Professor Cooper is reading...

I’m currently reading Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk. It is a memoir in which Macdonald, a naturalist and a scholar at Cambridge, recounts her attempt to train a goshawk while struggling to come to terms with her father’s sudden death. The encounters I’ve had with Maine’s birds of prey since my move here from Los Angeles have increased my respect for these formidable creatures, from the osprey that raised their chicks near my husband’s old house along the Kennebec River, to the Cooper’s Hawk that has been performing fly-bys around my morning class at the top of Cole’s Tower this semester. (I like to think he’s finding the complexities of the passive construction in Italian fascinating. My students would undoubtedly disagree). These chance meetings and the loss of my own father last summer made me especially receptive to H is for Hawk’s unusual story.

Forging a relationship of trust with a goshawk is, in Macdonald’s telling, equal parts folly and deliberation. Her decision to engage in such a fraught pursuit springs from the inner turmoil she experiences in the aftermath of her father’s death. While this initially seems like a peculiar response to the loss of a beloved family member, it becomes clear that Macdonald’s taming of the hawk is analogous to the taming of a self unmoored by grief. “Here’s one thing I know from years of training hawks,” she writes. “One of the things you must learn to do is become invisible.” In these pages and elsewhere in the book, the reader comes to understand that “manning” the goshawk requires its handler first and foremost to fall away. Yet falling away in H is for Hawk is a form of mindfulness that is exactly what the heartsick Macdonald needs to regain herself after her loss. It is also a technique that honors the raptor’s true nature and avoids the trap of anthropomorphization. Indeed, in the memoir it is Macdonald’s younger self who assumes the attributes of the raptors she so admires. Despite the seemingly vast gulf that separates our species from that of the accipiter gentilis, Macdonald shows a unique empathy for her ward and, ultimately, our fundamental interconnectedness.

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