“A hawk will not come to your rescue if you’re in trouble,” Montgomery writes with only a touch of sarcasm. They don’t want to be touched, even if their human handler has raised them from a hatchling, and they can be incredibly intolerant of mistakes or discourtesies. Hawks, she realizes, aren’t in any sense pets. She’s also drawn to the awesome, forbidding nature of the birds themselves, as she watches Cowan’s Harris’ hawks, meets other birds, and learns their ways. She's aware that falconry might well consume her life and her family (not to mention, quite literally, her chickens), but she feels a passionate pull towards the subject. That she, of all people, would enter the world of falconry, where the humans involved use a combination of hunting dogs and falcons to find and kill prey, appears to be a contradiction. Montgomery, a long-time vegetarian, keeper of chickens, and a hunter's daughter who foregoes hunting herself, immediately sees the irony. For our author, they represent an icy kind of beauty, “pure savagery bereft of evil.” Hawks are pure predators, carnivores who live for hunting, and their skills at finding, flushing, and killing their prey has made them prized hunting partners for humans in many cultures for millennia (as Montgomery points out, the humans are very much the junior partners in the arrangement). From Cowan, Montgomery learned the strange terminology of falconry – jonking, feaking, mantling, and so on – and was introduced to some of the world’s 300 species of avian daytime predators, the hawks, eagles, falcons, harriers, kites, and so on she refers to as “the tigers of the air.” The starting point of the book is Montgomery’s tutelage by experienced New Hampshire falconer Nancy Cowan, who died at the beginning of 2022 (the book is dedicated to her memory). Montgomery, whose 2010 book “The Soul of an Octopus” made her a favorite of animal-book readers, turns her formidable descriptive passion to hawks, and to the world of falconry. It does not store any personal data.Bestselling author Sy Montgomery’s slim new book, “The Hawk’s Way: Encounters with Fierce Beauty,” began life as a chapter in the author’s 2010 book “Birdology.” It’s presented here by Atria Books as an elegant little illustrated booklet on its own. The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance". This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary". The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional". The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics". These cookies ensure basic functionalities and security features of the website, anonymously. Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly.
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