H is for hawk - helen Macdonald

• Hawk


  • Powerful
  • Violent
  • Intimidating
  • From another world
• Hawk emerging from box


  Overwhelming experience for the narrator
• The hawk's world used to be no larger than a living room, then a box, but now it is this expansive world
• Narrator's experience of the hawk

  Parallel to narrator's own experience of loss and new experiences
• Hawk handler


  • Calm
  • In control
  • Careful
  • Nurturing towards the hawk
• The hawk handler had been caring for the hawk since it hatched from the egg
• Order of events to take control of the hawk

  1. Be very careful

  2. Make sure everything is in order

  3. Take control of the hawk
• The man's control of the hawk

  Contrasts with the bird's lack of control
• The hawk was hatched in an incubator and had broken from a frail blueish eggshell
• The man had fed the hawk with scraps of meat held in a pair of tweezers, waiting patiently for the lumpin fluffy chick to notice the food and eat
• The man's nurturing and caring for the hawk


  • Extremely nurturing and caring
• The woman's feelings towards the man


  She loves him fiercely, quite melodramatically, even though she has only just met him
• The hawk's beak was open, her hackles raised, her wild eyes the color of Sun on white paper, and they stared because the whole world had fallen into them at once
• The woman's understanding of the hawk's behaviour

  She understands why the bird looks and behaves the way it does, because it is overwhelmed by everything
• Putting the hood on the hawk

  1. Grab the hood from the box

  2. Turn to the hawk

  3. Draw the braces closed
• The hawk's skull and brain

  A thin angular skull, an alien brain fizzing and fusing with terror
• This was the wrong bird, the younger and smaller one, not the woman's hawk
• The woman's reaction to realizing it is the wrong bird

  Nervous excitement is for nothing, disappointment
• The second hawk was much larger, smokier, darker, and wailed great awful gouts of sound like a thing in pain
• The woman's reaction to the second hawk

  Filled with terror, the sound is unbearable
• The woman tells herself "this is my hawk" but then says "I didn't recognize her"
• The woman's inability to connect with the second hawk


  Contrasts with her understanding of the smaller hawk
• The woman's attempts to get the first hawk instead

  1. Awkwardly ask if she can take the first one instead

  2. Compliment the second hawk

  3. Desperate, incoherent appeals
• The woman is described as a "white faced woman with wind wrecked hair and exhausted eyes" who is "pleading" with the falconer
• The woman's emotional state

  She is an emotional wreck, frail, and looking for a distraction from her grief