A Treatise of Hawks and Hawking

A Treatise of Hawks and Hawking is a falconry book associated with Edmund Bert whose account of goshawks gives Helen Macdonald a historical alternative to the familiar image of the bird as sulky and intractable. Its emphasis on kindness, attention, and companionship reframes the relationship between falconer and hawk: not merely a contest of control, but a practice shaped by the bird’s independent responses.

Nature and Historical Context

Helen encounters the treatise while comparing falconry books about goshawks. Later writers describe the birds as disagreeable, contrary, or difficult to manage, and attribute their behaviour to a supposedly fixed disposition. Bert’s book, by contrast, belongs to an earlier tradition. Simon Latham, writing in 1615, presents goshawks as sociable and familiar while also shy and fearful. Their response to rough treatment matters: with kindness and consideration, they can become affectionate toward their keepers.

The difference is more than a change in descriptive language. The harsher accounts make the hawk’s resistance seem like an inherent defect; the earlier writing asks what the falconer has done to earn or undermine the bird’s trust. Bert’s account therefore stands out in Macdonald’s comparison as a model in which the hawk’s behaviour is relational, not simply evidence of a troublesome nature.

A Relationship of Care and Play

Bert describes the keeper as responsible for meeting the hawk’s needs so that she can find pleasure in her own life. He presents himself as his goshawk’s friend and playfellow. That formulation gives the bird a place beyond the role of hunting instrument: she is a distinct participant in a relationship whose terms depend on attention to her welfare and temperament.

Macdonald is drawn to this account because it accepts the hawk’s difference without treating it as a problem to be suppressed. She does not claim that the early falconers’ attitudes made their historical society equitable; rather, she values their stated willingness to court the hawks’ trust and seek their companionship. Against later descriptions of goshawks as irrationally moody, Bert’s account allows for a bird who can be wary and brave, affectionate and self-willed.

Reading the Book Beside Mabel

Macdonald reads Bert’s treatise while reconsidering her own assumptions about goshawks. Soon afterward, Mabel turns a strip of paper over in her beak, plays with it, and follows Macdonald’s improvised paper-telescope game. The encounter surprises her: the books she has read did not prepare her to see a goshawk at play. The scene does not prove that Bert’s account caused Mabel’s behaviour; instead, the book helps make room for a fuller understanding of what the bird may do.

That understanding develops through sustained attention to small cues and responses. In training, posture and feather position can indicate whether a hawk is afraid or at ease, while finer changes may disclose subtler moods. Mabel’s play with paper and her later games of catching and tossing scrunched paper show how interaction can exceed the expected pattern of handling and hunting. Read beside these encounters, Bert’s language of friendship and play becomes a useful counterweight to descriptions that reduce the goshawk to a difficult temperament.

Practical and Historical Afterlife

The treatise also serves as a working object for another falconer. T. H. White writes a detailed plan for training a new goshawk on the inside cover of a fresh copy, giving the book a place in the practical preparation for handling a bird. The hawk he expected did not arrive as planned: White was taken to hospital with appendicitis the day before she was due. The notes nevertheless show the manual being used not only as a record of older ideas but as a surface for planning future practice.

Macdonald’s broader account links falconry to unequal access to land and status. Falcons suited hunting over extensive open country, opportunities more readily available to wealthy or well-connected practitioners, while goshawks could be flown in more varied settings. Her comparison with hunting in Maine, where common-law access to land supports a more egalitarian tradition than the British system she describes, underscores how hunting practices and reputations are shaped by social arrangements as well as by birds. Within that history, A Treatise of Hawks and Hawking matters as a record of a more companionable approach to the goshawk—and as a reminder that the bird’s character cannot be separated from how people choose to observe and treat her.