The 1970s

The 1970s mark a turning point in the book’s account of goshawks in Britain: falconers began quietly bringing birds back to a landscape from which the species had disappeared. The decade’s significance lies not in a return to untouched nature, but in the uneasy history of human influence that made the goshawks’ renewed presence possible—from land use and hunting traditions to deliberate release and ecological change.

Goshawks return

By the 1960s and 1970s, falconers had begun an unofficial scheme to restore goshawks to Britain. The British Falconers’ Club recognized that a falconer importing a goshawk from the Continent could, for the additional cost of one bird, bring in a second to release. The practical method could be simple: find a forest and open the transport box. Other falconers adopted the approach around the country.

The imported birds came from Sweden, Germany, and Finland. Some were deliberately released; others were lost. The goshawks survived, found one another, and bred. Their descendants later numbered around 450 pairs. The account presents this recovery as both an ecological change and a challenge to the idea that wildness must be untouched by human action: the birds’ return depended on people, but their survival and breeding were not simply an extension of human control.

A landscape made by history

The decade sits within a much longer history of human activity in Breckland. The region’s sandy ground preserves traces of Neolithic flintworking, while its rabbit warrens once supported meat and felt production. Intensive grazing by rabbits and sheep reduced vegetation to a thin cover over sand; during the 1688 shifting-sands disaster, strong south-westerly winds drove dunes across the land, engulfing settlements and choking a river. In the 1920s, pines were planted across much of the area to provide timber for future wars.

These layers complicate any simple opposition between a natural countryside and a human-made one. The landscape where goshawks returned had been altered by work, commerce, grazing, disaster, and forestry. Its wildness was not an untouched remnant but a condition emerging from accumulated human and ecological histories. The goshawks’ return belongs to that same history rather than standing outside it.

Class and the traditions of falconry

The account also places falconry within a history of unequal access to land and sport. Falconry with goshawks could be practiced in many places because the birds hunted in short dashes from the fist at close range. Flying falcons properly, by contrast, required large open spaces such as grouse moors, partridge estates, and extensive farmland—resources more readily available to the wealthy and well-connected. Historical writing consequently associated falcons with aristocratic status and treated the solitary goshawk trainer, or austringer, with contempt.

A comparison with hunting in Maine makes the social dimension clearer. An article from 1942 appealed to a tradition in which common law allowed people to hunt across the land, contrasting it with systems that reserved hunting for estate owners and their guests. This is not evidence that the British goshawk scheme itself transformed access to land; rather, it shows how falconry and hunting carry different meanings in places shaped by different rules of ownership and participation. The return of goshawks in Britain was a practical conservation effort, but it unfolded against a longer history in which access to birds, land, and the status of particular forms of hunting were socially divided.

Ecological change and the meaning of return

The goshawk recovery also contrasts with other changes in British wildlife. Myxomatosis arrived in Britain in 1952, and within two years the virus had killed about 95 percent of the rabbit population. The loss altered grasslands and affected predators; rabbits later recovered, though not to the numbers once treated as normal. The book’s wider account of disappearing wildlife also describes agricultural pesticides and the loss of species from farmed landscapes, emphasizing that apparent continuity of fields and trees can conceal substantial ecological depletion.

Against those histories, the goshawks’ return offers neither a simple restoration story nor proof that human intervention is harmless. It records a particular outcome: falconers imported and released birds, and the birds established a breeding population. Their presence reveals how human action can help create conditions for wild animals to persist, while the surrounding history warns that other human practices can remove species and remake habitats. The 1970s therefore matter as a point in an ongoing, uneven relationship between people, land, and wildlife.