The 1960s

The 1960s are a turning point in the book’s account of goshawks in Britain: falconers began bringing the birds back through a quiet, unofficial release scheme. The decade is framed not as a clean break with the past but as one moment in a much longer history of human influence on wildlife, land, and the social meaning of falconry.

The return of goshawks

After goshawks had disappeared from Britain, falconers began a practical scheme in the 1960s, continued into the 1970s. The British Falconers’ Club worked out that the cost of importing a goshawk for falconry could also cover a second bird to be released. Falconers brought birds from the Continent, including Sweden, Germany, and Finland. Some were deliberately released; others escaped. In either case, the birds survived, found one another, and bred.

The method depended on the goshawk’s capacity to live and hunt independently: falconers could release a bird in a forest and let it go. The descendants of those birds eventually formed a British population estimated in the book at around 450 pairs. Their return makes the decade significant not as a story of wilderness untouched by people, but as evidence that human action can help create conditions for wild populations to re-establish themselves.

A landscape made by successive histories

The restored goshawks belong to a landscape already layered with human activity. In Breckland, ponds can occupy German wartime bomb craters, while the surrounding forest was planted in the 1920s to provide timber for future wars. Reindeer moss and flint flakes connect the same ground to older ecological and human histories: the region was a centre of flint working in the Neolithic.

Rabbit farming and grazing altered the sandy land on a much larger scale. Enclosed warrens once spread across it, and intensive grazing by rabbits and sheep left the soil vulnerable to wind. In 1688, strong south-westerly winds lifted and shifted the sand, engulfing settlements and choking a river. The later forest concealed many dunes without erasing the sense of a damaged, human-shaped place. Against that background, the goshawk’s return belongs to a history in which land use, commerce, forestry, disaster, and wildlife continually remake one another.

Ecological loss around the decade

The book also places the goshawk’s return against recent and continuing ecological losses. Myxomatosis reached Britain in 1952; within two years the virus had killed 95 percent of the rabbit population. The loss altered grasslands and was followed by a decline in predators. Although rabbits later recovered, they never returned to the numbers people had once regarded as normal, and outbreaks continued.

The account links such changes to a wider sense of environmental crisis: birds of prey fell sharply amid agricultural pesticide use, while rivers, trees, and seabirds were also described as suffering or disappearing. The rabbit’s disease is therefore more than a preceding episode in the wildlife history of the 1960s. It shows how human actions and ecological disruptions can leave effects that persist beyond the immediate event, even as particular populations later recover.

Class, access, and the language of falconry

The decade’s reintroduction story also sits within a history of unequal access to hunting. The book contrasts the goshawk, which can hunt over many kinds of ground, with falconry involving peregrines, which requires broad open spaces such as grouse moors, partridge estates, or large farms. Those spaces were more readily available to wealthy or well-connected people. The praise of falcons and the disparagement of goshawks consequently carry a social history as well as a judgment about birds.

Older writing also described goshawks through gendered stereotypes, treating their fearfulness or resistance as evidence of a bad temper. In a later reading of falconry books, the narrator contrasts these judgments with seventeenth-century accounts that emphasized the birds’ need for kind and considerate handling. Together, these histories complicate the idea that the goshawk is simply difficult or alien: what falconers call a bird’s character may reflect the relationship and expectations brought to it. The 1960s return thus forms part of a broader reconsideration of who could practice falconry, how birds were understood, and how human choices shape the supposedly wild.