Extinction of the goshawk in Britain

The Extinction of the goshawk in Britain was a local disappearance, not a worldwide one: by the late nineteenth century, a bird once found across the British Isles no longer bred there. The book presents this loss as the outcome of changes in land, hunting and human attitudes, then measures its historical weight against a stark image of one of the last birds shot and preserved as a specimen.

Former Presence and Changing Status

Goshawks had once bred across the British Isles and were valued as hunting companions. Richard Blome’s 1618 account distinguished birds by the countries where they were bred, praising goshawks from several northern regions. That older place for the bird in falconry did not endure. With the spread of land enclosure, ordinary people had less opportunity to fly hawks, while accurate firearms made shooting more fashionable than falconry. The bird’s status shifted: from a hunting companion to vermin.

The decline also unfolded within a social hierarchy of falconry. Falcons were associated with aristocratic privilege partly because flying them properly required extensive open land, such as grouse moors or large estates. Goshawks could be flown in more varied places, while the solitary trainer of goshawks and sparrowhawks—the austringer—was disparaged in older writing. These contrasts do not, by themselves, explain the birds’ disappearance, but they show how access to land and judgments about class shaped the culture in which different birds were valued.

Causes of the Disappearance

The account identifies several pressures rather than a single cause. Habitat loss had already weakened the population; persecution by gamekeepers was described as the final blow. The change from falconry to firearms mattered too: once goshawks were treated as vermin rather than as useful hunting birds, killing them became part of their new place in the countryside.

The decline was therefore both ecological and cultural. The loss of habitat reduced the population’s prospects, while changing land use and hunting fashions altered how people encountered the birds. The book’s history of falconry makes the social dimension visible: restrictions on ordinary people’s access to land narrowed who could practise hawking, even as shooting gained prestige. The disappearance belongs to that wider transformation, though the evidence does not assign a separate share of responsibility to each pressure.

The Last Birds and the Meaning of Loss

A photograph of one of the last goshawks shot in Britain gives the extinction a particular material trace. The bird, from a Scottish estate, survives in a black-and-white image as a stuffed specimen, its appearance fixed after death. The account does not treat the photograph as proof of a precise final date; instead, it stands for a population already gone by the late nineteenth century.

The preserved bird also contrasts with the living, elusive goshawks encountered elsewhere in the book. A specimen can be kept and examined, but it cannot restore the bird’s former place in the landscape. The photograph turns a broad historical absence into an individual remnant, while the narrative’s attention to changing attitudes shows that extinction was not simply the disappearance of an animal: it was also the loss of a relationship in which people had once flown goshawks as companions.

Return and Historical Significance

The account later describes an unofficial effort by falconers in the 1960s and 1970s to bring goshawks back to Britain. The British Falconers’ Club helped establish a practice of importing birds for falconry and releasing additional birds; others followed, and birds from northern Europe survived and bred. Their descendants eventually numbered around 450 pairs. This later return does not undo the earlier extinction, but it changes the story from a permanent absence into one of loss followed by human-assisted recovery.

That recovery complicates any simple opposition between human influence and wild nature. The original extinction followed habitat pressure, persecution and changing hunting practices; the later population was established through deliberate human action, yet the birds survived and bred in the wild. In the book’s account, the history of the British goshawk is thus a record of how people can help make a species disappear—and, under different circumstances, help make its return possible.