![]() We must work as fast as possible so the hawks can settle after we’re gone. A shadow tears itself from the trees: a zoescope silhouette of a female goshawk, flickering fast through the white gaps between the branches. Then he loops the rope around the trunk and begins to climb. Wiry and bearded, with a base-jumper’s adrenaline-wired demeanour, he pulls on a helmet, hauls out coils of rope and harnesses and clips. There’s the nest, the ringer says, pointing at a table-sized shadow of sticks high in a larch above us. Now we’re standing by a thicket of light-deprived hazel. In this extract from the Samuel Johnson and Costa Prize winning H is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald introduces the art of ringing wild goshawks.Īt dusk the Gloucestershire forest is dim and vaulted green. ![]()
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