“The wild can be human work”

“The wild can be human work” is both a conclusion about the return of goshawks to Britain and a challenge to the idea that wildness must be untouched by people. The phrase holds together two facts that might seem opposed: humans helped restore a vanished population, while the birds that survived and bred remained self-reliant, elusive animals. Its meaning also develops through the narrator’s close work with Mabel the goshawk, where watching and care become ways of encountering, rather than mastering, another species.

A Return Made by People

British goshawks once bred across the British Isles, but land enclosure restricted ordinary people’s access to falconry, and accurate firearms made shooting more fashionable than flying hawks. Goshawks came to be treated as vermin; persecution by gamekeepers compounded habitat loss. By the late nineteenth century, the British population was extinct. The narrator recalls a photograph of one of the last birds shot: a stuffed specimen from a Scottish estate, its image fixing disappearance as something human actions had helped bring about.

In the 1960s and 1970s, falconers began an unofficial effort to reverse that loss. The British Falconers’ Club recognized that the cost of importing one goshawk for falconry could cover bringing in a second bird to release: buy one, set one free. Other falconers took up the practice across Britain. The imported birds came from Sweden, Germany, and Finland; many were large, pale birds from taiga forests. Some were deliberately released and others lost, but they survived, found mates, and bred. Their descendants eventually numbered around 450 pairs. The phrase gives this history its significance: human involvement did not cancel the birds’ wildness, and wildness did not require a landscape free of human history.

Beyond the Idea of Untouched Nature

The return of goshawks complicates a simple division between nature and human intervention. The falconers’ scheme created an opening, not a guarantee of control over what followed. The birds survived and reproduced beyond the immediate purposes for which individual falconers had brought them into the country. Their presence, in the narrator’s account, makes the notion of a wild world wholly separate from human hearts and hands untenable. Human action can help make conditions for wild life without making that life an artifact or possession.

The narrator’s sighting of a pair in the air gives that claim a particular shape. The goshawks soar above the canopy, mobbed by crows that do not deter them. The male moves above, beside, and beneath the female; the pair’s changing distances and courses make their flight legible as their own activity, not simply as an emblem of restoration. Then they disappear from view. The encounter joins a known human history of reintroduction to an animal presence that remains fleeting and independent of the observer’s ability to hold it in sight.

Class, Access, and the Making of “Noble” Birds

The phrase also sits within a history of unequal access to falconry. Falcons, the narrator later realizes, had been celebrated partly because flying them properly required extensive open land: grouse moors, partridge estates, and farmland more readily available to wealthy or well-connected people. A historical account by Gilbert Blaine calls possession of noble falcons an aristocratic privilege. Goshawks, by contrast, could hunt at close range from the fist and be flown in more places. Their solitary trainers, known as austringers, received a hostile reputation, while goshawks themselves were often described as difficult, coarse, or inferior to peregrines.

Older accounts offer a counterpoint. Simon Latham described goshawks as shy but sociable and familiar, and attributed their reactions in part to whether a falconer treated them harshly or with consideration. Edmund Bert imagined the keeper as the hawk’s friend and playfellow. The contrast does not erase the inequalities or assumptions embedded in falconry’s history; it shows that judgments about an animal’s character also depend on the human relationship and social values through which it is described. The narrator’s later account of hunting in Maine adds another comparison: there, common-law access allows hunting across the land, and local people take pride in a tradition less divided by Britain’s landed privileges. In these different settings, the meaning of a wild animal is entangled with who can approach, hunt, train, or write about it.

Learning to Attend to Another Animal

The expression’s relational meaning becomes intimate in the narrator’s training of Mabel the goshawk. The narrator explains that the work requires reading posture and feather position, then noticing increasingly subtle signs of the bird’s state. A hawk’s bodily cues allow a trainer to anticipate what it may do, but sustained attention also changes the observer: the narrator describes becoming so responsive to those cues that the hawk’s apprehension seems to become her own. This is not evidence that the two share a single experience. Rather, the account stresses both the discipline of attending and the limits of human access to the bird’s mind.

Those limits become vivid in the college garden. The narrator is overwhelmed by the speed and density of the changing surroundings, while Mabel tracks clouds, a passing aircraft, and insects. The account distinguishes the hawk’s perceptual world from the human one: birds have different color sensitivities, can see into the ultraviolet spectrum, and perceive forms of light the narrator cannot. The bird is not simply a figure for human feeling; her attention is directed toward details unavailable to the person watching her. In this sense, human work begins with learning that the animal’s world is not a human world made more vivid.

Play further unsettles the familiar image of the goshawk as merely difficult or severe. When Mabel first eats from the narrator’s hand, her calm is interrupted by a sudden burst of movement. The narrator initially reads the action as fear, then recognizes frustration and hunger instead. Later, Mabel engages with paper: she catches and tosses scrunched-up balls, and waits for another. The narrator’s friend Stuart doubts that a goshawk would play, yet their repeated game becomes a way to ease the isolation of the narrator’s life. The significance is reciprocal but not symmetrical: the narrator changes her assumptions about goshawks through Mabel’s behavior, while Mabel acts, chooses, and responds in ways that are not exhausted by what the narrator needs from her.

Wildness, Dependence, and Limits

The phrase does not make every human intervention benign, nor does it present the goshawk as a symbol that can be fully possessed by interpretation. The narrator confronts this limit in the account of a pheasant hunt after her father’s death. As she searches the hedge and tries to infer what Mabel is doing above her, her sense of self divides between observer and participant. When the pheasant finally rises and Mabel pursues it, the narrator’s disconnection gives way to a renewed sense of relation among herself, the hawk, the prey, and the unfolding moment. The episode connects human grief to the hunt without turning the bird’s action into a simple cure or allegory.

“Human work,” then, names a relationship rather than a claim of human ownership over the wild. People helped goshawks return to Britain; the narrator’s labor and attention made a working bond with Mabel possible. But the birds’ independent survival, their distinct sensory world, and their unexpected play all resist the idea that care means control. The phrase’s force lies in holding those truths together: human hands can help create the conditions in which wild lives persist, while those lives remain more than human intentions can define.