Peregrine falcon

The Peregrine falcon is at once a bird admired for its aerial ability and a figure through which Helen Macdonald examines class, cultural ideals, and the stories people impose on wildlife. In her account, the gap between a living falcon and its symbolic afterlives matters: the same bird can signify aristocratic privilege, military power, or a world imagined as already disappearing.

Identity and reputation

Macdonald recalls that falcons were the raptors she loved before she chose to train a goshawk. She valued their speed, ease in the air, and spectacular high flights, and the falconry books she read reinforced her sense that the Peregrine was an exemplary bird. The praise was not simply a description of the animal. Writing in 1936, Gilbert Blaine presented the Peregrine as the most perfect expression of power, speed, and grace. Macdonald later recognized that this idealization was connected to the people who could afford to fly falcons.

Falcons require open space for the kind of hunting described in the book: grouse moors, partridge estates, and extensive farmland. Those landscapes were difficult to access without wealth or influential connections. Blaine’s account explicitly connected possession of the so-called noble falcons with aristocratic privilege. The Peregrine’s elevated reputation therefore reflects both its celebrated flight and a social world in which the land needed to fly it was unequally available.

Falconry and social distinction

Macdonald sets the Peregrine’s standing against the poorer reputation of the solitary goshawk trainer, or austringer. Falconry writing repeatedly ranked the falcon above the goshawk, attaching nobility and admiration to the former while describing the latter as difficult and disagreeable. That contrast exposes how judgments about birds can reproduce judgments about the people who handle them: the aristocratic falconer and the solitary austringer occupy different positions in the same hierarchy.

The book also unsettles the apparent naturalness of that hierarchy. Macdonald’s own experience with falcons included friendly birds kept by falconers on suburban lawns, a setting at odds with the remote, exclusive landscapes that helped define the Peregrine’s prestige. Her account thus distinguishes the living bird from the cultural image built around it. Neither the aristocratic ideal nor the opposing stereotypes applied to other hawks can fully contain an animal encountered in particular relations and circumstances.

The falcon as warplane

The Peregrine’s association with speed and predation also helped bind birds of prey to military aviation. Macdonald describes how military propagandists treated raptors as natural counterparts to aircraft: both fly, hunt, and kill. This analogy made air warfare appear continuous with nature, while falconry’s medieval associations supplied a romantic history for modern military power.

A striking example appears in Powell and Pressburger’s 1944 film A Canterbury Tale. A knight releases a falcon on the way to Canterbury; the film cuts from its flight to the silhouette of a diving Spitfire. When the knight appears again, he wears the helmet of a modern soldier. The visual transition links the medieval past to contemporary war and suggests an unchanging national identity. The Peregrine’s flight becomes part of that imaginative bridge: an animal’s movement is recruited to make military technology seem both timeless and natural.

Literature, extinction, and the living bird

Macdonald’s reading of J. A. Baker’s The Peregrine, an account of watching wintering wild falcons in Essex in the late 1960s, produces a darker version of the bird. She had remembered the book as a celebration of nature, but rereading it, she recognizes a preoccupation with death and annihilation. In her interpretation, Baker’s falcons are already made into figures of extinction: the threatened world seems to vanish around them, and the birds become images of a loss that has not yet fully happened.

That literary inheritance can shape encounters with real animals. Macdonald observes that many bird-loving friends read Baker before seeing a live Peregrine, and consequently associate actual falcons with distance, extinction, and death. Her own earlier experience ran in the opposite direction: she had met living, sociable falconer’s birds before reading the book. The contrast does not make either encounter unreal; it shows how prior stories can guide what people notice and what they believe a wild animal represents.

The Peregrine also belongs to Macdonald’s broader account of watching, memory, and flight. Her father watched aircraft, while she learned to attend to birds; she comes to understand these interests as historically entangled rather than wholly separate. The bird can therefore be both an independent creature and a screen for human meanings, but the narrative keeps those roles in tension. Against the falcon reduced to a sign of war or extinction stands the living bird encountered outside the page: not an emblem that exhausts its identity, but an animal whose meanings have been made by changing relations, landscapes, and histories.