There are bees and butterflies but the midsummer skies above Thetford forest in East Anglia are bereft of birds. This sunny, tranquil scene bears no shadow of swooping danger, no hint of the goshawks that have once again made their home here after falling extinct across Britain more than a century ago. Then, suddenly, an enormous grey object materialises above the trees, roaring, bristling with weapons and menace.
"It's an F-15E," says Helen Macdonald almost admiringly, before returning to point out wasps' nests, old bomb craters and other intricate details of otherworldly Breckland. Macdonald's plane-spotting skills should not really be a surprise because the author of just-published H Is for Hawk, an already acclaimed account of her acquisition of a goshawk after the death of her father, is a strikingly unconventional polymath. A poet, historian, naturalist and illustrator, she has also worked as a professional falconer and has bred and trained hawks for Arab sheikhs.
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