“If you want to see hawks, you have to be patient”

“If you want to see hawks, you have to be patient” is a lesson in attention that changes meaning over time. Helen Macdonald first hears it as a child waiting with her father for Sparrowhawks; as an adult, she recognizes it in her own stillness while watching hawks, and the recollection becomes bound to the memento she kept before learning that her father had died.

A lesson learned while waiting

On a July afternoon in Surrey, nine-year-old Helen Macdonald waits with her father for Sparrowhawks nesting nearby. She fidgets at the fence, bored by the long search. Her father, a newspaper photographer, explains that patience is essential when trying to see something one badly wants to see. He describes sitting for hours in a car to get a photograph, unable to leave even for tea or the loo. His advice is serious, but the child hears it as a lecture and does not yet understand its point.

The lesson is not simply to wait passively. It joins stillness to attention and to a continuing desire to see: the watcher must remain in place long enough for an encounter that cannot be commanded. The father’s work as a photographer gives that principle a practical example, while his words make it a form of guidance he passes to his daughter.

Patience as a practiced form of attention

Years later, after waiting motionless for hawks, Macdonald recognizes that she has become patient. The birds have appeared; she rises slowly, her legs numb, and finds a small clump of reindeer moss in her hand. She takes it home as a memento and sets it on a shelf near the phone. The moss, which can survive by becoming dormant and waiting for conditions to improve, gives physical form to the patience her father described.

The remembered instruction also resonates with the practice of watching a newly acquired hawk. Macdonald describes sitting quietly with the bird, attending to its fearful posture and waiting for it to lower its head and feed. In this falconry practice, called watching by older falconers, patience is active attention: small changes in the hawk matter, and the desired moment cannot be forced. The lesson from her father’s work and the discipline of hawk-watching meet in the same careful refusal to interrupt what must unfold in its own time.

The memento and the news of death

Three weeks after Macdonald brings the moss home, her mother calls to tell her that her father is dead. Later, while watching the hawk, Macdonald notices a small feather drifting to the carpet and remembers how intently she had looked at the moss on the day of that phone call. The recurrence links the childhood lesson, her adult practice of watching, and the loss that followed the earlier hawk sighting. Patience remains a method of attention, but the objects associated with it also hold memories of her father and of the moment she learned he was gone.