British falconers' goshawk import-and-release scheme

The British falconers' goshawk import-and-release scheme was a quiet, unofficial effort that helped bring a vanished native bird back to Britain. Its defining exchange was practical as well as ecological: falconers importing a goshawk to fly could afford to bring in another and set it free. The birds survived and bred, making their return an instance of wildness shaped, rather than untouched, by human hands.

Extinction and the falconry context

Goshawks had once bred across the British Isles, but their place in the countryside was undermined by changes in land use and fashion. Land Enclosure restricted ordinary people’s ability to fly hawks, while accurate firearms made shooting more fashionable than falconry. As goshawks came to be treated as vermin rather than hunting companions, gamekeepers persecuted them; this pressure compounded habitat loss. By the late nineteenth century, British goshawks were extinct. A photograph of one of the last birds shot, stuffed and glassy-eyed, records the bleak endpoint that preceded the later return.

Access to falconry also followed social distinctions. Goshawks could be flown in many places because they hunted in quick, close-range dashes from the fist. Falcons, by contrast, required open country such as grouse moors, partridge estates, or extensive farmland—spaces less readily available to people without wealth or connections. The contrast helps place the scheme within a tradition in which the opportunity to fly a bird depended partly on access to land, even as falconers’ initiative would later contribute to the goshawk’s recovery.

The import-and-release method

In the 1960s and 1970s, the British Falconers’ Club worked out that the cost of importing one goshawk for falconry could cover the import of a second bird for release. The arrangement was informal: falconers brought birds from the Continent and released them in forests. The account describes the method as straightforward for a self-reliant predator: find a forest and open the transport box. Like-minded falconers adopted the practice in different parts of Britain, forming a dispersed effort rather than a single public restoration program.

The birds came from Sweden, Germany, and Finland. Many were large, pale goshawks associated with taiga forests. Not all returned to the wild through deliberate release: some were simply lost. The scheme’s outcomes therefore emerged through both purposeful action and birds’ subsequent survival outside captivity.

Survival and return

The released and lost birds survived, found one another, and bred, largely out of sight. Their descendants eventually numbered around 450 pairs. This population was not the result of an untouched wilderness reappearing on its own: its origins lay in imported birds, falconers’ decisions, and forests made available as release sites. Yet the birds’ persistence and breeding were not reducible to those human intentions; the goshawks survived and established themselves in the wild.

Significance

Helen Macdonald presents the goshawks’ return as evidence against the assumption that wildness must be wholly separate from human activity. The scheme did not erase the history of extinction, nor did it turn the birds into domesticated animals. Instead, it joined human intervention to the goshawks’ capacity to survive independently. Their presence in Britain made this altered landscape feel newly alive to Macdonald, and their history gives the scheme its larger significance: people can help make conditions in which wild animals return without thereby owning or domesticating the wildness that follows.