Goshawk observation in Breckland

Helen Macdonald’s goshawk observation in the Brecklands is a brief encounter shaped by waiting: after an unsettled night and an unplanned drive, she sees a pair of goshawks above the forest canopy, then watches them disappear. The sighting gives physical form to a lesson in patience that her father had once tried to teach her, and becomes bound to the news of his death three weeks later.

Setting and Search

The Brecklands lie forty-five minutes north-east of Cambridge, where wet fen gives way to dry sand. The landscape Macdonald describes holds twisted pines, forestry blocks, military installations, and open fields; spring brings together aircraft, farm noise, and woodland birds. This is not an untouched wilderness. Its human traces are part of the place through which she goes looking for a bird that is difficult to see.

The trip begins before dawn, after a night when Macdonald feels overtired and mentally unsettled. She leaves home without having first decided where to go. Halfway along the A14, she recognizes the destination: the forest, and the hope of seeing goshawks. Her purpose is not simply to find a large bird. Goshawks are elusive woodland hunters, and a week in a forest where they live might yield only indirect signs: other birds abruptly calling, a sudden quiet, or a fleeting glimpse of movement. The possibility of seeing one depends in part on restraint and attention.

Macdonald knows that early spring can offer a better chance on clear, still mornings, when goshawks may leave the cover of the trees to court in the open sky. She walks into the frost-washed forest with binoculars and looks for clearings. Some ground has changed since her previous visit: clear-cut areas expose torn roots and scattered pine needles. Moving through the broken light and the narrow shadows between stands of trees, she finds that the search has changed her own manner of moving. She becomes alert to calls from jays and crows, which might signal either a human presence or a goshawk. Her task is to look for the bird while making herself less conspicuous.

The Pair Above the Canopy

At exactly 8:30, while looking down at a small sprig of mahonia, Macdonald glances up and sees two goshawks soaring above the canopy. Their grey is not the uniform slate or pigeon colour she might have expected; she notices the white undertail feathers fanned beneath the tail and the curved shape of the wings. Crows mob the pair, but the goshawks continue their flight without apparent concern.

The birds are not performing the dramatic skydiving displays Macdonald has read about. Instead, the male moves around the female in repeated, measured passes. He rises above her, drifts to one side, then drops beneath her before they soar upward again. Their flight occupies the space between them, a changing pattern of distances and curves rather than a single display. Macdonald watches them over the pines until they are suddenly gone. She cannot say whether she blinked or looked away; in the instant she cannot account for, the birds have dived into the wood and the sky is empty.

She sits down, tired but content. The encounter does not end in a prolonged view or a close approach: its brevity is part of what makes it memorable. The birds have appeared in open sky and then returned to the concealment that makes them so difficult to watch. A sparrowhawk passes later at knee height, but Macdonald remains absorbed in recollection of the goshawks.

Patience and Her Father

The sighting recalls Macdonald’s childhood visits with her father to watch sparrowhawks. At nine, she found waiting difficult: she kicked at a fence, fidgeted, and grew bored while they watched the trees. Her father explained that patience was necessary when trying to see something one wanted very much. He connected birdwatching to his work as a newspaper photographer, where obtaining a picture could mean remaining in a car for hours without getting up.

As an adult, Macdonald recognizes that she has learned what she could not take in as a child. She had stayed still, and the goshawks had come. After the sighting, she finds a small clump of reindeer moss in her hand and takes it home as a memento. The moss, which can survive by waiting through difficult conditions, makes patience tangible to her. She puts it on a shelf near the phone. Three weeks later, her mother calls to tell her that her father has died. The remembered lesson and the private object thus become joined to the news: the forest visit precedes the loss, and the moss remains beside the phone when that loss is announced.

Observation Beyond the Sighting

The encounter also establishes a recurring problem in Macdonald’s account: close attention can change the observer’s sense of separation from the animal being watched. Later, while training Mabel the goshawk, she describes learning to read small changes in posture, feathers, and expression. Watching closely enough to anticipate the hawk’s next action can make the observer feel less like a detached spectator and more like a participant in the bird’s perceptions. The Brecklands search offers an early, less intimate instance of this discipline: Macdonald adjusts her movement to the birds’ possible presence, listens to signals in the forest, and waits for a moment she cannot summon at will.

The later relationship with Mabel also complicates any expectation that watching a goshawk means seeing only a symbol of wildness. Macdonald discovers that the bird responds to paper toys and plays catch with them, an experience that unsettles what she had assumed goshawks could be. That later knowledge does not alter what happened in the Brecklands, where the pair remained distant and quickly vanished. It does, however, extend the significance of the first sighting: patient observation begins not with possession or mastery, but with attending to an animal whose appearance, behaviour, and absence remain partly beyond the observer’s control.