Taming, control, and coercion

Taming, control, and coercion are inseparable in Helen Macdonald’s account of falconry: training brings a wild hawk into relation with a human, but the human controls the conditions under which that relation develops. Food, sleep, handling, and exposure to unfamiliar places can become instruments of pressure, even when a falconer intends to be gentle. The contrast between Mabel’s gradual acclimation and T. H. White’s treatment of Gos makes the difference between patient attention and imposed endurance central to the book’s understanding of training.

The social meanings of control

Falconry carries a history of unequal access as well as a practical art of handling birds. Helen Macdonald observes that falcons require open country for their characteristic hunting flights, making their pursuit more available to people with access to large estates and farmland. Goshawks can be flown in more confined settings, yet historical writing often ranked them beneath the falcons. The language of nobility and refinement thus attaches not only to birds’ perceived qualities but also to the wealth and landholding that make particular forms of falconry possible.

This hierarchy shapes the reputations of both birds and falconers. The solitary austringer, who trains goshawks or sparrowhawks, appears in older writing as an awkward, antisocial figure, while goshawks are repeatedly characterized as difficult and disagreeable. Such descriptions make control seem like a contest against a bird’s allegedly defective nature. They also obscure the falconer’s part in the relationship: fear, resistance, or withdrawal can be interpreted as the hawk’s bad disposition rather than as a response to how it is treated.

The book complicates that assumption by setting later stereotypes against earlier falconry accounts. Seventeenth-century writers describe goshawks as wary but capable of affection, and connect their responses to the keeper’s conduct. In this account, a hawk’s self-willed character is not proof that it is a failed object of training. The prospect of friendship depends on recognizing its needs and responding with care, rather than treating obedience as evidence of a naturally compliant temperament.

White’s training of Gos

T. H. White’s first night with Gos establishes a pattern of misunderstanding. The young hawk steps onto his fist and eats in the early hours, but White is alarmed by pale marks in the tail feathers and fears that earlier hunger has damaged them. Although the marks cannot be worsened by feeding the now-grown feathers, he tries to compensate by giving Gos more food. The bird is already full; White’s anxious efforts to make it eat therefore meet a need for quiet and distance with further pressure.

That mismatch becomes a recurring cycle. White offers different foods and waits for Gos to become hungry enough to eat; when the hawk does, he feeds it heavily again. He hopes that care will repair the harm he imagines, but his intervention repeatedly produces the opposite of the closeness he seeks. White describes their conflict as a back-and-forth struggle. The episode shows how benevolent intention can still serve the human’s need for reassurance rather than the animal’s actual needs: White wants evidence that Gos will accept him, while the hawk’s behavior is treated as an obstacle to overcome.

White’s ideas about training are bound up with his experience as a schoolmaster. He sees falconry as education, but values that it rejects punishment as a response to difficulty. The contrast matters to him because he has spent years teaching at Stowe School, where discipline has been part of his working life. He imagines that a different method might allow him to care for a pupil without repeating the harm he associates with punitive authority.

The hawk also becomes entangled with White’s effort to revisit his own past. He imagines himself returning to boyhood and taking the role of a humane teacher who will not beat the child in his care. This identification helps explain the emotional intensity of training, but it does not make the relationship equal: Gos remains the animal whose movement, rest, and surroundings White controls. The human wish to repair an earlier history can become another demand placed on the hawk.

White’s sleepless watching makes that tension especially clear. Reading Edmund Bert’s seventeenth-century falconry treatise, he adopts the practice of keeping a hawk awake through a trainer’s continued watchfulness. He turns the method into a solitary ordeal, a test of his own restraint as well as an attempt to master the bird. During six days he sleeps only six hours, carrying Gos while reciting Shakespeare and singing to him. White’s wish to avoid visible cruelty does not remove the hardship built into the method: the hawk’s sleep is still subordinated to the falconer’s chosen ritual.

Mabel and gradual acclimation

Helen Macdonald’s training of Mabel offers a different account of how control operates. She learns to read the hawk’s posture and feathers: feathers held close to the body signal fear, while a looser position indicates ease. With sustained observation she becomes attentive to smaller changes in expression and learns to anticipate Mabel’s responses. This knowledge can help the human avoid frightening the bird, but it also makes the relationship dependent on the trainer’s willingness to notice what the hawk is communicating.

The first time Mabel eats from Helen’s hand in Christina’s presence does not follow the private, solemn pattern Helen had expected. Christina reads the newspaper while the hoodless hawk watches the unfamiliar activity. Mabel eventually eats and shows signs of contentment. The scene matters because the hawk’s progress takes place amid another person, ordinary conversation, and television, rather than according to the controlled emotional setting Helen had imagined. Training is not solely a human plan fulfilled; it is also a series of responses whose timing and circumstances the bird helps determine.

Introducing Mabel to the city further distinguishes patient acclimation from forced exposure. Helen proceeds gradually, moving from enclosed spaces toward the open air and allowing Mabel time to encounter traffic and unfamiliar movement at a distance before coming closer. By comparison, White took Gos outside soon after his arrival and repeatedly brought him into busy situations. Gos endured the bustle, but endurance is not the same as comfort or trust. The contrast makes pace and attention ethical questions, not merely practical techniques.

The hood concentrates those questions in an object. It is a finely made piece of equipment, but placing it over Mabel’s head also means covering her eyes to keep her calm during travel. Helen offers it repeatedly as Mabel bates away, telling herself that it is necessary. Her distress does not change the fact that the decision belongs to the human, while the bird bears the immediate constraint. By connecting the hood’s use in falconry with its wider political associations, the episode unsettles any easy claim that control is harmless simply because it is described as protection.

Agency, play, and the limits of mastery

The book also resists a picture of the goshawk as nothing but a difficult creature to be subdued. When Helen plays with Mabel, offering paper for her to seize and chew, the hawk responds with curiosity and apparent pleasure. Later, during a meal with Christina present, Mabel’s first calm eating and rousing are unexpected rather than programmed. These moments expose the limitations of the descriptions inherited from falconry books: the bird has capacities and preferences that the available stereotypes do not anticipate.

Hunting makes human and hawk activity interdependent without making them identical. When Mabel pursues a pheasant into brambles, she waits above while Helen searches below to flush it. Helen has to infer Mabel’s position and likely actions even when she cannot see her. The resulting hunt briefly makes their separate perspectives part of one unfolding event; its coordination depends on the human’s participation, but not on human command alone. The hawk remains an agent with her own attention and action.

That distinction is significant because Helen’s grief can draw her toward the hawk as a refuge from human life. She recognizes that time with Mabel cannot supply every form of companionship: falconry’s solitude and wildness do not substitute for human closeness. The relationship is therefore neither pure escape nor simple mastery. It alters what the trainer notices and does, while leaving intact the question of what the hawk needs for herself.

A comparison with hunting in Maine extends the book’s attention from the individual training relationship to land and class. Helen describes local hunting as more broadly accessible than hunting in Britain, where access to land and elite forms of sport remain closely associated with privilege. The contrast recalls the unequal conditions behind falconry’s reputations: control over land helps determine who can hunt, which practices appear prestigious, and how hunters and birds are judged. Across these episodes, taming is shown as both a close, practical relationship and a structure of power. Its ethical measure lies not in claiming that control has disappeared, but in whether the human recognizes the hawk’s fear, limits, and independent life.