THUNDER ROLLS
Do you remember when you were a kid, the day before your birthday,
you couldn't sleep because you knew something special was coming?
It's a little bit like that.
Crossed with the thought that maybe tomorrow there'll be a hurricane.
You know, the weather's going to change
and things are going to get really serious.
Because you know that life's going to change when the goshawk arrives.
Ten years ago, my father died suddenly.
Stricken with grief, I fled from humanity.
I ran towards things of death and difficulty.
Spooky, pale-eyed feathered ghosts
that lived and killed in woodland thickets.
I ran towards goshawks.
The story of how I trained my goshawk Mabel
became a bestselling book, H Is For Hawk.
Oh, my gosh.
She's amazing.
And so beautiful.
Hello.
But this fiery bird with light splashed feathers isn't Mabel.
I'm training a new goshawk.
And the prospect is terrifying.
This is the raging wild challenge of my future.
A hawk that won't be a solution to grief...
..but my wings to somewhere new.
Wow.
She's...
She's amazing. She's huge, she's like twice the size of Mabel.
She's doing that goshawk magic thing already.
She's... She's transforming this room into something very unlike
a domestic sphere. She's...
She's making it feel wild,
it's like you've stepped into another world in here.
She's...
You know, half dragon, half leopard.
Something very old and prehistoric.
She has this very light hood on which just makes her think
it's night-time, so she's sort of sleepy, as well,
and I'm not going to challenge her today by taking that hood off.
What I might do is sit with her and just talk to her and try
and get across that this voice is not something to be feared.
Our journey begins, I guess.
Here we go.
Training another hawk was inevitable.
But I didn't know it.
I didn't know that it would be the outcome
of a journey that began earlier that year
when I set out to watch goshawks in the wild.
To me, goshawks are among the most beautiful things
the world has ever made.
Their predatory grace is bewitching.
They are big, bloody, deadly,
scary,
and very, very hard to see.
Wild goshawks are magnificent phantoms.
You might spend a week in a forest full of them and never see one.
Just traces of their presence.
A sudden hush...
..followed by the calls of terrified woodland birds
and a sense of something moving just beyond vision.
I was desperate to see this most secretive of hawks in the wild.
I knew they would be difficult to find,
but then everything about goshawks is difficult.
Looking for goshawks is like looking for grace.
It comes, but not often.
You don't get to say when or how.
That spring, I could have counted on one hand the number of times
I'd ever seen them in the wild.
But I remembered one morning a decade ago,
on a clear March day at the beginning of the breeding season...
..when, suddenly, there they were.
They had left their secret world under the trees
to court each other, dancing in the open sky.
I remembered them so clearly
because my memory of the hawk's graceful flight
became caught up in a terrible moment.
A few weeks later, my mum called me and told me that my father had died.
Dad was one of the best photojournalists of his time.
He took this photo of me.
I still remember how itchy that sweater was, how still I had to sit.
His unexpected death shattered all the stories I told myself
about my life.
Grief broke me.
I didn't know who I was any more.
I found myself falling back into old ways of looking at the world.
And my old childhood obsession started to return.
For as long as I can remember, I've loved birds.
I used to rear orphaned fledglings, like my crow, Albert.
But hawks were my favourite.
When I was small, I loved them so much I tried to sleep with my arms
crossed at my back, like wings.
I even said prayers to the ancient Egyptian falcon god Horus.
I went on a falconry course when I was 13,
and this is me with a Harris hawk and...
I don't know, I look joyous.
I mean, I was. It was an amazing experience.
And this is at the Bird of Prey Centre that I used to work at,
and they taught me, really, how to handle birds,
and then they gave me my first kestrel.
This is the one who used to sleep on my bedroom bookcase at night.
My parents were unbelievably chilled out about this falconry business.
I think twice my mother told me, you know,
are you sure you wouldn't rather be a lawyer than a falconer?
It's really weird when you look at childhood pictures
and you feel there is no continuity between you, they sort of punctuate.
This is one person, this is a different person.
But in all the ones where I have hawks on my hands, you know,
I remember those hawks, I remember those moments,
and I feel like I'm the same person.
When Dad died, I started dreaming of hawks all the time.
I wanted to fly with a hawk to salve my grief,
cross from this world into another, wilder one.
One of the millions of reasons it was really hard to lose Dad
wasn't just that he was a really good friend of mine,
but we kind of saw the world in the same way.
We were both watchers and it's a sort of spy shorthand, I guess.
I got it from a John Le Carre novel.
You all copy your parents, it's kind of who you are.
I guess what photography does is, when you're in a scary situation,
you can put the camera to your eye and look through the viewfinder
and it distances you from what you're seeing.
You know, he said that was the way to be safe,
you just look at it as a picture, you look through the lens.
I think with falconry,
when my dad died and the whole family was bereft,
living with a hawk let me experience the world -
in my imagination, anyway - through her eyes.
She was a little bit like a camera, a little bit like a viewfinder.
A hawk sees the world differently, too,
so it's kind of an escape from your own vision, I think, in both cases.
Escape was all I wanted when he died of a heart attack.
And this is what I escaped to.
Mabel was my first goshawk.
I had trained a lot of birds of prey in my life,
I never wanted to train a goshawk.
I knew they were very highly strung, very hard to train.
And then my dad died and I wanted a goshawk.
When something bad happens, when you lose a loved one,
you're often driven by, you know, almost unconscious motivation.
I was driven to get this goshawk.
The hawk had caught me, it was never the other way around.
Writing about Mabel was one of the ways I later tried
to make sense of it all.
The winner of the 2014 Costa Book Of The Year is...
..H Is For Hawk by Helen Macdonald.
APPLAUSE
I'm happy to announce that Helen Macdonald
is the winner of the Samuel Johnson prize 2014
with H Is For Hawk.
The book I wrote did really well - I didn't expect that.
It's been quite exciting, but a bit of a shock.
The person that's in the book isn't really me any more.
I think what happens after a big bereavement is that you, you know,
you fall apart and you have to remake yourself as someone else,
someone new, and that's who I am now
and that person in the book isn't really me any more.
Just before I finished writing the book, Mabel died.
A sudden untreatable infection with aspergillosis -
a deadly airborne fungal disease.
I carried her from her aviary to the dark woods
where dwelled the lost and the dead.
Eight years on, I felt compelled to bring goshawks back into my life.
So I turned to Rob, a friend of a friend,
and my wild goshawk guru.
I like the fact that, for most of the year, they're very secret birds
and you can't really see them.
No. And there's only one short window in the year
that you can actually get close to them and observe them.
Which is when they're... When they're breeding.
The rest of the year, they seem to disappear. Yeah.
And for such a large bird, that's quite a trick.
No, it is, it's almost supernatural, isn't it?
The ghostly way that they vanish.
I just think they're magical birds, really.
They are, they are.
Years ago, Rob had taken me to see a nest right at the edge of England,
just before it tips into Wales.
A land of wet forests and wild goshawks.
And now, I'd asked him to find me another.
One I could visit over the spring and summer
to get a personal view of Britain's most elusive bird of prey.
Wild goshawks are breeding again in Britain after over a century
of extinction, and this forest is one of their strongholds.
Their presence here reminds me that the wild does not have to be
a thing untouched by human hearts and hands.
The wild can be human work.
Because in the '60s and '70s,
British falconers worked out that for the cost of importing
a European goshawk for falconry,
you could bring in a second bird and release it.
Buy one, set one free.
Reintroduction isn't hard
with a bird as self-reliant and predatory as a goshawk.
After all...
..everything about these hawks is tuned to hunt and kill.
Falconers brought goshawks back to life.
And now I realised it was time to bring one back into mine.
The strange thing was that the hawk I trained this summer
would be, in one sense, immortal.
For while individual goshawks die,
their species has remained unchanged.
They have no fancy varieties because they were always taken from the wild
to be trained.
The birds falconers fly today
are identical to those of 5,000 years ago.
Civilisations rise and fall, but the hawks stay the same.
Today, British falconers only use aviary-bred birds,
and goshawks are fiendishly difficult to breed.
It's not for the faint-hearted.
Even in the wild,
there's a fine line between goshawk romance
and terrible mortal violence.
You can't just put a couple of goshawks in an aviary
and leave them to it.
More often than not, the female will kill her mate.
Instead, we put them in separate, adjoining aviaries
and monitor their behaviour closely.
Only when you think the female is ready -
a piece of fine judgment that does not omit error -
do you let the male into her chamber.
He's going to copulate. Yeah.
There we are. Come on, lad.
He's doing it right there.
There you are. That's it.
One copulation. Hopefully she'll lay soon and it'll be fertile.
Wayne, Dave and Andy are goshawk breeders.
During the mating season,
they stare obsessively at screens showing live footage
from their aviaries.
This is the best television ever.
Forget American cop shows, I want to watch goshawks all day.
The goshawk on the monitor, Helen,
that's the mother to the goshawk you'll be having.
Look at her. She's sat on eggs now.
Hello, you.
When I got Mabel, I never saw the parents of the bird.
It's kind of lovely to see the actual... It must be great for you,
having a bird and actually seeing the parents to the bird.
Yeah, it's amazing.
You know, it's got to give you a buzz, just to see this.
It's made me feel quite soppy, actually.
Yeah. This is one of the things about goshawks,
you know, I sort of love,
is that everyone thinks of them as sort of feathered shotguns,
but actually they make people feel quite soppy, as well.
There would be a goshawk for me to train,
and I'd asked, if possible, for a female, like Mabel.
As spring edged towards summer,
the forest shone with new-spilled beauty.
In the nest that Rob found for me, the chicks had hatched.
Three small bundles of dense cotton wool, waiting to be fed.
A new goshawk family, descended from birds released by falconers,
was being raised.
Wild, spectacular,
utterly at home.
The presence of these British goshawks fills me with joy.
For weeks, I waited anxiously, getting updates from Rob.
And then, after almost a month, I went to see them for myself.
I am 50 foot up in the air...
..staring at a nest of baby goshawks,
which is pretty extraordinary.
They are at this really ludicrous stage
where they look like moth-eaten eagles,
and they can hear me, I think,
because they're giving me evils through the foliage.
It's amazing sitting here.
I never thought I'd see a goshawk nest at this level.
I feel like, kind of, a bit of a spy.
She is on the nest! Oh, my gosh!
Oh, she's spectacular.
It's impossible to look at them without grinning,
they're just so great.
There's a whole bunch of things these birds are doing
which make my heart kind of ache a little because they're so familiar
and there's some great falconry terms.
So when the young birds extend one wing to stretch,
sort of drag it over their tail, it's called mantling.
They do this thing, too, where they put both wings above their back,
really, really, really stretch them, and that's called warbling.
It's really evocative of my time with Mabel.
Yeah, it's great.
A goshawk is a goshawk, I guess.
One of the things my dad taught me, or tried to teach me,
when I was a kid, was this abstract thing called patience,
and I was really bad at it when I was small.
He taught me that when you want to see something bad enough, you know,
you just have to be really patient and wait.
I never thought I'd see...
..a family of wild goshawks like this in Britain, and here they are.
You know, it's not just standing around waiting for long periods
of time, it's years passing and suddenly...
It's really emotional.
Patience.
The word makes me think of one of my father's photographs.
The sparrow is caught mid-hop at the exact moment it picks a crumb
from a street sweeper's fingers.
The expression on his face is beautiful.
To me, he looks like an angel.
It took a lifetime's patience to capture that perfect moment.
It's strange to look at these little scraps of life up there
and know that in an aviary quite a long way from here is a,
you know, a chick that I'm going to get to know,
and it'll be just as wild as these birds, you know -
I'm going to become acquainted with one just like this pretty soon.
It's very exciting!
For the breeders, the waiting and watching continues
for about another nine weeks after the chicks hatch.
Only then will a parent-reared bird be ready to train.
I still have more than two months to wait.
On a thick, gloomy summer's evening, I returned to the nest.
The forest was dim and vaulted green.
It felt like an underwater cathedral.
An old friend, Jimmy, was climbing to the nest.
With a base-jumper's adrenaline-wired demeanour,
he looped the rope around the tree and began to climb
as Rob and I watched.
We had to work as quickly as possible.
It's quite tense watching him climb, isn't it? It is, yeah.
There aren't that many wild goshawks in Britain.
Around 450 pairs.
Fitting chicks with numbered rings helps track the population,
and that's why Jimmy and Rob were here.
Precious cargo.
We'll get them all out together.
Oh, she's huge!
OK? Yeah, there we go.
And they're giving us the evils.
Two females and one male, carefully assessed by Rob.
Would it stress her out if I quickly held her?
No, that's fine, that's fine. Come on then, missus.
She's a sweetie, look at her.
I just love at this point, they haven't quite got their feathers yet
and they've got these fuzzy heads like little snowmen
and these wonderfully milky kind of bluey-grey eyes.
They're really gorgeous, like little reptiles.
I'm going to just smell it first because goshawks smell amazing.
Hang on.
Oh, oh, nostalgia! That reminds me so much of Mabel.
It's this weird smell.
They should bottle it and put it in perfume bottles.
But I think we should definitely get them back in the nest now.
They've had their moment of contact with humanity.
It's time to return them.
OK, so she's in safe.
Ringing gives us scientific data to help preserve birds like these,
but there's more to this than science.
Off you go, little ones.
These chicks will probably never be held by human hands again.
Might not even be seen again.
But, for a few moments,
we've been allowed to touch the lives of creatures far wilder
than ourselves.
And I will never forget it.
When I was small, the countryside was in crisis.
Pesticides were wiping out hawks.
Otters were gone.
Dead elm trees were being burned.
Rivers were dying.
Everything was sick.
And we'd be next.
We lived in the shadow of nuclear war.
I clung to hope as hard as I could,
prayed that life would go on, in spite of my fears.
But then, I grew up always expecting loss.
I did this in July 1977, so I was six years old,
and it's a male kestrel and it's sitting on a glove...
..and you have this...
I don't know, it makes my heart go all weird.
I'm really obsessed with its attachment to the glove,
so the things that are tying it to the glove are really carefully drawn
and there is a dot on the glove that I've gone round and round
with a pencil.
It can't leave, it can't leave me, it has to stay here.
I had a twin brother who died just after I was born
and I didn't know about this, it was a real tragedy,
and yet here I am, summoning something,
summoning something that could fly away,
and making sure it can't, making sure it's with me.
It's a really, really weird thing to look at now,
and I think that's kind of what it's all about. Falconry's about...
..things that can fly away choosing to come back to you.
It's all about returning - things returning that could go.
On a dark summer's day, I returned to the forest.
It would be six more weeks till the hawk I'd train left her parents.
But the wild chicks were older.
The male had already left the nest, and soon his sisters would, too.
I've got a bit of a pang in my heart.
This is probably the last time I'm going to see this particular year's
family of goshawks before they go.
It's really weird at this point when they've left the nest.
There's a lovely falconry term for it - branchers,
which means they are kind of scrambling around the branches
around the nest, and they're making little flights.
They're not really cued in to hunting yet.
They're much more interested in carrion
and the things their parents have brought.
So she's kind of watching all the birds around with interest,
but she hasn't got that kind of predatory fire yet.
But it's...
You know, this whole wood is animated by that bird being there.
It makes everything feel really quite exciting and special.
And these birds are going to start to slowly disperse and move away
from this wood. They might come back and visit,
but this is kind of it and it's the absolutely normal, slow
dissolution of goshawk family life for another year.
I kind of want to salute her, you know? Wish her luck.
It's a bit poignant for me.
Jesses. A little scrap of social history in the name
for a strip of leather.
It's a French word from the 14th century,
back when falconry was a favoured pastime of the ruling elite.
These are the soft straps that fit with the letter anklets on a trained
hawk's leg. It's a kind of ritual, making them.
When I was waiting the night before I picked up Mabel
in this little hotel up in Scotland, I remember sitting down and making
jesses like this, watching bad TV.
I guess it really, really brought home to me that this isn't ever just
about making falconry equipment.
There's something about making jesses that was haunting, you know?
And as I made them, the hawk became very real in my mind
and so did my dad.
I remember him always like he was standing there in his grey shirt
with his slightly wonky glasses and his tie and a cup of coffee
and it was really, really...
A very strong moment.
Everything's different now from all those years ago
when I trained Mabel.
I'm in a house that doesn't have a garden really suitable for keeping a
goshawk in. And I'm a different person.
I think I'm a lot softer these days.
I guess I kind of worked out that death waits for us all and it's
made me kind of love the world more and love people, too, more.
I don't really want that solitary withdrawal
from the world to train a hawk.
I want to kind of do it more sociably.
And so I went up to the Pennines to meet the hawk that I would train.
This is where she'll live with Kirsty, her new owner -
my friend and a fellow falconer.
She's going to be trained differently,
she's going to be trained in that old-school way.
Getting it used to people hanging out with Kirsty and her goshawk,
just making it a much, much less sort of miserable and lonely thing.
I'm really looking forward to it.
I think it's going to be a really extraordinary experience,
but a very different one from before.
I am...
Yeah, how can I put this without swearing?
I'm pretty scared. I haven't really trained a hawk since Mabel and that
was, you know, ten years ago now.
Mabel was super chilled out from the word go.
This bird could be a complete nightmare, so I don't know whether,
you know, the box will open and this kind of avenging angel will come out
desperate to sort of slay and stress me out beyond the limits
of human tolerance.
We'll just, you know, play it by ear, little by little.
Patience, positive reinforcement, calmness -
watchwords of training a hawk.
People have trained hawks for thousands of years.
A hawk must always be tamed from scratch,
and the first step is gaining their trust.
I want her to take food from my hand,
but the strangeness of my presence scares her.
She tries to get away,
which is hard because it's the opposite of everything I desire.
I concentrate very hard on trying to be invisible.
Pretending not to be there.
An ancient falconer's trick.
This new hawk is bewildered.
She stares and stares.
Seconds slow and tick past.
She's not happy with this unfamiliar situation.
HAWK SCREECHES
Her wings are dropped low.
She's crouched, ready for flight.
But she looks at the food beneath her feet.
It's been a long time since I've done this, but it's amazing.
As soon as the world shrinks to just you and the bird, all those kind of
old knowledges just come back like it was yesterday.
That's it, well done.
I know it didn't look like it, but she was phenomenally calm
and there's a moment when you take the hood off a fresh bird where...
This is going to sound very new-age,
but you kind of feel their spirit and...
Yeah, I'm in love. She's amazing.
She's really, really steady.
That was way more than I expected.
I'm kind of a bit freaked out, actually.
I think, you know, crossing fingers,
she's going to be a really cool hawk.
That was amazing.
Compared to Mabel, this bird is solid.
Not just bigger, but she's kind of strong,
she's got a really calm centre.
She's immensely likeable and has
already surprised the hell out of me.
Everything this bird sees now is strange.
She can see out the window,
there are ash-tree leaves being buffeted in the sunlight.
There are swallows bombing around, there's shadows,
there's kind of polarised light up there.
Everything must be pretty mind-blowing, actually.
So the fact that she's so calm and is treating this with such
reasonable equanimity is a kind of miracle, really.
The secret to taming a hawk is to take things slowly.
To move gradually from darkness into light.
Go on, have a bite to eat.
You'll feel better when you've had some dinner.
I think I'm going to call her Lupin.
It's one of those nice names that sort of means the flower,
but it also means wolf.
There's a great tradition in falconry that you don't give birds
of prey - particularly goshawks - scary names.
So you don't call your goshawk, you know,
Slayer or Vulcan or something like that.
Because sort of superstition says that if you give a bird a name like
that, it'll just sit on a fence post and squeak at you and do nothing.
You give them cutesy names and then
they become proficient hunters, so...
Yeah, I have a friend with a goshawk called Bunty, so I think Lupin kind
of fits that and we'll just pretend it's the flower name
so she'll become a proficient hunter.
Everything fascinates her.
Lupin can see with fierce clarity things I can't possibly resolve from
the generalised blur.
BIRD SQUAWKS
But this new world of Kirsty and her birds unnerves her, too.
Good girl.
And so we sit quietly at a distance so she can see these things
and not a threat.
Days pass and we move through the intricate process of training.
Next, I want her to jump to my fist for food.
You cannot menace or punish a hawk.
You must wait for them to choose to come to you.
The space between the fear and the food is a vast, vast gulf
and you have to cross it together.
She did it. You know, there was no half-heartedness about that.
She was incredible.
I'm really pleased with her, I'm really delighted with how that went.
I couldn't have asked for better.
Come on, then, Lupin.
Let's see what you weigh today.
Birds in falconry have a flying weight.
I guess it's a bit like boxers have a fighting weight.
Basically if a hawk is full of food, it's fed up, it's not going to want
to fly at all, let alone fly towards you for food.
So you have to monitor the bird's weight very, very carefully,
and you do that by weighing the bird every day - sometimes twice a day.
She's doing so well. She is, isn't she? It's phenomenal.
The bird's been amazing but it's kind of been hard, too.
I had a sleepless night last night.
I woke up in the morning very early and had a bit of a weep,
which I didn't expect. I feel a bit like a truck's hit me.
And I guess it's that combination of, you know, the raw stress and
responsibility that it takes to look after a new bird like this
and make sure you're doing everything right
and not messing it up.
Also, I haven't sat with an untrained goshawk on my hand since
the year my father died and it's kind of brought it all back.
You know, I dreamt about him last night,
joked about Mabel, the hawk I had back then.
Bit of weird time travel going on and it's kind of hard,
I have to process some stuff again.
Dad was, I think, the first person to take a photograph like this one.
He'd been a plane-spotter as a boy,
cycling from his home to local aerodromes,
where he'd stand for hours staring at the sky.
We were both, in a sense, obsessed with the same thing -
creatures that lift off and take your heart with them when they fly.
After Dad's death, my grief-spurred dreams were filled with wings.
But now I was dreaming of Mabel.
I dreamed of the hawk that had been my refuge.
There was no regret or mourning in her.
No past, nor future.
She lived in the present moment only, and that was my escape.
Watching her hunt felt like gambling,
though the stakes were bloodier.
You put all your skill, your very soul,
into training the hawk then step back and relinquish control.
That's the gambler's hook.
Once the dice roll - once the hawk leaves the fist -
you open yourself to fate and you cannot control the outcome.
I had hunted with hawks for years before I lost my father.
I never considered it cruel.
Wild hawks hunted, so did mine.
It's what hawks do.
It's what they're made of.
Training a goshawk and not letting it hunt still seems to me like
raising a child and not letting it play.
What's really got to me is that you can still see on the leather, here,
these tiny nicks and cuts that were made by Mabel's talons.
It's really strange how history kind of inheres in material objects.
It's kind of a bit of a dizzying sense, really,
that she's still here, she's still here in the marks in this glove.
Mabel was the fire I used to burn my hurts away.
She was my way of escaping human contact.
Training Lupin with Kirsty is different.
I'm accepting help.
We're doing it together.
When I trained Mabel,
I really bought into that idea that falconry was all about solitude.
This sort of monkish seclusion - just you and your bird.
And you know what? The early days, you do need to do that, but I've
been sitting with Kirsty and her goshawk and we've been manning
them, taming them together and chatting about everything.
I've just realised that that's how falconry is,
it has been for centuries all over the world.
You know, people train hawks together.
It doesn't have to be this dark kind of pursuit that it was after my
father died. It can be something much...
Much more full of joy, much more full of company.
That's a nice thought.
Time runs forward and Lupin scarcely misses a step of our intricate
training dance.
Lupin is currently 2lbs 10oz.
She's responding really well to that weight, she's very attentive.
She's feeding on the fist.
She is, you know, completely in the right zone.
Before a hawk flies free, a falconry bell the size and shape of an acorn
is fixed onto its topmost pair of tail feathers
next to a tiny radio transmitter mount.
These help us find the hawk if it flies out of sight.
BELL JINGLES
I know you're a bit noisy now, but...
First, though, I fly Lupin on a long line of braided cotton
called a creance.
It is both a literal line of attachment and something more
than material reassurance.
That went brilliantly. She's in a ferociously good mood right now,
and so am I.
I mean, I sort of think she's ready to fly free.
There was no hesitation there, she didn't try and veer off.
In fact, at one point, she was so desperate to come,
she didn't let me walk away.
So, you know, she completely trusts me.
She wants to come to me for food,
she isn't thinking about flying away.
I think we're there.
I'll be really happy to see this bird fly free.
I mean, it's the summation of it all, isn't it?
All those bonds and lines of trust that you've created over the weeks
suddenly are tested.
Yeah. You sort of have a sleepless night before you fly a bird free
for the first time every single time it happens.
Let's hope it works.
Now everything is accelerating towards that crucial point.
Point in the sense of time.
Point in the sense of aim.
Point in the sense of something so sharp, it hurts.
Letting the hawk fly free.
This is typical.
The day that I planned to fly Lupin free,
the whole valley is buried in fog.
The problem is that if she veered away from the fist
and disappeared into a tree or kept going,
we wouldn't be able to find each other.
Even though she's wearing a transmitter, it's going to be very
hard to sort of catch up with her and I'm not going to risk that,
so I'm just praying that the fog will lift.
Fog's a strange thing.
Everything just goes into stasis.
It's kind of what certain stages of grief feel like.
Everything familiar becomes obscured and sort of buried.
Nothing seems to be moving,
you don't really recognise where you are.
Familiar landscapes seem really strange and you just have to wait it
out until you don't feel like that any more.
Slowly, the fog seeps away.
And we decide to call Lupin to the fist once on the creance
before flying her free.
Yeah, she's not ready to go free. She's not ready.
Didn't quite work. She's not quite ready.
She's at the right flying weight, she should really -
as soon as the hood's off - she should be flying towards me.
Should be an instant response.
And she just sort of sat there and had a look around like, you know...
And Kirsty and I both decided it wasn't going to happen today,
so tomorrow... Hey-ho.
Tomorrow's the day.
Sorry about that, Lupes.
But all's fair in love, war and falconry.
It's always scary. You're always frightened it's not going to work
and she might fly away. But I feel pretty good about it today.
I think she's the right weight, she is obviously quite eager to fly so,
all being well, we should get the hawk back at the end of the day and
that's what you want.
You know, falconry is in many ways deep down about conjuring presence
in absence. It's about having this wild creature
that's decided that it wants to come back to you.
I think it might be all right. Shall we do it?
Blood pressure goes up, heart rate goes up.
This is the moment.
We have liftoff!
Big surge of adrenaline, here.
Well done, you.
That just happened. She flew free for the first time.
I'm super, super proud of her.
Yeah, really, really happy.
We've reached that wonderful point where Lupin is what's called in
falconry a made hawk.
She's flying free and now what we have to do is transform her life
from that of basically just flying backwards and forwards to my gloved
hand into something much more like that of a wild hawk.
So, teaching her about wind and flying into trees and learning about
quarrying and the whole kind of wider landscape.
Cambridge.
I've spent years of my life here,
sitting in libraries and seminar rooms.
First as a university student and then as a college research fellow.
It's a place I love very much.
But what's most special about it
isn't deep in its ancient bricks and mortar.
It isn't even in the city itself.
It's here, in the surrounding woods and fields.
This is one of the places where I used to bring Mabel.
She sat in pretty much all of these trees.
It's like a place full of ghosts.
Not bad ghosts.
I remember the dotted lines and the curves of all the different flights
we had here.
This was a landscape that, for me, was one that was marked with extreme
beauty but also a lot of darkness.
A lot of the time I was here, I was in this other place,
this other world of...
..not really knowing who or what I was.
It's...
It's kind of... Yeah, it's intense.
And, of course, as I sit here lost in my human memories,
you know, Lupin's just thinking, is there anything here I can catch?
Are there any rabbits?
What's going on? And I think that disconnect is really important,
you know? We give all our meanings to animals,
we make them into our own image.
And here I am thinking about the bond I had with Mabel,
the bonds I've had with goshawks, you know,
this incredibly ancient human hawk relationship,
and yet this thing's thinking, this human is just a hunting perch and
what can I chase?
I know, I know!
It's been a really fascinating and amazing few months...
..because a lot of things have changed.
What wild goshawks mean to me has subtly changed
and what trained ones mean.
It's really interesting.
You know, I never thought I'd get another bird after Mabel.
Mabel was THE goshawk of my life and, of course,
what I'd forgotten is Mabel was the goshawk of the life I had then.
She was the bird who belonged to a different person...
..and now I've got Lupin.
She's a very different character from Mabel
and I love her to bits.
It's really great to share life with her.
My life is not as completely empty as it was back in those dark days
after Dad died. I have a lot on but I'm going to fly Lupin
as much as I can over the season.
The idea that my life is going to be punctuated with the flickering
beauty of goshawks' wings is...
Just makes me... It sounds really cheesy,
but it makes me feel like a whole person again.
Goshawks are always going to be part of who I am
and I'm really glad about that.