Helen Macdonald's sighting of wild goshawks in Brecklands is a defining encounter between patience, attention and loss. A pair appears above the trees, moves through the air together, and disappears into the wood; afterward, the wait recalls a childhood lesson from Helen's father. The memory takes on a further weight when, three weeks later, her mother calls to tell her that he has died.

Return of the goshawks

The encounter belongs to a landscape in which goshawks had returned through human action. In the 1960s and 1970s, members of the British Falconers’ Club organized an unofficial scheme: for the cost of importing a goshawk for falconry, they could bring in another bird and release it. Falcons came from across the Continent, including Sweden, Germany and Finland. Some were deliberately released; others were lost. The birds survived and bred, and their descendants came to number around four hundred and fifty pairs. The sighting therefore brings together wild flight and a concealed history of human intervention. The birds are not untouched by people, yet their continued existence unsettles the idea that wildness must be wholly separate from human work.

The pair above the canopy

At eight thirty, Helen looks up from a small sprig of mahonia and sees two goshawks soaring above the canopy. Crows mob them, but the birds do not seem disturbed. When a crow bears down on the male, he raises a wing to let it pass. The pair are not performing the dramatic skydiving Helen had read about. Instead, they occupy the space between them in a shifting pattern: the male passes above the female, drifts north, then slips below her before they rise again. Their flight makes the air between them seem measured and shaped.

The display ends almost as abruptly as it began. The pair vanish, apparently diving into the wood, and the sky is left blank. A sparrowhawk passes later, but the sighting has already changed the character of the wait: the birds came while Helen remained still, then were gone before she could hold on to the moment. The encounter depends as much on their sudden absence as on the flight itself.

A lesson recalled

Watching the sparrowhawk brings Helen back to a summer afternoon when she was nine, standing beside her father and looking for sparrowhawks nesting nearby. As a child, she fidgeted at the fence and found waiting difficult. Her father explained that patience mattered when someone wanted to see something badly. His work as a newspaper photographer gave him a practical example: he sometimes had to remain in his car for hours to get a picture. The lesson had sounded like a lecture to the child, but the adult Helen now recognizes its meaning in the sighting. She had stayed still, and the goshawks had come.

Afterward, she notices that she has been holding a small clump of reindeer moss. She takes it home and puts it on a shelf near the phone. Its ability to endure harsh conditions by becoming dormant gives the plant a quiet association with waiting. Three weeks later, it is the moss she is looking at when her mother calls with news of her father's death. The sighting thus becomes inseparable from the ordinary object carried home from it: a modest reminder of the day that, in retrospect, stands close to a loss she did not yet know was coming.

Significance in the narrative

The event links observation across two periods of Helen's life. The childhood memory supplies the lesson; the adult sighting shows that she has learned to practice it. The goshawks remain independent of her attention, appearing and disappearing on their own terms, while her patience allows her to witness them without controlling their movement. In the later recollection, the moss and the phone shelf give the encounter a material afterlife. What began as a brief view of wild birds becomes a marker of time: a memory of her father, preserved just before the call that makes the memory newly poignant.