PS: mi si consenta di dire che quando è comparsa la Prunella modularis detta " passera scopaiola" non ho potuto evitare di ridere. Perhaps it’s easier to maintain a degree of equanimity about the excesses and idiocies of humankind when you have fallen in love with the most brutal killer in our islands’ ecosystem. And then when the war came, as it surely would, and everything around him crumbled into ruin and anarchy, White would fly his goshawk. He is an extremely skilled and keen-eyed ornithologist, and the details of plumage, nestmaking, hunting and chick-rearing are compelling on their own terms, but this wouldn’t be a goshawk book without a little dark rapture, and Aldred obliges, marvelling at the ‘brooding power’ of the female and going head-over-heels for the ‘restless wild beauty’ of her mate: ‘There’s something shadowy, even blurred, that suggests transience, as if he dwells on the wavering edge of visible light. She dripped blood gently over the gate, while I held up her muzzle in the falconer's glove and looked into her small, opaque, ursine eyes.

I can't help thinking it's a kind of animal cruelty, especially in the way White tried it (not to mention that I don't understand the appeal of hunting for sport). The other thing that's clear from the beginning is that White himself is very sad in years 1936 and 1937, the period that he's writing about. quando bruciavo dalla voglia di schiacciarlo, e, mentre il sangue mi saliva furiosamente alla testa, di pestarlo, fracassarlo, smembrarlo, torcerlo, slogarlo, spennarlo, disperderlo ai quattro venti, picchiarlo, sbatterlo, trascinarlo e schiacciarlo sotto i piedi, punirlo senza pietà, e cancellarlo, farla finita con quell’odioso, imbecille, demente, indomabile, inqualificabile, insopportabile Gos". It had been a Bank of England apprehension, a painful impotence, a Come-you-here arrest by all-powerful police. The “family tree” that White was apparently referring to — a pedigree of Arthur’s illegitimate son Mordred — was later included in The Once and Future King, in a passage at the end of The Queen of Air and Darkness.

Qualche anno fa mi sono incantata ad osservare da vicino le manovre di un gruppo di falconieri con i loro volatili, alla festa di Campora, e mi è balenata in mente l'idea di iscrivermi anche io ad una scuola di falconeria. White è ironico in maniera pungente (nei confronti di se stesso, degli altri uomini, del falco, della natura, della storia, della guerra), e impeccabile come etologo.

You can read it as an investigation into the nature of freedom, of education, power, war, history, class, enslavement, the English landscape and the workings of the human heart… In our present age of terrible environmental destruction, it can be read most usefully as a book about humanity’s lamentable inability to see nature as anything other than a mirror of ourselves. The author noted that his admiration of the skills of mothers and demands of motherhood grew from the experience. It must have been like death-- the thing which we can never know beforehand--as, with clumsy talons groping for an unnatural foothold, his fledgeling consciousness was hunched and bundled in the oblong, alien surroundingness. Apparently most readers come to this book via a more modern treatise on the realm of hawking that was published within my lifetime.In my reading life, I can go from being a shad fisherman one week ( The Founding Fish) to being a falconer the next. and train him per the methods of three textbooks: a volume of The Sportsman's Library, one of The Badminton Library of Sports and Pastimes, and the truly incredible Bert's Treatise of Hawks and Hawking, published 1619. After the spectacular success of Helen Macdonald’s memoir last year, many a rural literary festival bookstall was given a mini falconry section, and publishers showed some eagle eyes for an opportunity.