Vesper Flights. Helen MacDonald
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H Is for Hawk
Falcon
Shaler’s Fish
Copyright © 2020 by Helen Macdonald
Jacket design by Suzanne Dean
Jacket photograph © Chris Wormell
Some of these pieces have appeared in different form in the New York Times Magazine, New Statesman and elsewhere.
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First published in the United Kingdom in 2020 by Jonathan Cape
First Grove Atlantic eBook edition: August 2020
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.
eISBN 978-0-8021-4669-4
Grove Press
an imprint of Grove Atlantic
154 West 14th Street
New York, NY 10011
Distributed by Publishers Group West
groveatlantic.com
Contents
Sex, Death, Mushrooms
Winter Woods
Eclipse
In Her Orbit
Hares
Lost, But Catching Up
Swan Upping
Nestboxes
Deer in the Headlights
The Falcon and the Tower
Vesper Flights
In Spight of Prisons
Sun Birds and Cashmere Spheres
The Observatory
Wicken
Storm
Murmurations
A Cuckoo in the House
The Arrow-Stork
Ashes
A Handful of Corn
Berries
Cherry Stones
Birds, Tabled
Hiding
Eulogy
Rescue
Goats
Dispatches from the Valleys
The Numinous Ordinary
What Animals Taught Me
Acknowledgements
Back in the sixteenth century, a curious craze began to spread through the halls, palaces and houses of Europe. It was a type of collection kept often in ornate wooden cases, and it was known as a Wunderkammer, a Cabinet of Curiosities, although the direct translation from the German captures better its purpose: cabinet of wonders. It was expected that people should pick up and handle the objects in these cases; feel their textures, their weights, their particular strangenesses. Nothing was kept behind glass, as in a modern museum or gallery. More importantly, perhaps, neither were these collections organised according to the museological classifications of today. Wunderkammern held natural and artificial things together on shelves in close conjunction: pieces of coral; fossils; ethnographic artefacts; cloaks; miniature paintings; musical instruments; mirrors; preserved specimens of birds and fish; insects; rocks; feathers. The wonder these collections kindled came in part from the ways in which their disparate contents spoke to one another of their similarities and differences in form, their beauties and manifest obscurities. I hope that this book works a little like a Wunderkammer. It is full of strange things and it is concerned with the quality of wonder.
Someone once told me that every writer has a subject that underlies everything they write. It can be love or death, betrayal or belonging, home or hope or exile. I choose