The reintroduction of goshawks to Britain was an unofficial effort begun by falconers in the 1960s and 1970s. By importing birds for falconry and releasing additional birds, they helped restore a species that had disappeared from Britain; the goshawks survived, bred, and became part of the modern landscape. For Helen Macdonald, their return is evidence that human action can help make, as well as damage, the wild.

Background and setting

Goshawks had once bred across the British Isles, but their place in falconry and their fortunes in Britain changed over time. The account presents their recovery against a landscape shaped by human use, not as a return to an untouched wilderness. In the Brecklands, the sandy country where Macdonald later sees goshawks, the land bears marks of industry and disturbance: it was a centre of Neolithic flint-working, and rabbit warrens and grazing contributed to the shifting sands disaster of 1688. The goshawk’s renewed presence belongs to this longer history of people altering landscapes and the lives of other species.

Falconry itself carried social distinctions. Goshawks could be flown in many places because they hunted in quick dashes from the fist at close range. Flying falcons properly, by contrast, required large open spaces such as grouse moors and extensive farmland, access more readily available to the wealthy or well connected. Historical writing also treated the solitary goshawk trainer, or austringer, with contempt. The return scheme therefore grew from a practice whose birds and practitioners had not occupied the same prestigious position as falconry with aristocratic falcons.

The falconers’ scheme

The British Falconers’ Club worked out that the cost of importing a goshawk from the Continent for falconry could cover the import of a second bird for release. The principle was simple: buy one bird, set another free. Because goshawks were self-reliant predators, the account describes release as requiring little more than finding a forest and opening the box. Falconers who shared the approach carried it out in different parts of Britain.

The birds came from Sweden, Germany, and Finland. Many were large, pale birds from the taiga forests. Not all entered the wild through a planned release: some were simply lost. Both released and lost birds survived, found one another, and bred. The recovery thus emerged through a mixture of deliberate human assistance and the birds’ own capacity to persist and reproduce; it was not a centrally organized restoration described as proceeding by a single method.

Return and significance

The descendants of these goshawks numbered around 450 pairs by the time Macdonald recounts the scheme. Their presence overturns the expectation that wildness is necessarily separate from human hands. The birds’ return was enabled by falconers, but their survival and breeding were not simply a human achievement imposed upon passive animals. The account holds those facts together: people opened the way for the birds, and the birds established themselves.

Macdonald’s later sighting of a soaring pair in the Brecklands gives this history a present-tense consequence. The goshawks are elusive and at home in a landscape already layered with human history. Their existence makes the wild neither a pristine refuge nor merely a human construction; it shows how human intervention can sometimes help create the conditions in which nonhuman lives continue.