H Is For Hawk is a book by Helen Macdonald about relationships and how they consume and fill and fulfill our lives. It is wonderfully fantastic and I would highly suggest it to anyone looking for a good read.

I really didn’t think training hawks and arboriculture could have much in common, but they do.

Hawks, much like trees, are wild and incredibly simple in what they seek to do: stay alive. They are also both highly mechanized beings with fascinating specialized systems (leaves, talons).

In the seventh chapter of the book Macdonald has recently just purchased a hawk to train. She and the bird are sitting in a room and she describes what it’s like early in the relationship between falconer and bird:

“Here’s one thing I know from years of training hawks: one of the things you must learn to do is become invisible. It’s what you do when a fresh hawk sits on your left fist with food beneath her feet, in a state of savage, defensive fear. Hawks aren’t social animals like dogs or horses; they understand neither coercion nor punishment. The only way to tame them is through positive reinforcement with gifts of food. You want the hawk to eat the food you hold-it’s the first step in reclaiming her that will end with you being hunting partners. But the space between the fear and the food is a vast, vast gulf, and you have to cross it together…to cross this space between fear and food, and to somehow make possible an eventual concord between your currently paralyzed, immobile minds, you need-very urgently-not to be there. You empty your mind and become very still. You think of exactly nothing at all. The hawk becomes a strange, hollow concept, as flat as a snapshot or a schematic drawing, but at the same time, as pertinent to your future as angry high court judge. Your gloved fist squeezes the meat a fraction, and you feel the tiny imbalance of weight and you see out of the very corner of your vision that she’s looked down at it. And so, remaining invisible, you make the food the only thing in the room apart from the hawk; you’re not there at all” (Macdonal, 67)

I love this passage very much, and I think it projects well onto the idea of caring for trees. If we consider the arborist as a falconer of sorts, the relationship between us and the trees we care for transforms maybe from what we typically think of. Trees as dogs and cats to trees as raptors, wild birds of prey. It’s a much more fragile and encompassing altogether. With fear comes much more respect. The hawk absolutely depends on what you provide, and is as “pertinent to your future as a high court judge”. Don’t we as arborists need trees that way? They are essential now, and for our future. If you break the trust, the bird won’t return. It’s one of the most beautiful and sad relationships that I know. Sometimes, it is with trees too.

I also love to think about this invincibility as a climber too. Climbing like a hawk or falcon. A raptor. Climbing invincibly. Now that is a romantic idea. Noninvasive. So fast that you become undetected. A perfect climbing machine. Like a hawk flies and kills, we swing through the air, as Macdonald describes it, “like canvas ripping”. All that’s left is a collar cut, maybe dripping slowy with sap.

It’s a relationship, between arborist and tree, that is completely dependent. It’s exactly like falconer and falcon. Macdonald says in the above passage that “the space between fear and food is a vast, vast gulf, and you have to cross it together.” It’s exactly how arborists help trees.

Fly like a falcon today.