Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in H is for Hawk, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Living with the Wild
Fear, Grief, and Loss
Love, Trust, and Freedom
Time and History
Social Divisions
Summary
Analysis
Early one spring morning in 2007, Helen Macdonald groggily climbs into her car and drives to the Brecklands, a unique area of southeastern England. She hopes to see a goshawk. Similar in color and general shape to the more common sparrowhawks, goshawks are bigger, deadlier, more muscular, and more secretive than their smaller cousins. But they take to the skies to perform aerial mating dances on on mornings like this one, so Macdonald hopes to see at least one pair.
It’s clear from the earliest pages of the book that Helen Macdonald is enamored with the wild spaces and creatures of the world. In some ways, this represents an escape, and in others, it seems that she looks to the wild to make up for what she herself lacks. Goshawks are powerful, decisive, and in control, which is not how Macdonald herself feels at the moment.
Themes
Macdonald exits her car and heads into the woods, confronting an unstable landscape shaped by human and natural forces. The Brecklands are home to an American Air Force Base and timber industry forests. In the 17th century, overgrazing by local rabbits and increasingly large sheep herds killed the grass, releasing the sandy soil and turning the area into what one contemporary writer described as England’s Sahara Desert, thanks to the shifting sand-dune topography. Now, the logging forests hold most of the sandy land in place with their roots.
Macdonald doesn’t come to the Brecklands to escape humanity, but to experience a place where human and natural worlds collide in primal and powerful ways. It’s clear that human activity can be harmful (the overgrazing), but the answer isn’t to try to return to a pure natural state—rather, it is to find creative solutions that merge human and natural forces, like using timber forests to still the shifting sands.
Themes
British goshawks suit this landscape. Long ago, they were coveted hunting animals. But as the aristocracy began to enclose the land for their personal use, and as people began to hunt with guns, goshawks became not just obsolete, but endangered. Treated as vermin, they went extinct in England. Then, in the 1960s, British falconers began releasing imported, captive-bred continental goshawks into the wild. By the early 2000s, there are about 450 breeding pairs in England.
The history of goshawks is intimately tied to human history. But that isn’t always a bad thing: humans reintroduced the birds to the wild, too. This history suggests that it doesn’t have to be a binary choice between wild and civilized. Instead, people can find ways to live with the two in a state of balance or harmony.
Themes
At exactly 8:30 a.m., Macdonald sees one of those pairs looping through the sky. After they’ve finished their display and swooped back below the tree line, she sits down on the grass, contentedly remembering a hot July day when she was nine and she and her father went birding in another forest. When she got bored, he explained that hawks demand patience. This morning, the adult Macdonald feels proud for having learned that kind of patience. When she leaves, she takes a clump of reindeer moss as a memento. Three weeks later, when her mother calls to say that her father has died, she will be looking at the moss.
The birds connect Macdonald not just to England’s past, but to her own. The memory she shares is sweet and extremely ephemeral—unlike the goshawk population in the 1960s, she cannot recreate this moment. When they were birding, Macdonald’s father encouraged her to develop patience, a skill that she will draw on throughout the rest of the book as she wades through the grief and loss of his death as well as the trials of training a goshawk of her own.
Themes
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