Report from Santa Fe; Helen Macdonald

The National Education Association of New Mexico, an organization of professionals who believe that investing in public education is an investment in our state's economic future. And by a grant from the Healey Foundation, tell us New Mexico. Hello, I'm Lorraine Mills and welcome to Report from Santa Fe. Are we in for a treat today? Our guest is Helen McDonald. Author of H is for Hawk. Thank you for joining us. Oh, it's great to be here. Hello, everyone. Yes, well tell us a little about your background and how you ended up being this international best -selling award -winning writer. That was a bit of a shock. I didn't expect that. You know, I wrote this book about the strange thing I did after my father died. I trained a hawk and I thought it was an odd book and no one would read it and suddenly it just caught fire. And it's been a best -seller here and in Europe. You know, I was an academic historian. I worked at the University of Cambridge as a historian of science. You know, my audiences were very small. And now here I am. It's been a really wonderful journey. Well, you've won the Samuel Johnson Award for nonfiction. You won the Costa Book Award. New York

Times best -selling, international best -selling. You're background. You're a naturalist, a British naturalist, and you're a scholar at Cambridge University. But I have to tell you that your book, and I want to show it here, it's called H is for Hawk. And it's been called an instant classic. It's been called all sorts of things. I've never read a book like it. Well, I absolutely love it. I suppose I have some critical distance, but I've just never read anything like it. So you always love birds. You know, it's true. This is a very open book emotionally. It's about the death of my father in many respects. But there's one thing in this book that I'm still embarrassed about confessing. And that is, when I was very small, I loved hawks and birds so much that I used to try and sleep with my arms behind my back like wings. You know, I was an obsessed child. All my friends had pictures of pop stars on their bedroom walls and I had pictures of birds of prey and castrails, you know. And I wanted to be a falcon. I wanted to train birds of prey. And I did that for many years. I was this, you know, I worked in various places. And then I became a historian and sort of forgot about it. But that was my, for a while until I

came back to it, you know, after my father died. But that was my big thing when I was a child. You know, I really loved these birds. Even to the point where at age eight, you read TH white's book called The Gashhark. Yeah, it's a really sad book that one. Yeah, he hadn't didn't have the network and support system in place to do it in what is now the accepted way. Yeah, he was a very sad man and I'm sure many people listening and watching this will know him from the sword and the stone and the once -in -future king, those great Arthurian legends, the retellings of these legends he did. Yeah, and he grew up in a sort of very miserable household in British India and he, you know, had a horrible time at school and he really struggled with who he was and he tried to train a hawk not knowing how to do it. And this book he wrote about it is so heartbreaking. And I was kind of obsessed with it when I was younger. I hated it, but I kind of was drawn to it. Yeah. Well, you also said that while you had experiences of Falconer and with Kestrels and Merlins, you viewed Gashhark's, what did you call him? Psychopaths. And what is their reputation in the aviary world? In the Raptor world. In the Falconery world, they're kind of the Christopher Walken

of the birds, right? They sort of have this reputation as being psychopathic murderous, feathered shotguns. And they were very much boys birds when I was growing up. You know, there were things that I didn't ever want to, ever want to handle. To the point where even the term to train a hawk is to man a hawk, isn't that true? Yeah, Falconery has been a bit of a boys game for a few centuries, you know. If you go back to the 11th and 12th century, it wasn't, you know, women trained all these big hawks too, but then something happened. And when I was a kid and I wanted to be a Falconer, I didn't know any other women or young women that wanted to do it. And I was a bit strange, you know. But goss hawks were always beyond the parallel. My father suddenly died and it was all I could think about was getting a goss hawk. Well, tell us a little about your dad. You paint such a wonderful picture of him and his lessons for you. It's hard right now. I know. It was, you know, he died in 2007, very suddenly of a heart attack while he was out taking photographs. He was a press photographer, a very good one. And of course, my brother and I never realized how good he was. You know, when you have parents, you never know how

professional they are. But he was also an incredibly kind man and very interested in the natural world and he taught me so many lessons about life, about how to be patient, about how to take joy in seeing things, you know, seeing celestial events, meeting your showers, eclipses. He loved field guides, you know, those books that didn't you how to identify things. And we were both kind of nerds, I guess, and we were best friends. And I think that's something that I've been very surprised about over my time touring with this book of a number of women have come up to be and said, why does no one talk about that relationship between father and daughter? It's such an extraordinary friendship when it works. And it's not really something we talk about. And in his profession, as a photographer, there was the sense of being a watcher or the observer and you had always grown up. That was one of your strong points, your ability to watch and to observe what was going on. He and his youth watched the World War II planes coming over trains, plane smiling. He was a terrible plane spotter. I mean, you know, at the end of the book, there's a bit where I find his old plane spot in diaries. And I discovered that when he was a teenager,

he used to bicycle miles and miles with his notebooks to watch these things flying in. Twelve hours a day, he'd just sort of sit watching these planes. I mean, what an extraordinary thing to do. And you were looking up too, but you were looking at the birds. Yeah, I was a bird obsessive, as I said. And yeah, I mean, I just, you know, I remember when I was a child learning all the birds of Britain, slowly one by one. It's quite stressful being in America. I'm pretty good at American birds, but you know, there are always ones I think, what is that noise? I don't know what it is. It's quite exciting to be here. Well, speaking of British birds in the late 19th century, the hawks were exterminated in Britain. So you had to get European, you actually worked providing hawks and falcons for the Middle Eastern princes, is it? Yeah, there's some big conservation issues with Arab falconry in the Gulf states. It's a very traditional thing there. It's come to a stand for a very sort of strong marker of Gulf Arab identity, but a lot of them were being taken from the wild. So I worked out there in the 1990s for a while. We were captive breeding birds and trying to persuade local falconers to use these captive

bred birds rather than wild ones. It was amazing out there. I mean, I met amazing people very, very different from my home in England, yeah. And when you were in England, we had almost like buy one, get one free. You would, you know, British falconers or hawk people would buy a hawk from abroad and they get another one to let loose. And you now have reestablished somewhat of a population of hawks. That's absolutely true. And in many countries like the condor, for example, here you've had these reintroduction programs. And in Britain, it was kind of unofficial. You know, these goss hooks were wiped out by shooting in the 19th century in habitat loss. And these falconers would bring them into fly birds for falconry and they'd sort of buy, I think, buy one set one free was what they did. They used to let, and we've got goss hooks back in England, which is wonderful. Yeah. So your father died suddenly and you were just stunned. Yeah. And you're writing is so beautiful. You would put that memories are like heavy blocks of glass and you would try to arrange them to make all of this make sense. And it wouldn't. And you

started having these dreams about hawks. Tell us how Mabel came into your life. I just, you know, there was a funeral. It was very hard. My mum and my brother and I were, you know, clinging together. And I went back to my house in Cambridge where I was teaching. And I thought, well, this is, you know, now we're just going to recover slowly. But I started dreaming of goss hooks every single night. And there's one particular bird, a wild one that we sort of rescued years before at this but center where I worked and let it go. It just slipped, slipped through the air into nothing. It seemed to disappear. And that was the one I dreamt about. Well, when you were with that one, because you read about it, it's so beautiful. You thought about the reptilianness of her and the scent of the goss Huck feathers. And then you suddenly realized that she was bigger than you. And older. It's all reptilian presence. Really strange. I mean, being close to that bird. I said, she was muscled as a pit bull and so intimidating this bird. And then she looked right at me and it was like looking at a dinosaur. And I realized that, you know, I was just this kind of, you know, I'm just a mammal, right? I

mean, these things were old and extraordinary. And yeah. And I kept dreaming of goss hooks and I decided that I needed one. I mean, you know, I think after a bereavement, often the decisions you make happen at a level that's way below consciousness. You know, it's all you sort of compelled to do things. And I was, you know, I don't recommend it as a way of dealing with grief, generally. But I decided that I needed to have a goss Huck in my life. So training goss Huck is quite a process. I mean, it is like reading Moby Dick and that I learned a lot about whales and I learned so much about Huck's. But each thing I learned kind of where did my desire to know more. So you said you had, when the training process, you got this beautiful young Huck, you had to become invisible. And some way you talked about the gap between fear and food, which you as a falconer had to gap somehow. But describe what you went through in training this beautiful bird. Because you said you would sit with it and almost not breathe and not blink for hours. It's very intense. This dance that you have to have with a new heart because they've never been domesticated. There's such an old

partnership between humans and birds of prey. But every time the bird is terribly wild and terribly frightened of you to start with. And the way that you start to instill trust in this bird is to give it a gift of raw meat. And slowly the bird will come to see you as a benevolent presence. But it's very intense and you have to almost will yourself into not being there in order to not scare the bird to start with. But as the days go past in your kind of munkish seclusion with this bird, it starts to trust you. And it's an extraordinary moment when this bird first starts to look forward to seeing you and sort of jump to your hand for food and then fly to you. And it's so ancient. I mean, we're talking sort of 4 ,000 years BC. And the idea that I'm just one of the one of that long line of people that have done precisely this with birds that haven't changed. It's very heady. Yes. You describe there's something you know city people and you know there's a lot of cultures that have lost such with nature at all, let alone

wildlife. And they have a sort of Disney expectation of Bambi and Thumper and and a very bucolic sense of what nature is about without looking at the prey hunter sort of a relationship. You describe taking the hawk and going to this bucolic setting where bunnies are munching and fesins are moving through the end of growth. And thinking how did you describe the hawk on your hand? I said I said and I'm this sort of like cuss word here. I said that she was like the bastard offspring of a flaming torch and an assault rifle. And that's what she felt like. She was in hunting mode and I knew that keeping a hawk I was going to let her hunt. I think that you know that's part of what they are. But it was a very very weird experience you know going out there and seeing this bird doing what they do. And the the thing that was really extraordinary about this was that you know the goss hawks they're not very clean killers. They're very powerful. Once they catch things they just start eating and at some point this poor thing is going to

expire. So I had to run in and put these rabbits and fesins out of their misery very quickly. And that was a very very serious and difficult thing to do for me morally. I mean I wasn't morally upset about it but it was hard. And it made me realize we just don't see death anymore. It happens behind walls mostly now and it was a very serious education into the way the world works I think. Well when when it's able to be in touch with you know the life in the wild much more than we do even on PBS documentaries or BBC documentaries. I mean it's it's and it's hard for some people to accept. Yeah no absolutely. And so this is not a nature book like other nature books. Well it's Gavin the Otter all these wonderful nature books. So you know and people sort of said you know it's this is a book about someone who was very sad and got a hawk and then was happy and I'm like well you know it's a bit more complicated than that you know the hawk me took me to some quite dark places before I crawled back into the human world and but again she taught me a lot about how the world works and I you know I'm deeply grateful to that bird for showing me some a lot of things that I didn't

know before. So in your sense of watching of what you had the pattern you had in your whole life and continue to your father's powers of observation as you worked had this long experience with this beautiful bird tell us what was revealed to you because this is not an ordinary grief book this is not an ordinary nature book you've created a unique masterpiece they're calling it an instant classic. So so I know that's too much but and we're speaking today with with Helen McDonald who wrote H's for a hawk so as you went down the path and observed training the hawk and what the hawk taught you what was revealed to you about what you've been going through about grief. Well I guess it took me a while to work out what was going on and a deep down I obviously had flown to this hawk because I wanted to be like her I wanted to be this solitary self -possessed kind of raging roar creature of

wildness I didn't want to feel human emotions I didn't want to feel the grief for my father I wanted to run away. So in a way the hawk was kind of a bit like you know I could have taken drugs or got into drink or had inadvisable affairs you know but I chose a goss hawk to lose myself to obliterate my sense of myself and that was kind of dangerous you know when I was flying here it was very beautiful and exquisite experience you know going out for hours every day with her but ultimately I realized that I'd gone way too far into the wild and I needed to come back and I got quite depressed as well and I ended up going to the doctors and getting an empty depressants and trying to find my way back to the world I'd run away from but in the end the deepest message of the book I think is that we all do this sort of thing all the time with nature we always give it meanings that reflect reflect our own views of the world and it's impossible for us not to do that without realizing it but eventually I sort of understood that you can look past those meanings and see the real creatures there and that's the great joy maybe was so different from me you know she's a bird but we still shared this life and that was a gift that was a proper gift

so it's so beautifully written this is extraordinary two of my favorite lines the hawk filled the house with wildness like a ball lilies fills a house with its scent yeah that's how it felt you speak so much about the prehistoric marsi granite order of this hawk it's not like anything else yeah I remember a falconer once writing that the smell of hawk breath is unexpectedly amazing and he thought that maybe you know expensive perfume manufacturer should bottle it in it'll smote glass falcons instead it's a very very strange and transporting odour but yeah I mean I didn't I never thought I had a very strong sense of smell but I have a friend who on twitter who's a perfume expert and she said yeah there's a lot of smell in this book and I'm thinking yeah there is really there's a lot of senses in this book there's a lot of visuals the sky the woods you know I'm there's it's a very sensual book everything the sound of the birds everything is is right there well I found that very

immediate and very real that's really nice to hear and I think that again was a consequence of grief I think after a big shock you you lose all the skins that you've built to protect yourself from the world and it becomes a very raw and bright and sharp place and I wanted to get that across in the writing well one of the conclusions one of the things that's revealed to you and and it was very naturally through the book but you ultimately what is it that's saying the phrase that you said about grief grief is love with no place to go oh that line it's so true you know and I'm so amused by this line in many ways because I think I might it might have come from one of those scandy crime dramas on television right and I heard it and I'm like oh well that's it that's the line that's the line that explains so much about what it's like it's love with no place to go it's all that emotion all that desperate frustration that the thing that you love is not there anymore and yet you feel the love and it hurts and yeah that's that's what it is and it's it's lonely and it's hard and it's and it's something that happens to

everyone well but everyone doesn't get through it well of course not with a hug but some people maybe even after 10 years have not come to that point it's very restorative to realize that that's what it is love with no where to go and then you'd say well thank you that I was given this gift of this love and I'm going to redirect it or maybe even self -direct it yeah yeah one of the most moving and humbling things about this whole experience with this book coming out is having opportunity to go on tour and meet meet readers and so many of them afterwards talked with me about their own losses and some of those losses are of a magnitude so much greater than mine and yeah we're all in it we're all in it we all suffer it and it's very very hard and I don't know it just I guess it just makes me feel that um you know we never taught this almost small I say oh somewhere else in the book I say that when we were small we think the world's always going to be full of new things you know and then one day you think no wait a minute that's not how it is the world is going to be full of absences as we get older and recognizing that and realizing

that's how it is is is another big moment I think it people's lives you know but one the other lines that I love so much is about a presence you say the weight of the hawk on your arm was like a layman putting on an accustomed wooden leg after it had been lost so that realization that its absences that are in our future as well as novelties yes that felt to me like putting on the missing leg it really felt ah that's I've that's true to me in my experience yeah no but I have not heard it so well expressed thank you that's a line I think that line comes from T .H. White who was one of those another strand of the book is about you know the about the right T .H. White yes and he he he had that ability to put things succinctly and with extreme beauty I remember one time reading about him psych bicycling along with an English lane under overarching trees as being like cycling on the inside of a snake oh my goodness he had these ability to just capture things in a single sentence it's amazing so now you're you're traveling I want to direct people who will love your

writing you have a monthly column a nature column in the New York Times well I've been doing that for a year and I'm both delighted to say that I'm continuing to write for them and a bit sad to say the column is no longer going to happen but what I'm doing now it's even better I'm I'm going to be writing huge features for the magazine again about natural history and about our relationships the natural world I think it's the most important subject there is right now we're living in this very dark time for the environment the you know the sixth great extinction is upon us so trying to understand why we see the world of nature the way we do I think is really important so I'm having to have more space to do that so look out for those I've recently interviewed Jane Goodall and one of her well she's of course working hard to preserve the creatures and the environment but she says you know in a hundred years the people then are going to look back at the extensions that we've allowed and there might be no more elements elephants there might be no more polar bears there might be no more giraffes I mean these are extort and then all the insects and the amphibians that we're losing too and I you know thank you for your efforts this book does a lot to wake people up to think this

look what we have now let's not lose it thank you that's very good to hear I'm very glad that that's one of the messages that comes across yes pages so you are a bird -hearted person maybe there's no longer with us I'm a sadly no she died very suddenly a few years ago of a horrible fungal infection called a spurgellosis I miss her to bits I really do I've still got a vase of her multitethers on my desk a bit sentimental but you now have a new bird friend yeah I have a parrot now my friends tell me it's emotionally more healthy than a hawk because it's cuddly but I can I swear to everyone you know listening and watching this that I have more scars from that parrot than I ever have had from a hawk you know because with your upset a hawk it just gets upset if you upset a parrot it remembers right right yeah yeah no it's great I love it I love it so much one of the things you said about scars about Mabel the goshawk was that you know you could count one of the things that happens when

she inadvertently attacks you and and you're bleeding and it's horrible and you have to go to your friends they help help but you then you sit down and you write your father's obituary yeah more if for the piece that you had to write it's like you said she struck sense into you finally it was one of those moments where it was like almost like some kind of spiritual moment where the hawk had taught me something and I was trying to think of the eulogy for my father's memorial service it was extremely hard to do I couldn't think of what to do and then one day I was trying she didn't do it on purpose I was trying to get this pheasant out of her head and I stuck my head through the head and she was on top of the head getting very excited and trying to see this pheasant and she saw my head coming through and I think she just thought it was her prey and she dived down and bounced off me and it was like being hit with a sort of baseball bat full of nails and I was bleeding everywhere and you know and she was kind of you know a bit sort of non -plussed by all this but that that moment that that sort of not sensing to me now I went home and I just wrote the eulogy straight out you know the world is full of weird moments like that yeah yeah and you write about them

so well you talk about all the scars on your hands and your face and everything got from her but you said the other scars are the scars that she healed the emotional psychic spiritual scars from this great loss she really served to help heal them she did and I think one of the things that we do with animals without realizing it quite a lot of the time is to use them as almost like proxies for other parts of herself that we can't otherwise be maybe was all the things in myself I couldn't recognize or couldn't deal with she was all this sort of post grief kind of anger and power and wildness and I think we all do this with animals you know I was talking to a psychotherapist recently in a non -professional capacity we're having tea and he said he has a woman who comes to therapy with a dog and she has problems expressing her emotions but she quite often says in the in the sessions my dog is angry with you right and everyone knows what's going on apart from the dog but I think you know it's safe it's safe to use animals as to sort of stand for parts of ourselves and

I think that's what we you know Mabel was partly for but she was also an extraordinary character in a real live bird so you know she wasn't just a symbol no no she was in the flesh on the flesh and eating the flesh yeah she was all these things um so you now have a small green parrot and are you writing well I know I'm not writing in the same way it's no longer kind of weeks of sort of weeping up my desk and trying to and junk eating junk food and you know and it's writing a book is very lonely and hard it's very exciting as well but but writing a book instigated by the death of your father right it was emotionally very tough to do I'm writing for the New York Times magazine and I know there's another book to come at some point but I just have to you know calm down a bit but this is very very intensive this well you also you're touring you're in a different city all the time and people come to you saying oh thank you for this work I'm I'm really pleased that that yeah I've read that it's going to be made into a film and tell us who this is so funny you know I'm a creature of muddy English hillsides and the other

day I was in LA having a meeting with a whole bunch of film people including the wonderful Lena Headee who right who plays so mean Cersei and Cersei right and yeah she bought the option and I think she wants to play me and you know I met her and she just instantly just thought this is the most wonderful person and she really gets the book but yeah I mean it's very surreal and you know I just sometimes I sort of pinch myself and think is this really happening but you know I'm going to just enjoy it while it lasts it's been incredible so I find you're writing now everywhere there was a column in this week that was your they asked you your favorite books but these were just books that you really liked so yeah nature books I really liked yeah and a lot of them were about birds but thank goodness your first one was Rachel Carson's silent spring that started everything and especially for the birds because of the DDT and their eggs and all that and how long ago was her 50s that was in the 60s and then of course the sad thing about that is when I first read that you know I really believe that that they were the battle days you know it was all solved now and you look at what's going on and we still have

huge problems with chemical contamination pesticides and it is if we haven't learnt those lessons so it's a book that's not only a book about one success and about loving the natural world but also about you know it's a cautionary tale as well yeah well from your own cautionary tale do you have any advice to people who come to this book for as Poe says Sir Sees of sorrow you know who are looking who are in the state of grief themselves well some people I've found it's too close you know some people it's too much because it is it I do talk very directly about what it's like at that moment you know there's physical visceral effects of grief but you know it's hard to talk about grief and what I hadn't expected with this book is that you know anywhere where you feel someone else is talking about grief and sharing that experience can be helpful so maybe it will be helpful to read about someone else's miserable time but yeah I guess you know be gentle to yourself keep breathing it will get better but it takes a long time you never get over it you just become a new person that can incorporate that grief within yourself that's what happens eventually

and that wonderful concept that grief is love with nowhere to go exactly I found that very very transformative oh well I'm glad that was helpful thank you so our guest today is Helen McDonald and her book is called Shailer's Fish and this beautiful New York Times best seller H's for Hawk I know you'll love it thank you thank you for joining us thank you it's been so lovely thank you very much and I'm Lorraine Mills I'd like to thank you our audience for being with us today on report from Santa Fe we'll see you next week past archival programs of report from Santa Fe are available at the website report from satafay .com if you have questions or comments please email info at report from satafay .com report from satafay is made possible in part by grants from the members of the National Education Association of New Mexico an organization of professionals who believe that investing in public education is an investment in our state's economic future and by a

grant from the Healey Foundation house New Mexico