Red-tailed hawk

The Red-tailed hawk appears in Helen Macdonald’s account through Yoder, a first-year male flown by Maine falconer Scott McNeff. Already experienced in hunting before he is trapped, Yoder enters a regulated, temporary partnership with a human handler. His pursuit of a squirrel through snowy residential backyards becomes more than a demonstration of hunting skill: it unsettles the division between wilderness and home, and helps the narrator imagine a way to bring the wild into ordinary life without reducing it to a distant landscape.

Identity and Physical Description

Yoder is a passage bird: a young Red-tailed hawk that has left its nest and learned to hunt in the wild. His plumage is described in clear contrasts: chestnut brown across the crown and back, with pale underparts marked sparsely by a collar of spots and dashes. His toes are shorter and thicker than those of the goshawk with which the narrator compares him, giving them a fist-like appearance. His dark eyes and mild, open face contribute to an impression of steadiness rather than apprehension.

The narrator also distinguishes Yoder’s build and manner from the rangier goshawk. He seems thick-set and amiable, and his unflappable quality shapes the encounter that follows. These comparisons do not make him a lesser or domesticated version of another hawk. Instead, they establish a particular animal, with its own physical presence and hunting experience, before he acts in the landscape.

A Temporary Partnership with a Wild Bird

Yoder has been borrowed from the wild, not bred in captivity. As a passage hawk, he already knows how to hunt; since leaving the nest, he has had to learn quickly to negotiate air, rain, wind, and quarry. Maine’s falconry rules allow a licensed falconer to trap and fly such a bird over its first winter, then release it in spring so it can return to the wild and breed. The falconer must be tested and licensed by the state. The narrator regards this arrangement as a good system and wishes a comparable practice existed at home.

Scott prepares for the outing by changing Yoder’s jesses and checking that his jacket pocket contains food. The practical work of handling the bird precedes the hunt, but the relationship does not make Yoder’s movements predictable or wholly directed by a person. In the field he follows his own quarry through trees and open residential spaces, drawing Scott and the narrator into a pursuit whose unfolding depends on the actions of both hawk and squirrel.

The Hunt in a Residential Landscape

The outing takes place not in the immense woods nearby but in a town. On a deep crust of snow, Yoder leaves Scott’s fist for a children’s play structure, then follows the pair as they move down a slope behind timber-clad houses. He climbs a pine behind a backyard fence, rising by successive leaps. When Scott spots a squirrel, the narrator has to follow the action overhead through branches and needles, where height, escape, and pursuit become difficult to read from the ground.

The squirrel moves from branch to branch and the hawk follows. Their chase ends in a fall through the snowy air; Yoder reaches the ground with his prey and mantles over it. The setting makes the encounter strikingly legible as both a hunt and a feature of neighborhood life. Around them are backyards, garages, a low fence, a snow-covered barbecue, and an inflatable Santa on an inflatable Harley Davidson. Icicles hang from Christmas eaves, a television can be heard nearby, and someone is singing Happy Birthday. These details remain present alongside the hawk’s concentrated pursuit; the suburban setting does not dissolve into an imagined wilderness.

Wildness, Access, and the Meaning of Home

The Maine episode is framed by a contrast in access to hunting. The narrator describes local hunting as less divided by inherited land privilege than hunting in Britain: common law allows people to hunt over land, and residents take pride in that tradition. An account of the state’s widespread deer-hunting culture further places hunting within ordinary households and social exchange. Against that background, Yoder’s outing is not staged on an exclusive estate or in a remote landscape. His hunting ground includes a playground and the back lots of a town.

Earlier reflections on falconry explain how class and access have shaped the prestige attached to different birds. Properly flying falcons requires extensive open country, such as grouse moors or large areas of farmland, whereas goshawks hunt by short dashes after nearby prey and can be flown in more restricted spaces. Historical writing also disparaged solitary austringers and their hawks, setting them below aristocratic falconers and celebrated falcons. This history makes the Maine scene a useful counterpoint: the encounter with the Red-tailed hawk unfolds in a setting where hunting is described as comparatively accessible, and where the wild does not require an elite expanse of land to appear.

The narrator calls the hunt the wildest she has seen precisely because it happens amid familiar signs of home and community. Its force lies in that coexistence, not in a journey away from human settlement. Looking back on the outing, she considers whether home might be found in more than one place and recognizes that a suburban backyard can offer the hawk a useful vantage. Yoder’s presence changes the narrator’s understanding of what can belong within a domestic world: the wild need not be left outside it, or confined to the remote woods. The episode presents the bird’s independent hunting and the human community around it together, making their proximity the basis for a revised idea of home.