Join two of our finest nature writers in conversation.
As a child Helen Macdonald was determined to become a falconer.
She learned the arcane terminology and read all the classic books, including TH White’s tortured masterpiece, The Goshawk, which describes White’s struggle to train a hawk as a spiritual contest.
When her father died and Macdonald was knocked sideways by grief and she became obsessed with the idea of training her own goshawk.
She bought Mabel for £800 on a Scottish quayside and took her home to Cambridge. Then she filled the freezer with hawk food and unplugged the phone, ready to embark on the long, strange business of trying to train this wildest of birds.
After the massive, world-spanning, unanimously acclaimed Birds & People, Mark Cocker looks in fascinating detail at his home parish in Norfolk and its wildlife in Claxton: Field Notes from a Small Planet.
Distilled into a single twelve-month cycle, these writings explore Mark Cocker’s relationship with the East Anglian landscape, to nature and to all the living things around him.
He explores how all wildlife is as essential to our sense of genuine well-being and to our feelings of rootedness as any other kind of fellowship.
