Psychological projection in falconry

Psychological projection in falconry describes the way falconers make hawks carry human meanings: ideals of rank and masculinity, fears of disorder, or desires a person has tried to suppress. In Helen Macdonald’s account, the practice is never only a technical relationship between trainer and bird. It can also become a contest over who the hawk is allowed to be—and a mirror in which the falconer encounters an altered image of himself.

Class, character, and the birds people admired

Macdonald traces one projection to the social prestige of falconry. Falcons were celebrated as noble and perfect, but flying them properly required extensive open ground, such as grouse moors, partridge estates, or large farms. Access to those places was easier for the wealthy and well connected. The language of admiration therefore accompanied a privilege of access: the supposedly superior bird was also the bird associated with aristocratic sport.

Goshawk and sparrowhawk trainers occupied a different position in this hierarchy. The solitary austringer was disparaged in older writing as graceless and antisocial, while goshawks were described as difficult, ill-tempered, and threatening. These judgments made the bird appear to confirm the trainer’s low status: the solitary person and the supposedly unruly hawk were both placed outside the polished world of elite falconry. Macdonald’s comparison shows how judgments about an animal can encode judgments about the people who keep it, turning differences in access and hunting practice into apparent differences of nature.

The contrast also reveals a contradiction in the language of falconry. A goshawk’s close-range hunting style meant that it could be flown in places where a falcon’s pursuit required more space. Yet the practical flexibility of the goshawk did not earn it the same cultural esteem. The hierarchy was not simply a measure of a bird’s abilities; it reflected the land, status, and social identity that different forms of hunting demanded.

Taking the hawk’s qualities—and mastering them

Macdonald identifies a further projection in nineteenth-century falconry books. Their falconers imagined modern life as threatening qualities coded as masculine: wildness, strength, independence, power, and virility. By identifying with a hawk during training, a man could symbolically repossess these traits. At the same time, he exercised authority by making a wild creature conform to human expectations. The bird thus served two purposes at once: it represented the power the falconer wanted for himself, and the disorder he wanted to govern.

This double movement matters. The hawk is not merely admired as an emblem of freedom, nor simply subdued as a problem. The falconer’s identification with it can make training seem like a way to recover personal strength, while the act of training reasserts human control. Macdonald reads that combination as an imperial pattern: the trainer claims the animal’s strength and, in the same gesture, presents its transformation as civilization. The imagined exchange is unequal even when it feels intimate—the man takes the qualities he values, while the hawk is expected to take on the manners he approves.

T. H. White and the lost goshawk

In T. H. White’s case, the projection is more inward and more dangerous. A story in Gilbert Blaine’s falconry book describes a lost goshawk that became feral. White responded to that possibility as an image of freedom: he wanted to become feral, ferocious, and free himself. He found in the hawk a figure for parts of his own life and character that he had tried to exclude, including his sexuality and his desire for mastery and cruelty. Training the bird became, in his imagination, a way to teach both hawk and self.

White’s hopes were bound up with the pressures surrounding him. He was dissatisfied with his life at Stowe, had turned away from earlier pursuits, and feared the coming war and the collapse of the civilization he distrusted. He imagined retreating to the countryside and surviving through the hawk’s hunting. The bird offered a way to picture an alternative self: apart from the schoolroom and metropolis, aligned with ferocity rather than gentility. But the hawk could not simply release White from the conflicts he had placed in it. In Macdonald’s interpretation, he was trying to civilize in the goshawk the very unruliness he longed to claim.

An earlier encounter with foxhunting helps explain the appeal of this arrangement. White recoiled from the human spectators at a fox hunt but regarded the hounds’ savagery as true to their nature. The huntsman, who commanded the pack and performed the formal act commemorating the fox’s death, escaped White’s revulsion. Macdonald interprets this as a moral solution White glimpsed in skilled association with a hunting animal: identification with the animal could seem to permit desires that would otherwise trouble him. That belief did not resolve the conflict. The hawk became at once the object of White’s desired freedom and the creature he tried to discipline, a paradox that made their relationship tragic rather than redemptive.

Gender, historical change, and the limits of the mirror

Macdonald also examines projection through the way falconers wrote about female goshawks. A contemporary remark to her treated her and Mabel’s shared sex as an explanation for their relationship. The older books she consulted often characterized goshawks as sulky, contrary, or irrational, assigning difficult behavior to the bird rather than asking how a falconer’s treatment might contribute to it. These descriptions turned a woman-coded stereotype into an explanation of the hawk’s conduct.

Earlier writing offered a contrasting account. In a seventeenth-century text, goshawks are described as shy and fearful but also sociable and affectionate with a keeper who treats them kindly. Their reserve and self-will remain part of the description; they are not reduced to either perfect docility or an allegedly pathological temperament. Macdonald finds in these accounts a different model of relationship, one in which care and attention matter and the hawk’s distinct character is not automatically recast as a defect. The contrast suggests that descriptions of the bird reveal the expectations of the falconer as much as the animal itself.

The Maine hunting community provides another useful comparison. Macdonald contrasts its common-law access to hunting land and broadly shared hunting culture with the class-bound traditions she associates with Britain. This setting reinforces her account of falconry as socially shaped: attitudes toward hunting and its participants change with access to land and local custom. Across these examples, projection is not a single private fantasy. It is also a cultural habit, one that distributes prestige, masculinity, and unruliness among birds and people. Macdonald’s analysis preserves the force of the mirror while questioning its limits: a hawk may carry human meanings, but its behavior cannot be explained entirely by the meaning a falconer assigns to it.