We have just read Helen Macdonald’s critically acclaimed, wildly successful and award-winning book H is for Hawk, in which the author, an experienced falconer, relates how, following her father’s sudden death, and by way of self-administered therapy, she acquired and trained a goshawk, allegedly the most thuggish and challenging of raptors to deal with. The book sheds a fascinating light, for the uninitiated, onto the ancient and arcane world of falconry, and imparts a great deal that most will not know about T H White, author of The Goshawk along with his Arthurian romances. Certainly its success will be acknowledged by many a contemporary nature writer…

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We noticed in Jim Perrin’s Guardian Country Diary of 7th March, entitled Raptor in Rapture, and typically lyrical, a closing paragraph — written from a very high horse and, to mix our metaphors, from a rather precarious glass house when one considers the fate of so many of his unfortunate ex-partners — which we quote from here (the emphasis is ours):

The sky dance of the goshawk – what more beautiful expression of wild, true freedom? Yet people buy these birds for grubby wads of cash. They tether, blindfold and cage them, subject them to human will, by trickery of bribe bring them to obedience …

…words which, we believe, will resonate with those he has abused. His is a valid point of view on falconry, of course, but might it have just a little to do with the extraordinary success of Helen Macdonald’s book — a success which so many others have recognised? In the past Jim Perrin has referred in his Country Diary entries  to the work of other authors, and to his own — and in the most flattering of terms — but given this book’s recent publication and popularity, and considering the content of his diary entry, it is noticeable that he refers to it only obliquely yet with clearly barbed intent. We believe this entry was a vehicle; deliberately designed to carry the unpleasantly jealous remark that was his actual motive for the piece…

Or, since on BBC TV’s Springwatch of 11th June Chris Packham described the goshawk as the psychopath among birds, should we see Jim Perrin’s words as a gesture of solidarity?

NB: A fascinating and ironic reader comment follows Jim Perrin’s Diary entry:

Yes very beautiful! And not a comment on Helen Macdonald’s marvellous recent work H is for Hawk on grief and goshawks, where she pays for a Goshawk with a wad of cash and trains it.

This comment was posted by Miriam Darlington, herself an acclaimed nature writer, and we telephoned her to check whether our interpretation of her comment as irony was correct (in light of this post) She assured us it was so, and was highly critical of that aspect of Jim Perrin’s diary entry…