I have mixed feelings about this book. On one hand I’m not sure if I agree with falconry and taking hawks (and other birds) from the wild, but on the other hand without people who do this, we wouldn’t learn so much about the animals. It is clear that Macdonald cares for her hawk well and trains Mabel without cruelty, but my bias against it did stop me from fully enjoying these bits.
Why read a book about falconry if you’re not keen on the dies of it then? Because this book isn’t just about the bird. The story Macdonald shares of her grief, the darkness she feels and how she clings to Mabel at a time when everything else was crumbling.
My favourite quote from this is one after she has encountered a couple who are lamenting “old Britain” and instead she expands on humanity and the world as it is:
“Old England is an imaginary place, a landscape built from words, woodcuts, films, paintings, picturesque engravings. It is a place imagined by people, and people do not live very long or look very hard. We are very bad at scale. The things that live in the soil are too small to care about; climate change too large to imagine. We are bad at time too. We cannot remember what lived here before we did; we cannot love what is not. Nor can we imagine what will be different when we are dead. We live out our three score and ten, and tie our knots and lines only to ourselves. We take solace in pictures, and we wipe the hills of history.”