Patience in hawk-watching

Patience in hawk-watching is an active discipline of remaining still and attentive until a bird appears, rather than trying to force a sighting. Learned from Helen Macdonald’s father during a childhood search for sparrowhawks, the principle returns in her adult watching and becomes inseparable from the memory of his death.

The lesson from Helen's father

As a child in Surrey, Helen waited with her father for sparrowhawks nesting nearby. When she fidgeted, he explained that a person who wanted to see something had to stay in the same place and be patient. His example came from his work as a newspaper photographer: he might sit in a car for hours for a picture, unable to leave even for tea or a visit to the toilet. To him, patience was practical knowledge about how seeing depended on waiting. To his nine-year-old daughter, it sounded like a lecture, and she did not yet understand its point.

Patience as a practice

Years later, after remaining motionless through a watch, Helen recognized that she had learned what her father meant: she was no longer bored, and the hawks had come. The lesson is not simply to endure delay, but to hold attention in place without disturbing the possibility of encounter. It also sits alongside the gentleness required in handling a goshawk. A seventeenth-century account by Richard Blome describes such hawks as wary of people and dogs, remembering rough treatment, but capable of becoming tractable when handled gently. Patience and gentleness thus meet in a practice that responds to the bird rather than demanding an immediate result.

Reindeer moss and remembrance

After the watch, Helen found a small clump of reindeer moss in her hand and took it home as a memento. Its capacity to survive freezing and drying by becoming dormant made it, to her, patience made visible: it could wait for conditions to improve. She placed the moss on a shelf near the phone. Three weeks later, she was looking at it when Helen's mother called to tell her that Helen's father had died. The object carried the earlier lesson into bereavement, giving the memory of patient watching a material form at the moment it became bound to loss.