“We use animals to think about everything,” Macdonald observes. Macdonald named hers Mabel, derived from amabilis in Latin, meaning “worthy to be loved lovely.” From their initial meeting and for the first time since Macdonald’s relationship with her father, this was a companionship that made sense.

She knows a hawk named Baby Doll, and another named Bunty both are lethal. Among falconers, Macdonald says, conventional logic states that the more innocuous a bird’s name, the more “proficient” the animal. Just months after her father’s death, Macdonald found herself on a Scottish quayside waiting for a breeder to deliver her new roommate. But the decision to bring a hawk into her home, train it to hunt, and assist in its deadly assaults on unassuming pheasants and rabbits in the Cambridge meadows held a particular allure, one which grief only begins to explain. Macdonald had been fascinated with birds of prey since childhood, and as an adult she studied and even bred them for sheikhs in the United Arab Emirates.

Night after night, laden with grief, she dreamt of hawks-until the morning she decided to adopt one. She withdrew into her cottage near Cambridge University, where she was affiliated with the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, and stuttered through conversations with her close-knit family. When naturalist and writer Helen Macdonald’s father died unexpectedly in 2007, her world stopped.

Helen macdonald goshawk