Anachronistic goshawks

[nickwhit.livejournal.com]

Am reading (and very much enjoying)  H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald. But was thrown a bit by her assertion that British goshwaks were extinct by the end of the nineteenth century, and only reintroduced in the 1960s and 70s. Did I miss the bit where Jon brought Jael back from the Continent?

Comments

[lilliburlero.livejournal.com]

I haven't my copy of T.H. White's The Goshawk to hand, but as I remember he gets his first gos essentially by mail order: Jon might have done the same? Though The Goshawk was written in the 1930s; I'm not sure what effect the war might have had on the goshawk importation business.

[jackmerlin.livejournal.com]

Didn't Patrick say she had come from Finland?
I was wondering if H for Hawk was worth reading. It's just won a prize for non-fiction, hasn't it? Let us know when you've finished it what you think!

[hooloovoo_42]

Ditto on the review once finished.

[legionseagle (from livejournal.com)]

They appear in a Field Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe as an occasional visitor from Scandinavia; I always assumed that Jael (and her predecessors) had to be imports.

Incidentally, http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1954/30/enacted would have put a further crimp into Patrick's shennanigans on Leeper's Bluff, had it been in force at the relevant date.

[colne-dsr.livejournal.com]

In Falconer's Lure, they talk about airfields using hawks as pigeon-scarers. Could Jon have bagged a goshawk from a decommissioned airfield - not The Ripper, because that was too early, but possibly Jael? Maybe an informally imported goshawk, fetched back by a keen hawker-pilot from Norway, or Canada, or wherever these birds hang out.

[lilliburlero.livejournal.com]

He gets his first postwar hawk that way, doesn't he, from the LAC who's being demobbed and can't accommodate a hawk in his home in Sheffield?* But we're not told what sort of hawk it is irrc.

*I love the way Forest wordlessly implies that, for Geoff's benefit at the breakfast table, Jon's making it sound like he was just doing one of the Other Ranks a favour, and was dead reluctant to take on anther hawk and all their little ailments, but really, he couldn't have been more thrilled at having a hawk again.

Goshawks etc.

[patudo]

Goshawks did indeed become extremely scarce or outright extinct in the UK thanks to relentless shooting/trapping by gamekeepers. The sad irony is that very the hunting ability that made them so prized during the age of falconry (when one of the few ways of securing a duck or pheasant was to capture it with a bird of prey) made them the sportsman's public enemy number one after hawks and falcons were replaced by firearms.

Goshawks were still desired by those individuals that continued to practice falconry in the UK and in that 1930s to about late 1960s time period, most came either from Germany (I believe this was where T.H. White's goshawk came from) or from Finland, where they were, again, considered undesirable due to their depredations on gamebirds, and widely trapped. If I remember rightly the British Falconers' Club established contacts in Finland and had birds that would otherwise have been destroyed sent over. The Finnish birds, being larger, were particularly valued by British falconers, and a good number of UK goshawks still resemble these Finnish birds (large and pale, with a certain chilling beauty).

It's worth noting that the "reintroductions" HM speaks of were not always planned! Goshawks, partly due to being pretty independent creatures and partly due to the terrain they are often flown in (less open than falcons) are quite frequently lost, and many of the pairs that established themselves in the UK post-war would have been escaped, as opposed to deliberately released, falconry birds.