I devoted most of my career to conservation charities and now write full-time. Besides my book Looking for the Goshawk, I've published regular articles about this species and the issues around it. In an age of increased awareness of the need for rewilding, the goshawk becomes especially interesting, although it receives little of the airtime given to other birds of prey, and mammals. If we are serious about fixing ecosystems and living with raw nature and having any credibility or moral compass when bemoaning nature loss in other parts of the world, we need to get real about the importance of accommodating keystone species like the goshawk.
Tired of humanity and keen to ‘rewild’ himself, T. H. White gave up his teaching job and bought a goshawk from Germany (they had been wiped out in Britain).
He set out to ‘revert to a wild state’ and rented a cottage in the woods. His account of trying to ‘tame’ this hawk is vivid and intense, and not without controversy, as he used a medieval method that seemed cruel to some back then, and to most people now. This book is the only one written about goshawks here in the 20th century.
A complex and brilliant mind, White is better remembered for his Arthurian tales of young Wort and Merlin the Wizard, which helped inspire J. K. Rowling’s creation of Harry Potter. The Goshawk is considered a classic.
With a foreword by Helen Macdonald, author of the multi-award-winning H IS FOR HAWK.
'No hawk can be a pet. There is no sentimentality. In a way, it is the psychiatrist's art. One is matching one's mind against another mind with deadly reason and interest. One desires no transference of affection, demands no ignoble homage or gratitude. It is a tonic for the less forthright savagery of the human heart.'
First published in 1951, T.H. White's memoir describes with searing honesty his attempt to train a wild goshawk, a notoriously difficult bird to master. With no previous experience and only…
If you want chapter and verse on the science behind the northern goshawk (aka Accipiter gentilis) this is a good place to start. This title is a comprehensive and authoritative analysis of the species, published in the respected series of Poyser monographs.
Kenward's book gives details of where the northern goshawk lives, across the northern hemisphere, and how the different races of this species vary according to their habitats, from the huge and very pale birds of the colder north and east of Asia to the smaller, darker birds of the Mediterranean islands in the south and west.
In North America, the goshawk has many interesting differences too, including a reputation for ferocity in defence of its nesting territory.
A large and spectacular bird of prey, the Goshawk lives in boreal forests throughout the Northern hemisphere. A powerful hunter of large birds and woodland mammals, it was persecuted for many years by game keepers to the point of extinction in the UK. However, escaped falconry birds led to the establishment of a new population in the 1960s, though the species remains rare and elusive - birders need a combination of hard work and a little luck to see this magnificent raptor. The Goshawk is an authoritative yet highly readable monograph of the species. It includes chapters on nomenclature, races…
Helen Macdonald, Richard Hines and I first met on a foggy winter’s day in Oxford back in 2009, and quickly formed an unofficial T. H. White Goshawk fan club. We were all incubating books of different kinds, with the common element of T. H. White’s book The Goshawk. We continued to share thoughts and information as our books took shape.
Helen’s book describes how she sought solace in a goshawk following the shattering loss of her father. She compares notes on her hawk training experience with White.
The lines between her and the hawk become blurred. In many passages the prose is vivid. "The hawk had filled the house with wildness as a bowl of lilies fills a house with scent." "She looks new... a thing hammered of metal and scales and glass."
One of the New York Times Book Review's 10 Best Books of the Year
ON MORE THAN 25 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR LISTS: including TIME (#1 Nonfiction Book), NPR, O, The Oprah Magazine (10 Favorite Books), Vogue (Top 10), Vanity Fair, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Seattle Times, San Francisco Chronicle (Top 10), Miami Herald, St. Louis Post Dispatch, Minneapolis Star Tribune (Top 10), Library Journal (Top 10), Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Slate, Shelf Awareness, Book Riot, Amazon (Top 20)
The instant New York Times bestseller and award-winning sensation, Helen Macdonald's story of adopting and raising one of…
T. H. White’s book The Goshawk had been a profound influence on Richard’s life as a boy. It inspired his early interest in falconry and his relationship with a kestrel. This in turn inspired his older brother Barry to write Kes.
After I had been helped to find it by the local Wheeler family who had known White all those years ago, Richard, Helen Macdonald and I made a memorable pilgrimage to White’s long-lost cottage one sunny spring morning. Richard describes the occasion in No Way But Gentlenesse, his vivid and moving memoir.
Born and raised in the South Yorkshire mining village of Hoyland Common, Richard Hines remembers heaps of coal dust, listening out for the colliery siren at the end of shifts and praying for his father's safe return. When he failed his eleven-plus it seemed all too likely that he would follow in his father's footsteps and end up working in the pits - unlike his older brother Barry, who had passed the exam to grammar school and seemed to be heading for great things.
Crushed by this, Richard spent his time in the fields and meadows beyond the slag heap.…
There were quite a lot of books written during lockdown, as the enforced isolation created new contexts for connecting with nature close to home.
In summer 2020 James Aldred was in the position of having a large part of the New Forest mostly to himself, and a chance to immerse himself in the company of goshawks and other wild creatures. James was filming the hawks for a BBC documentary, with many hours spent in a hide, camera pointed at the nest, watching, waiting. This gives the book some of the self-contained, moment-in-time-and-place intensity of T. H. White’s Goshawk book.
WINNER OF THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR NATURE WRITING 2022
'A beautiful inspirational tale set in an extraordinary time.' Ray Mears
'Wonderful ... they don't come much more expert than James Aldred' Lauren Laverne
What happens to nature when we are no longer there?
In early 2020, wildlife cameraman James Aldred was commissioned to film the lives of a family of goshawks in the New Forest. Then lockdown. No more cars, no more aeroplanes, no one in the woods - except James - in a place empty of people but filled with birdsong and new life.
A deep-dive investigation into the many mysteries surrounding the fabled ‘phantom of the forest,’ including how the northern goshawk’s scarcity and elusiveness in the UK contrasts with the situation in other countries and what this tells us about the state of wild nature here and abroad.
Consider this: there are as many goshawks alive and well and breeding in Berlin as in all of Scotland. And yet very few people seem aware. Along the way, this plot-driven tale also makes vivid the natural and cultural history of this extraordinary predator – there is no wild bird with which our shared past has been more checkered. Once beloved of royalty across many lands, the goshawk would become the most persecuted raptor of all.
I have been to, and loved, North, Central, and especially East Africa for over fifty years. Only six times have I been to Africa on holiday; more often, perhaps twenty or more times, as a television producer. Working in Africa gains a perspective of reality that the glories of vacation do not. Each has its place, each its pitfalls like stalled plane rides with emergency landings in the bush or attacks by wildlife. But, in the end, the magic of the “otherness,” what an old friend called “primitava” captures one’s soul and changes your life.
Keen to rekindle their love of East African wildlife adventures after years of filming, extreme dangers, and rescues, producer Pero Baltazar, safari guide Mbuno Waliangulu, and Nancy Breiton, camerawoman, undertake a filming walking adventure north of Lake Rudolf, crossing from Kenya into Ethiopia along the Omo River, following a herd of elephant making their annual migration.
Stumbling onto an elephant poaching, the team become embroiled in true financing of terrorism for al Shabaab –ivory sales–and are determined to stop the slaughter at any cost. Ivory trade financing terrorism involves UN refugee camps with two hundred thousand displaced Somali persons, powerful…
A documentary team hiking through East Africa collides with a gang of deadly poachers, in this gripping adventure by the author of Kidnapped on Safari.
Years of filming, extreme dangers, and daring rescues have taken their toll on documentary producer Pero Baltazar and his team. To relax and reconnect with the East African wildlife they love, Pero organizes a walking safari for him, his camerawoman Nancy Breiton, and their elite guide Mbuno Waliangulu. Still, Pero has trouble truly disconnecting from work. When the team comes across a herd of elephants making their annual migration north of Lake Rudolf, Pero decides…
