![]() ![]() ![]() I rejoiced in their aerial verve, their friendliness, their breathtaking stoops from a thousand feet, wind tearing through their wings with the sound of ripping canvas. Falcons were the raptors I loved: sharp-winged, bullet-heavy birds with dark eyes and an extraordinary ease in the air. They were things of death and difficulty: spooky, pale-eyed psychopaths that lived and killed in woodland thickets. She meets nature-in all its wildness-with her own emotions, blending the acts of training a Goshawk with the process of exorcising grief and depression: MacDonald describes the prehistoric reality that birds of prey are beautiful killers. How the world is full of signs and wonders that come, and go, and if you are lucky you might see them. Now that Dad was gone I was starting to see how mortality was bound up in things like that cold, arc-lit sky. MacDonald is struggling to say goodbye to her father, a photographer, who taught her to find the memorable aspects of life’s otherwise mundane moments, and to savor them. ![]() Rather, its many layers are inspirational for anyone familiar with grief and loss, or anyone ready for a change in life. H Is for Hawk-a New York Times bestseller and winner of the UK’s Samuel Johnson Prize and Costa Book of the Year-displays her varied talents because it is not a simply a “birder” book. MacDonald is a poet, historian, naturalist, and falconer. Walking the dog this summer was much more interesting than usual because I was reading Helen MacDonald’s H Is for Hawk (Grove Press, 2014), a tripartite story about the author’s love for her recently deceased father, for birds and nature, and for literature. These silent hunters feed mostly on cicadas and flying insects, but also eat small rodents and birds. According to an Audubon Society field guide, adult Kites weigh about ten ounces spread across a three-foot wingspan. I noticed these sleek, soot-colored raptors soaring above me in the windy sky on Mother’s Day-never beating a wing-only slightly tilting their tails for direction. 26.00.Īll summer long a family of Mississippi Kites nested in a centuries-old Live Oak tree sprawling over shotgun houses across the corner of Octavia and Chestnut Streets. ![]()
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