Vesper Flights is a collection of essays by Helen Macdonald who wrote the sublime H is for Hawk. I cannot do them justice so I’m going to share the quotes that moved me - I apologise for there being so many!

Introduction
I hope my work is about a thing that seems to me of the deepest possible importance in our present-day historical moment: finding ways to recognise and love difference. The attempt to see through eyes that are not your own. To understand that your way of looking at the world is not the only one. To think what it might mean to love those that are not like you. To rejoice in the complexity of things.

Tekels Park
When habitats are destroyed what is lost are exquisite ecological complexities and all the lives that make them what they are.

The Human Flock
Watching the flock has brought home to me how easy is is to react to the idea of masses of refugees with the same visceral apprehension with which we greet a cloud of moving starlings or tumbling geese, to view it as a singular entity, strange and uncontrollable and chaotic. But the crowds coming over the border are people just like us.

Winter Woods
…..remind me that we have consequential presence, that the animals we like to watch are creatures with their own needs, desires, emotions, lives.

Swan Upping
Swan Upping at Cookham was painted by the mystical, eccentric English artist Stanley Spencer, who left it half finished in his bedroom in Cookham when he went off to war in 1915, and the knowledge that it was there sustained him over the next three years. He longed to explain to his military superiors that he couldn’t take part in attacks because he had a painting to finish at home.
He finished his painting. But the war is caught up in it. Years before he had laid complex, sunlit ripples on the river below the bridge, but the lower post-war parts of the picture are lifeless, muddy and dark. Boats are painted odd colours and have the wrong shapes, his familiar childhood landscape coursing with new and ominous strangeness.
(You can see this artwork here: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/spencer-swan-upping-at-cookham-t00525)

The Falcon and the Tower
….our commonplace notion that nature exists only in places other than our own, an assumption that seems always one step towards turning our back on the natural world, abandoning it as something disappearing or already lost.

Cherry Stones
the history of hawfinches in Britain reminds us how seamlessly we confuse natural and national history, how readily we assume nativity in things that are familiar to us, and how lamentably was it is to forget how we are all from somewhere else.

Eulogy
…I’m thinking of Stu and what is happening to him, thinking of his family, of what we face at the end of our lives’ long summers when the world parts from us, of how we all, one day, will walk into darkness.

Rescue
Against a backdrop of environmental destruction and precipitous species decline, our social anxieties about the impact we have on the natural world are often tied to tragedies suffered by individual animals. Tending injured and orphaned creatures until they are fit to be returned to the wold can feel like an act of resistance, redress, even redemption.

What Animals Taught me
A photograph of the last passenger pigeon makes palpable the grief and fear of our own unimaginable extinction. We use animals as ideas to amplify and enlarge aspects of ourselves, turning them into simple, safe harbours for things we feel and often cannot express.

What a fascinating book this was: part autobiography; part natural history writing; and part analysis of personal grief and depression. However, this book was not depressing - it was very moving. Helen’s journey through the pain of grief by way of training a goshawk was, at times, extraordinarily raw. This rawness was tempered by her love of falconry and its history. It also made me want to re-read T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone! You’ll have to read the book to know why.
Highly recommended.