GOODNESS ME! IS THAT A GOSHAWK?

JANUARY A beautiful killer

Walking the dogs at 4.30am – dark but noticeably lighter than even two weeks ago – I noticed a large bird flying towards the house from across the fields. It looked black, so I thought at first it was a crow – but all the birds looked black in that light, silhouetted against the sky and I quickly realised it was too big for a crow. Probably a buzzard then, but there was something about it that was not buzzard-like in its shape and the way that it was flying. The tail was longer and its head stuck out a little more. I realised with a flush of excitement and triumph that it was a goshawk.

Although they have become much more common over the last 20 years, I still think of goshawks as our rarest raptor and something that I would be lucky to see just once in my life. So, although I now see them once or twice a year and sometimes more, every time is like that first time, that moment fulfilling my dreams. Ever since I read TH White’s The Goshawk when I was 17, I have been obsessed with birds of prey of all kinds and goshawks became totemic for me, representing all that was untameable, pure and exquisitely beautiful, yet honed to kill.

This gos flew quite slowly and casually but in a dead straight line, perhaps 100ft up. Its wings had an almost deliberate flap that rose as high above its back as below, quite unlike a buzzard. It passed directly over the house, and then was swallowed up by the dark sky. But my day was made.