Helen Macdonald (writer)

thumb|Macdonald in 2015 Helen Macdonald (writer) Helen Macdonald (born 1970) is an English writer and naturalist, as well as a poet, illustrator, and historian. Macdonald's 2014 memoir H is for Hawk won the Baillie Gifford Prize Samuel Johnson Prize and the Costa Book Awards Costa Biography of the Year Award. Quotes Falcons are the fastest animals that have ever lived. They excite us, seem superior to other birds and exude a dangerous, edgy, natural sublimity. All of this means nothing to falcons, of course; these are our own concepts. Though real, living animals, falcons can't be seen except through what anthropologist Franz Boas described as your Kulturbrille, the invisible lens your own culture gives you through which you see the world. Falcon London Reaction Books 2016 9781780236896 https://books.google.com/books?id=vDOHDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA15 15 (240 pages; 1st edition 2006) People say, Why didn’t you get a dog? I guess the big question is, Why didn’t you find a human? In a way, I tried. I fell in love with a friend of mine, a very nice man. I think I freaked him out, deeply, because I was broken. He ran away. So maybe there was a feeling that the hawk was safe. But falconry is very strange in that it’s very much about letting things go. These birds are flown free; once you’ve got them tame and trained, you let them go every day! And hope they come back to you. When they do, that reestablishes the sense that things can return. as quoted by Christina Fischer Guy in: What I Was Flying Toward: An Interview with Helen Macdonald Los Angeles Review of Books April 29, 2015 https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/what-i-was-flying-towards-an-interview-with-helen-macdonald/ As the Northern Hemisphere slipped towards spring and cases of coronavirus began to blossom horribly across the map of Europe, I was in Costa Rica on a wildlife-watching tour. For two weeks I shared a minibus with a group of retired British folk whose main aim was to see as many birds as possible: we met every evening to tick off the species we’d seen that day from a ready-printed list.We saw quetzals, trogons, potoos, cuckoos, hawks, a whole cavalcade of tiny New World warblers neotropical warblers, hummingbirds that snapped and buzzed through the air like animated electrons. ...... I realised that this trip was disquieting me because we weren’t learning anything much about the birds we saw: we were identifying them, ticking them off a list, and moving on, caught up in a hungry and expectant apperception of the world in which the lived reality of the creatures that flew and sang around us seemed almost entirely obscured by the triumphant, costly light of seeing them. Spring reflection: Learning from the birds 1 April 2020 The New Statesman https://www.newstatesman.com/long-reads/2020/04/spring-reflection-learning-birds Seabirds are various creatures and we’ve recruited them to symbolise many things. Gulls are a placeholder for social anxieties: reviled as invading thugs in the Tabloid journalism tabloid press, their crime seems little more than failing to treat humans and human spaces with due respect. Other seabirds, like penguins and puffins, fall into the anthropomorphised category of cute little guys, Instagrammable avian kawaii. And oceanic specialists like shearwaters and petrels spend so much of their lives at sea, visiting their nesting burrows in darkness, they seem barely part of our world at all: the Other rendered in feathers.But in my lifetime, seabirds have symbolised one thing above all: pollution. News photographs of guillemots thickly coated in Petroleum#Composition crude oil horrified me when I was young; their gluey silhouettes are still seared into my brain. Summer reflection: the silence of the seabirds The New Statesman 27 July 2020 https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/nature/2022/07/summer-reflection-the-silence-of-the-seabirds Swift (bird) Swifts nest in obscure places, in dark and cramped spaces: hollows beneath roof tiles, behind the intakes for ventilation shafts, in the towers of churches. To reach them, they fly straight at the entrance holes and enter seemingly at full tilt. Their nests are made of things snatched from the air: strands of dried grass pulled aloft by thermals; molted pigeon-breast feathers; flower petals, leaves, scraps of paper, even butterflies.During World War II, swifts in Denmark and Italy grabbed Chaff (countermeasure) chaff, reflective scraps of tinfoil dropped from aircraft to confuse enemy radar, flashing and twirling as it fell. They mate on the wing. And while young martins and Barn swallow swallows return to their nests after their first flights, young swifts do not. As soon as they tip themselves free of the nest hole, they start flying, and they will not stop flying for two or three years, bathing in rain, feeding on airborne insects, winnowing fast and low to scoop fat mouthfuls of water from lakes and rivers. The Mysterious Life of Birds Who Never Come Down July 29, 2020 New York Times Magazine https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/29/magazine/vesper-flights.html We are pretty much in the Holocene extinction apocalypse right now, we just expect it to take place in 24 hours. Actually, it just takes place in a slightly longer timeframe. It is going to be grim. We are going to have to adapt. as quoted by Lisa Allardice in: Helen Macdonald: 'It is hard to write about the natural world without writing about grief' 21 August 2020 The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/aug/21/helen-macdonald-it-is-hard-to-write-about-the-natural-world-without-writing-about-grief It’s true, you can go nuts when you suddenly lose someone you love, you fall off the world. I saw in the goshawk — this ferocious, intense, bloodthirsty, murderous creature — what I felt: rage-filled and angry, living in the present with no thought for the future. My mistake was identifying too much with the bird and forgetting how to be a human. Helen Macdonald: I bawled my eyes out when I saw H is for Hawk, The Times (January 23 2026) Quotes about Helen Macdonald Macdonald is making it her mission to communicate as exactly as possible what wood warblers and a host of other species are, in the hope that her words are not obituaries. Tim Adams, Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald review — towards the sixth extinction 24 August 2020 The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/aug/24/vesper-flights-by-helen-macdonald-review-towards-the-sixth-extinction H Is for Hawk ... tells the story of how one woman deals with grief by training a Eurasian goshawk goshawk. This isn't as strange as it sounds: Macdonald, who became obsessed with Bird of prey birds of prey as a child, has flown many falcons over the years, and it's Alisdair Macdonald her father who has died so suddenly, a man she associates strongly with her passion (a press photographer, he and his daughter were good companions, sharing a certain beadiness and the ability to be vastly patient). But in another way it's perverse. Goshawks are by reputation the ruffians of falconry, being bloodthirsty, temperamental and supposedly difficult to tame. Rachel Cooke, H Is for Hawk review — Helen Macdonald's taming of a goshawk called Mabel reads like a thriller 4 August 2014 The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/aug/04/h-is-for-hawk-review-helen-macdonald-taming-goshawk-mabel External links articles by Helen Macdonald The New Statesman (newstatesman.com) https://www.newstatesman.com/author/helen-macdonald Category:1970 births Category:Living people Category:Essayists from England Category:Journalists from England Category:Memoirists from England Category:Naturalists from England Category:Non-fiction authors from England Category:Poets from England Category:University of Cambridge alumni Category:Women born in the 1970s Category:Women authors from England Category:Illustrators from England Category:Historians from England Category:Science authors Category:LGBT people