Finding Hope in Nature: A Conversation with H is for Hawk Author Helen Macdonald

Twice a day, just before dawn and again at twilight, the bird known as the common swift  performs a sort of miracle.

It soars to heights of up to 6,000 feet in the atmosphere, spiraling so high it can forecast the weather.  The swift then calibrates its position by the ever-nearing stars and its internal magnetic compass. Finally, sensing the collective reactions of the rest of the flock, it confers on the best flight path to take next, and the whole flock moves as one body.

This voyage is so unique it has been given its own term: a vesper flight. And Helen Macdonald — nature writer, science historian and best-selling author of H is for Hawk — points to this behavior as something for humans to emulate in these strange and “grim times.”

“It feels like we’re in the evening of the world. It it feels like we’re going toward darkness, so the idea that we might take flight … and figure out what to do next is very important to me,” Macdonald said from her home in Suffolk, in the U.K. “We need to drag ourselves way from everyday life and see where we are going.”

Macdonald spoke Sunday during an online event sponsored by the Miami Book Fair and Books & Books to promote her new book of essays, fittingly titled Vesper Flights. I was lucky enough  to listen in on her conversation with moderator J. Drew Lanham, a wildlife biologist and author of The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature.

At its core, it was a conversation about finding hope in, and drawing lessons from, the natural world. And about remembering that the line we drawn between humans and nature is a false one.

“We’re all just struggling to make connections, and I hope my book just shows that we can make connections with creatures that aren’t human,” Macdonald said. “We live in a world with a devastating lack of empathy, and I think that trying to imagine what it’s like to be an animal … or how it sees the world differently exercises that muscle. And it de-centers our egos and our sense of ourselves as ‘the important ones’ on this earth.”

Macdonald is an experienced falconer best known for her award-winning, 2014 memoire, which detailed how she trained a northern goshawk named Mabel as part of her grieving process after her father’s death.

On Sunday, she introduced us to another friend, her 17-year-old little green parrot Birdoole. She held the bird (a green-cheeked conure) on her finger and stroked its neck gently.

“I’ve taught him one English word, but he’s taught me an enormous number of vocalizations.”

One of my favorite things about Madonald’s writing is how she illuminates forgotten bits of history and political undercurrents that hide beneath people’s often-contradictory relationship with the rest of the planet. Or, as Lanham put it, the way her essays “splice culture and conservation,” including “humor that rolls into horror” and everything in between.

For example, both authors spoke about how early conservation efforts to protect songbirds in the United States – a laudable goal —  were actually tied to anti-immigrant sentiment, particularly of Italian immigrants who hunted songbirds for food. (To read more on this history, check out the book The Rise of the American Conservation Movement: Power, Privilege, and Environmental Protection by Dorceta E. Taylor or, if you’re short on time, this related article about the 1906 murder of a Pennsylvania game protector.)

Macdonald also drew parallels to present-day nativist terminology used to describe “exotic” and “invasive” species.

“It’s politically often inflected with some very dark things, even if we don’t realize what’s going on. It’s fascinating and very troubling,” Macdonald said. “If you read Australian government websites about invasive species like sparrows, they’re described as ‘promiscuous.’ They’re terrible birds! They’re promiscuous!”

Scientists themselves are caught up in the similar power structures, both authors agreed.  For example, for centuries it was considered a scientific fact that only male songbirds sing. Then, over the past 20 years, a new generation of researchers – most of them women – observed that many female songbirds do sing, especially in the southern hemisphere. 

“We only know that because of scientists who were looking through a different prism,” Lanham said. “Science is teaching us more [about] what we don’t know than giving us all the answers. We make assumptions about animals all the time.”

Rather than pretend to be unbiased, Macdonald said the best way she knows how to be “honest” in her nature writing is to acknowledge that she is not separate from what she  observes:

“If I’m bored or rained upon or I don’t know what I’m looking at, or I’m kind of fed up and I’m thinking about the washing machine instead of thinking about the mountainside, that’s what I want to put in.

“In nature writing … you’re not supposed to have anything human in it. It’s supposed to be this weird imaginary place where everything is pristine. But I feel very strongly that if a nightingale is singing next to a burned-out car, you put the car in.”

Given recent events – particularly the now-infamous incident of a white woman calling the police on a black birder in Central Park back in May  —  I would have also loved to hear Lanham speak more on his personal experience and essay “Birding While Black.” Lanham is a South Carolina native and an alumni distinguished professor of wildlife ecology at Clemson University. But Sunday’s event was focused on Macdonald, so instead I will simply make sure to read his book on my own.

Until then, I’ll keep in mind a story that Macdonald told after Lanham asked her how she manages to keep sane while stories of climate change, the pandemic and injustice abound in the world.   

In answer, Macdonald recalled a day when she saw a large SUV pulled over on the side of the road with its hazard lights flashing. It was the type of SUV “that in Britain tends to mean the person driving is a bit of an asshole,” she joked. She stopped and asked the driver – a “very stressed looking man in some very expensive clothes” what was wrong.

To her surprise, he pointed to a puddle in the road, in which swam a mother mallard and her ducklings. He was worried they would get run over by passing traffic. 

“And I said, ‘Why didn’t you just push them back into the ditch [beside the road] where the water is?’ And he said, ‘I didn’t want to disturb them.’ And I said, ‘How long have you been here?’ And he said, ‘About an hour and a half.’ And every car that went past, he’d tell them to be careful because of the ducks.

“And it’s things like that, little everyday moments, that carry me through.”