My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. “Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. White’s “The Goshawk” or Helen Macdonald’s “H is for Hawk.” The next time any reader catches a glimpse of a hawk soaring over a field or highway, they’ll think of this little book and feel an extra shiver of wonder.Ībout a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”: In “The Hawk’s Way,” Sy Montgomery and her publisher have crafted a sharp little gem of a book, something fit to stand with classics like T.H. The book breathes with glorious prose and challenging insights into a very strange world. One of Montgomery’s fundamental points is that anybody who decides to enter the world of falconry must be prepared for this kind of cruelty, but it’s still tough to read.įortunately, there’s plenty of compensation. “In their pet carrier, the two birds are still as stones, their stillness a fervent prayer that we somehow won’t see them.” Montgomery watches as quails are flung into the air. “There is nothing more innocent and appealing than a quail, with its rounded profile and soft brown plumage and black button eyes,” she writes. The protracted, dramatic set-piece that serves as the book’s climax is Montgomery’s evocative description of a field hunt, which includes “launching” of captive quails as prey for the hawks.
Readers who share Montgomery’s original empathy and compassion for animals might want to proceed cautiously. Of course, you can’t work with hunting birds without engaging in hunting.
“And nothing, I found, brings one closer to the pure wildness of birds than working with a hawk.”īy signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy.Īlready a subscriber? Log in to hide ads. One of the most memorable strands running through “The Soul of an Octopus” was the description of how strange and equal cephalopods are alongside humans, and the same thing happens repeatedly in “The Hawk’s Way.” “Birds are wild in a way that we don’t experience in our relationships with our fellow mammals,” Montgomery writes. “A hawk will not comfort you when you are sad.”Īs usual in anything by this author, there are many digressions about the often ineffable, alien quality of the intelligences she’s encountering. “A hawk will not come to your rescue if you’re in trouble,” Montgomery writes with only a touch of sarcasm. They don’t want to be touched, even if their human handler has raised them from a hatchling, and they can be incredibly intolerant of mistakes or discourtesies. Hawks, she realizes, aren’t in any sense pets. She’s also drawn to the awesome, forbidding nature of the birds themselves, as she watches Cowan’s Harris’ hawks, meets other birds, and learns their ways. She's aware that falconry might well consume her life and her family (not to mention, quite literally, her chickens), but she feels a passionate pull towards the subject. That she, of all people, would enter the world of falconry, where the humans involved use a combination of hunting dogs and falcons to find and kill prey, appears to be a contradiction. Montgomery, a long-time vegetarian, keeper of chickens, and a hunter's daughter who foregoes hunting herself, immediately sees the irony.
For our author, they represent an icy kind of beauty, “pure savagery bereft of evil.” Hawks are pure predators, carnivores who live for hunting, and their skills at finding, flushing, and killing their prey has made them prized hunting partners for humans in many cultures for millennia (as Montgomery points out, the humans are very much the junior partners in the arrangement). From Cowan, Montgomery learned the strange terminology of falconry – jonking, feaking, mantling, and so on – and was introduced to some of the world’s 300 species of avian daytime predators, the hawks, eagles, falcons, harriers, kites, and so on she refers to as “the tigers of the air.” The starting point of the book is Montgomery’s tutelage by experienced New Hampshire falconer Nancy Cowan, who died at the beginning of 2022 (the book is dedicated to her memory). Montgomery, whose 2010 book “The Soul of an Octopus” made her a favorite of animal-book readers, turns her formidable descriptive passion to hawks, and to the world of falconry. Bestselling author Sy Montgomery’s slim new book, “The Hawk’s Way: Encounters with Fierce Beauty,” began life as a chapter in the author’s 2010 book “Birdology.” It’s presented here by Atria Books as an elegant little illustrated booklet on its own.