Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald

But there is something else. As it passes overhead, the rook tilts its head to regard me briefly before flying on. And with that glance I feel a prickling in my skin that runs down my spine, my sense of place shifts, and the world is enlarged. The rook and I have shared no purpose. For one brief moment we noticed each other, is all. When I looked at the rook and the rook looked at me, I became a feature of its world as much as it became a feature of mine. Our separate lives coincided, and all my self-absorbed anxiety vanished in one fugitive moment, when a bird in the sky on its way somewhere sent a glance across the divide and stitched me back into a world where both of us have equal billing.

Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk, a memoir of her experience training a falcon in the wake of her father's death, might be my favorite non-fiction book of the past several years. I don't read a lot of non-fiction, and part of its appeal was its literariness: Macdonald interweaves her own story with rich threads of fiction, like that of fellow falconer T. H. White, and history and myth. But it also resonated with me because, like several people have in the wake of the COVID-10 pandemic, I have become more interested in birding and birds. Though training a hawk and birdwatching are very different pursuits, they share an inexplicable sense of satisfaction that derives from the way human and animal life intersects.

One of my favorite essays from Macdonald's new collection Vesper Flights hits much closer to home: Macdonald describes watching fall migrants in New York City from the observation deck of the Empire State Building, whose bright lights both attract and confuse the birds. In her account they "resemble stars, embers, slow tracer fire" and "ghostly points of light." In this moment Macdonald captures a very specific sense of amazement that occurs when one realizes that New York City, the concrete jungle, is--and has always been--a place where birds have lived lives that precede and overwrite us. Birding in New York puts me in touch with the transitory nature of life, as if the earth wears the city lightly.

The experience of reading Vesper Flights can't compare to H is for Hawk. The strength of that memoir is not just in the incision of its insight but the power of its narrative: the tortuous twin processes of training the hawk and coming to terms with the death of a father. The essays in Vesper Flights can feel too brief and too numerous, and when there are so many the form begins to show. The epiphanies come, as they never do in life, with a little too much regularity. The strongest essays are often the ones that linger the longest, like a long profile of a researcher who uses Chile's Atacama Desert as a stand-in for the surface of Mars, or an account of the yearly ritual of "swan upping," in which the Queen's swans--she owns most of the swans in the country, I guess--are tracked and tagged.

A theme does eventually emerge: several of the essays address the way that our ideas of the natural world intersect with the burgeoning forces of nationalism. In more than one piece, Macdonald describes how, during World War II, species that were considered notably "British" became rallying cries for preservation, as if British identity were to hinge on the continued existence of these birds. She makes much of the fact that birds don't know borders, even as they are enlisted in our most parochial disputes about who belongs where. She talks about how immense murmurations of starlings helped develop wartime radar technology, and hapless migrators whose leg tags have been mistaken for spy technology by suspicious powers. This is such an interesting perspective that I found myself longing for a book that might have been--not a collection of brief essays, but a book that develops this theme as fully and insightfully as H is for Hawk.