Fly low over fields, then into undergrowth with yellow talons outstretched, followed by the scream of a pheasant as the hawk begins to tear into its entrails — this is the reality of the ancient art of falconry. And the falconer must show the bird the intended prey because to let it choose on its own is considered bad practice.
Helen Macdonald lived a life training hawks and falcons (a significant distinction among experts) before she acquired a female goshawk from Ireland. She worked breeding raptors for sale to Arab royalty, but this time it was to be a personal, solo relationship between her and the one, gigantic bird. At home she even played games with it, tossing it scrunched-up balls of paper and getting it to peer at her down a rolled-up magazine. But her acquired expertise went into controlling its weight and taking it out onto trial runs connected by a long leash, before the final free flights and bloody kills.
“Falconry is fascism,” said a bright student to me once when I was a teacher. We’d perhaps been reading T.H. White’s The Goshawk, published in 1951 about his experience in the 1930s failing to train a similar bird. The book and its author are major themes in this new account. Macdonald is well-aware of falconry’s reputation, and for some its essential character, and most of the book is a long contemplation of her own nature, and why she engages in such an activity.
She knew from the start that training hawks was often to assuage some inner pain, at least in modern people, and even implies at one point that living a solitary existence in some wild countryside represents a similar strategy. She quickly gets to the root of White’s inner anguish. He was a repressed gay and a repressed flagellant, though working as a school master and refusing ever to physically punish his students. She has a good deal more difficulty, however, in analyzing herself.
“Human arms are for holding other humans close. They’re not for breaking the necks of rabbits … while the hawk dips her head to drink blood from her quarry’s chest cavity,” she writes. She takes medication for depression, and thinks that rabbits, unlike people, don’t know what loneliness is. Yet there she was, an ancillary teacher at Cambridge University, but by halfway through the book with no job or home of her own, and no partner, no child and — crucially — no father.
The death of her father, an admired London photojournalist, happens early on in H is for Hawk and it remains central. She records his habit as a boy of watching aircraft during World War II, sometimes illegally, and noting down their identifying numbers. Her life-long concern with birds, she concludes, must be related, though this hardly solves her problem.
Indeed, her search for an explanation, and perhaps then a justification, never really reaches a conclusion. But her research into White is fascinating indeed. He’s best remembered now as the author of The Once and Future King, a long novel about the imagined boyhood of King Arthur. J.K. Rowling has said he had a big influence on her Harry Potter novels, with his character of Wart (the youthful Arthur) being Harry’s “spiritual ancestor.” He’d originally been a teacher at the UK’s prestigious Stowe school and it was living in a cottage in the extensive grounds there that he tried training his goshawk.
For the rest, Macdonald flies to Maine one Christmas and discovers that falconry is legal anywhere in the US by those who’ve been licensed. In the UK, by contrast, though anyone can own a hawk, the land is divided into innumerable private parcels, and permission must be gained from each landowner before hunting over their land.
She also writes of a falconry contest held at the International Hunting Exhibition in Germany in 1937, a year when only Germany and England competed. England came second, but the current president of the British Falconers’ Club can hardly bear to look at the trophy, not because his country didn’t win but because the entire event reinforced falconry’s fascist associations. The Nazis had funded the activity even though there were no more than 50 falconers in the whole country. But hawks were the perfect symbols of Nazi ideology, “living paragons of power and blood and violence that preyed guiltlessly on things weaker than themselves.”
Macdonald shows herself as humane, too, and makes a point of running up (whenever she can) to where her goshawk has seized its prey and breaking the victim’s neck before it can make a meal of the entrails while the victim is still alive.
Although raptors are doing better in the UK countryside than they were 40 years ago, Macdonald still points to the depletion of other bird species. On the particular land over which she hunts there were, only a generation ago, turtle doves, corn buntings, lapwings, red-backed shrike, wrynecks and snipe. All are now gone.
In other ways Macdonald is very much the modern liberal. On one occasion she meets a couple out for an evening stroll who’ve shared with her the sight of a herd of grazing roe-deer. She’s previously been meditating on the origins of some UK species — fallow deer and probably hares brought in by the Romans, the first rabbits introduced in the Middle Ages, pheasants introduced from Asia Minor, partridges from France and gray squirrels from North America. “Yes,” says one of the couple, “a relief that there’re things still like that, a real bit of Old England still left, despite all these immigrants coming in.” She feels so astonished she can’t reply.
This book won the Samuel Johnson Prize in the UK for the best non-fiction publication last year. It may not answer its initial anguished questions, but it’s an absorbing read nonetheless.
The government released figures for October showing that, year on year, exports increased 49 percent to a record US$61.8 billion for the month. The dramatic increases were partly due to fall being the high season, but largely due to the AI boom driving demand for exports, which many investors fear is rapidly turning into a massive bubble. An editorial in this newspaper last month warned that the government should be ready in case the boom turns to bust. In previous boom-bust cycles, from shoes and textiles, through computer parts and accessories, to tools, bicycles and sporting goods, Taiwan has survived in
The Lee (李) family migrated to Taiwan in trickles many decades ago. Born in Myanmar, they are ethnically Chinese and their first language is Yunnanese, from China’s Yunnan Province. Today, they run a cozy little restaurant in Taipei’s student stomping ground, near National Taiwan University (NTU), serving up a daily pre-selected menu that pays homage to their blended Yunnan-Burmese heritage, where lemongrass and curry leaves sit beside century egg and pickled woodear mushrooms. Wu Yun (巫雲) is more akin to a family home that has set up tables and chairs and welcomed strangers to cozy up and share a meal
The second floor of an unassuming office building in central Bangkok is a strange place to encounter the world’s largest rodent. Yet here, inside a small enclosure with a shallow pool, three capybaras are at the disposal of dozens of paying customers, all clamoring for a selfie. As people eagerly thrust leafy snacks toward the nonchalant-looking animals, few seem to consider the underlying peculiarity: how did this South American rodent end up over 10,000 miles from home, in a bustling Asian metropolis? Capybara cafes have been cropping up across the continent in recent years, driven by the animal’s growing internet fame.
President William Lai (賴清德) has proposed a NT$1.25 trillion (US$40 billion) special eight-year budget that intends to bolster Taiwan’s national defense, with a “T-Dome” plan to create “an unassailable Taiwan, safeguarded by innovation and technology” as its centerpiece. This is an interesting test for the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), and how they handle it will likely provide some answers as to where the party currently stands. Naturally, the Lai administration and his Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) are for it, as are the Americans. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is not. The interests and agendas of those three are clear, but
RSS