Rabbit

Rabbit occupies a double role in Helen Macdonald’s account of falconry: it is an animal with its own life and habitat, and the quarry through which she confronts hunting, death, and responsibility. The pursuit can draw her into the hawk’s way of attending to the world; the moment of capture forces her back into a human obligation toward the animal. A sick Rabbit encountered beside a road makes that obligation part of a much larger history of disease and environmental change.

Habitat and Everyday Life

The book gives Rabbit a life beyond its function as quarry. Reflecting on an animal caught by Mabel the goshawk, Helen Macdonald imagines Rabbit growing up in a field, eating grass and dandelions, scratching its jaw with its feet, and moving through a warren. Rabbit has its own social world and can have young; it does not know loneliness in the way a solitary human might. These ordinary details resist the reduction of the animal to a target or a portion of food. Its life is situated in a landscape of fields, vegetation, and burrows, even when the falconer’s attention narrows to the requirements of a hunt.

Rabbit’s presence is also difficult to predict. In an oilseed-rape field, the dense crop conceals animals even where the vegetation seems too low to hide them. A European hare springs from the field, and Mabel pursues it twice in strong wind but fails to catch it. The scene distinguishes that open pursuit from the less visible lives concealed in the crop, and it shows the conditions of the landscape shaping what a hawk can detect and catch. Helen Macdonald is relieved that the hare escapes. The contrast matters: the field is not simply a stage arranged for the falconer but a place where prey can evade the hawk and where visibility is uncertain.

Quarry, Pursuit, and Responsibility

During a hunt near a farm, Helen Macdonald and Mabel approach a wood where three Rabbit silhouettes are feeding. A cock pheasant is nearby. As Mabel leaves the fist, the Rabbits run and the pheasant heads for cover; Mabel turns and disappears into the wood. The sequence makes the hunt a contest of movement and concealment rather than a guaranteed capture. In another flight, a cock pheasant rises unexpectedly from dry grass, and Mabel follows close behind. Wind disrupts her attack, the pheasant escapes over the wood, and Mabel returns to the fist. The pursuit is consequential even without a kill: the hawk acts on her own assessment of the quarry and conditions, while the falconer follows and responds.

When Mabel does catch a Rabbit, the meaning of the hunt changes for Helen Macdonald. She describes the hawk’s concentration on captured prey and her own need to ensure that the animal does not suffer. The death of Rabbit ends the falconer’s temporary identification with the predator: she must act as a human being accountable for what has happened. She had previously defended hawking by arguing that prey either escaped or was caught, and that what the hawk took was not wasted. The actual encounters make those explanations insufficient on their own. Responsibility attaches to the individual animal and to the human who has chosen to participate in the hunt.

This accountability extends beyond hunting. On a roadside, a group of walkers notices a Rabbit that is visibly ill but does not know how to intervene. After they leave, Helen Macdonald approaches and ends its suffering. The scene is a separate kind of encounter from falconry: the Rabbit is not quarry pursued by a hawk, and there is no hunt to complete. The walkers’ distress and inability to act, followed by Helen Macdonald’s decision, show how witnessing an animal’s suffering can demand a response even outside the relationship between falconer and hawk.

Myxomatosis and Ecological Loss

The roadside Rabbit has myxomatosis, linking one animal’s condition to a nationwide catastrophe. The disease arrived in Britain in 1952. Within two years, the virus had killed 95 percent of the British Rabbit population. Originating in South America, it had already been introduced by humans to Australia and Europe. The account describes consequences well beyond the animals themselves: tens of millions of corpses littered roads and fields, Rabbit-grazed grasslands grew thick with scrub, and predator populations fell. Rabbit populations later recovered, but not to the numbers people had once regarded as normal; outbreaks continue, although the virus has become less virulent.

For Helen Macdonald, the afflicted animal brings childhood memories of a countryside in crisis back into the present. The Rabbit becomes part of a remembered pattern that also includes falling hawk populations associated with agricultural pesticides, dead elm trees, lost otters, poisoned rivers, and seabirds affected by oil. These are distinct environmental harms, but their recurrence in her memory makes them feel connected. The account does not treat the sick Rabbit as a substitute for all those losses; rather, its presence gives a large-scale history a particular animal and an immediate human response.

Narrative Significance

Rabbit repeatedly tests the boundary between watching and participating. While Mabel pursues prey, Helen Macdonald’s attention can align with the hawk’s hunger, movement, and search. A capture changes that alignment: the prey’s death makes the consequences of the hunt unavoidable and places responsibility with the human participant. A Rabbit that dies from disease, by contrast, reveals the limits of the falconer’s role. It is neither a successful hunt nor an animal whose fate can be treated as abstract history; it is an individual encountered in distress, within a landscape shaped by a much wider epidemic.

The narrative also holds Rabbit’s ecological significance beside its ordinary life. The animal is prey, but not only prey: it eats, moves through a warren, and belongs to grasslands whose character changes when Rabbit numbers collapse. Its decline affects other species and habitats, while its partial recovery remains incomplete. Across the hunt, the roadside encounter, and the history of myxomatosis, Rabbit connects close observation to consequences that exceed any one field. The book’s attention to this animal therefore turns falconry from an exercise in watching wildlife into a question of what the watcher owes to the lives being watched.