Sparrowhawk

In T. H. White’s account, Sparrowhawk is both a mistaken identification and the object of an increasingly absorbing pursuit. The birds he sees in the woods are later identified as hobbies, not Sparrowhawks; yet White’s belief that he has found Sparrowhawks helps redirect his attention from Gos and becomes entangled with the larger story of loss, guilt, and waiting.

Identity and Misidentification

White first notices the birds in Three Parks Wood about a month before he begins trying to catch one. He remembers them as small, fast, sharply winged and highly aerial, moving around a tree in close formation in a way that recalls aircraft turning at the Hatfield air race. He knows they are not kestrels, hopes they might be peregrines, and settles on Sparrowhawks as the likeliest identification.

The retrospective account corrects him: the birds are hobbies, small migratory falcons with dark hoods, reddish leg feathers, and pale brows. They catch small birds and insects in flight. A bird that hunts in the air would not be drawn down by the tethered blackbird White uses as ground bait, making his plan poorly matched to the species he is actually pursuing. The distinction is consequential: the episode shows how White’s desire to catch a bird outruns his understanding of what he has seen.

White’s Pursuit

White constructs a bow-net from an ash wand bent into a U, leather hinges, and knotted strawberry netting. He intends to bait it with a tethered blackbird and catch a bird in the wood. He later makes a hide of poles and branches, places the trap fifteen feet away, and covers it with dust and leaves. His practical care in making the apparatus contrasts with the mistaken premise on which it depends.

The pursuit becomes a new fixation. White knows that he is neglecting Gos, but he tells himself that catching a Sparrowhawk will serve a former pupil whose pet bird has been lost, and that the challenge will test him against something harder than training Gos. Helen Macdonald, looking back as an adult, reads the episode differently: she sees White as turning his attention elsewhere because the intimacy he has achieved with Gos is difficult for him to trust. This is Macdonald’s later interpretation, not a motive White states at the time.

From Failed Traps to Waiting

In a later episode, news of agitated rooks sends White hurrying to nearby woods, where he finds neither Gos nor the Sparrowhawk he hopes to locate. He sometimes thinks he hears the birds, but allows that the calls might be owls. His search proceeds amid uncertain reports rather than reliable sightings, and he continues to set traps and sit for long periods in a woodland hide.

White adapts a gamekeeper’s pole trap by filing down its teeth and padding its spring-loaded jaws with felt. He also constructs another trap based on a falconry description: a tethered blackbird sits inside a ring of feathers, with running twine arranged to catch a bird’s legs if it takes the bait. He cannot catch a blackbird to use in this design. The practical failure deepens the episode’s pattern of effort without result: the birds remain elusive, and White’s elaborate preparations do not bring back Gos.

He eventually writes to Renz Waller in Berlin to ask for another hawk. He knows that the season may be too late for a young bird and that passage hawks are scarce. He posts the letter from Buckingham and waits, but no reply comes. The absent Sparrowhawk is thus part of a wider absence: White waits for the birds he cannot catch, for news from abroad, and for a substitute for the hawk he has lost.

Falconry, Access, and Narrative Significance

Macdonald places the episode against the social distinctions attached to different forms of falconry. A goshawk can be flown in many places because it makes a short dash from the fist after nearby prey; flying falcons properly requires expanses of open land, such as grouse moors, partridge estates, or large farmland, which are difficult to access without wealth or connections. Historical writing consequently associated falcons with aristocratic privilege, while the solitary trainer of goshawks and Sparrowhawks received a less prestigious image. The pursuit in the wood belongs to this tradition of more solitary hawking, even though White’s sought-after birds prove to be falcons of another kind.

For Macdonald, the mistaken name does not make the birds incidental. It exposes the gap between an animal’s actual life and the human purpose assigned to it: White sees a possible quarry and a test, while the later account identifies birds whose aerial feeding habits make his bait ineffective. Their elusiveness also gives the narrative a recurring image of hope organized around uncertain signs. White’s attempts to find them continue after the original sighting, but they yield neither the Sparrowhawk he imagines nor the return of Gos.