and expected a goshawk to be hard to manage. Mabel the goshawk enters the story against that accumulated reputation, which the training episodes gradually put under pressure.

Arrival and First Handling

At the collection, the hawks were kept in separate boxes. The first bird removed was the younger and smaller one, not the bird Helen Macdonald had chosen. The ring numbers showed the mistake, and the hawk was returned before the larger, older bird was taken out. That second bird was Mabel the goshawk. She had been raised in captivity: after hatching in an incubator, she had been fed by the man caring for her, who had patiently offered her food with tweezers. Helen Macdonald’s response to his care was immediate affection, even as the hawk’s unfamiliarity and distress made her own first encounter daunting.

At home, Mabel the goshawk initially sat hooded on her perch. Helen Macdonald put on her falconry glove, lifted the bird onto her fist, and untied the knot securing the leash. When Mabel the goshawk leapt away in alarm, Helen Macdonald returned her to the glove gently, following the patient method described by T. H. White. She also checked the hawk’s condition against the principle of flying weight: a bird too heavy might not want to fly, while one too light could lack the energy to fly well. Feeling the hawk’s breastbone and noticing her heartbeat made the abstract practice of assessment intimate and unsettling.

The early work required the bird to encounter a changed environment without being overwhelmed by it. Mabel the goshawk first reacted to Helen Macdonald as a threat, but later began to inspect the room: the shelves, walls, floor, ceiling, and rug. While absorbed in those surroundings, she turned and noticed Helen Macdonald, then jumped in surprise. For Helen Macdonald, this brief reversal mattered. The hawk had momentarily ceased to organize her attention around the human presence; that lapse suggested a beginning of acceptance, while also making the hawk’s independent attention itself a source of pleasure.

Learning to Share Attention

Mabel the goshawk’s first eating from the glove did not happen in the secluded, solemn circumstances Helen Macdonald had imagined. Christina visited with coffee and newspapers. At Helen Macdonald’s request, Christina ignored the hawk and continued reading while the hood was removed. Mabel the goshawk watched her turn the pages, then eventually bated from the fist. Helen Macdonald initially took the movement as a sign that the bird needed to rest, but recognized that frustration and hunger, rather than fear, had prompted it. The hawk then ate the meat beneath her feet and, after finishing, roused—a movement that indicated contentment and that she had not performed before.

The first approach to taking food from the glove developed through repeated, cautious exchanges. Mabel the goshawk would not yet allow herself to be picked up without bating, but she began to take small pieces of meat from the floor. Helen Macdonald moved slowly across the room, stopping whenever the hawk tensed. An initial attempt to offer food on the glove ended with the hawk leaping away; on a later attempt, Mabel the goshawk leaned forward and took the meat. She accepted several more pieces. The change was modest but concrete: food, rather than force, gave the bird a reason to reconsider the human’s place in her world.

Naming and Relationship

Helen Macdonald named the hawk Mabel. The name, associated with the Latin amabilis, suggested someone lovable or dear, and deliberately stood far from the dark, grand names that T. H. White had given his hawk. Helen Macdonald had once found that naming style excessive; now it seemed sad beside the name she wanted for her own bird. Choosing Mabel’s name became a way of refusing to make her an emblem of death or menace.

The act of naming also brought Helen Macdonald’s own name newly into view. As she said the hawk’s name aloud, she reflected that the people outside the window all had names, and then said her own: Helen. The episode links the developing bond to a shift in self-perception, but it does not make the hawk merely a reflection of her. Mabel the goshawk remains attentive to food, movement, and her surroundings on her own terms; Helen Macdonald must learn to meet that attention rather than assume the bird will respond as a human companion would.

Gendered Reputation and Narrative Significance

A visitor suggested that Helen Macdonald and Mabel the goshawk would naturally get on because both were female. Helen Macdonald rejected the idea that their sexes explained the bird’s behavior, though the remark led her to investigate what falconry books had said about female goshawks. Many later writers characterized them as sulky, contrary, or determined to frustrate their keepers. Such accounts treated the birds’ reactions as innate defects and rarely considered whether a falconer’s conduct contributed to fear or resistance.

Earlier writing offered a different account. Seventeenth-century falconers described goshawks as shy but sociable, responsive to rough treatment yet capable of affection when handled with kindness and courtesy. They could be self-willed as well as companionable. Helen Macdonald’s reading does not erase the bird’s difficulty or make her behavior predictable; instead, it makes the falconer’s responsibility part of the explanation. The contrast between these accounts helps frame Mabel the goshawk not as a naturally unreasonable creature, but as a distinct animal whose responses require attention and care.

That reassessment sits within a wider history of hunting and access. The book contrasts the class-bound British landscape of exclusive estates and elite hunting grounds with Maine, where common-law access to land supported a more egalitarian hunting tradition. The difference helps expose how social privilege shaped the prestige attached to particular forms of falconry. Mabel the goshawk’s significance is therefore both personal and historical: her training tests whether trust can be built across species, while her reputation reveals how human hierarchies and assumptions have helped define what counts as a noble bird and what is dismissed as a troublesome one.