As a child Helen Macdonald was determined to become a falconer. She learned the arcane terminology and read all the classic books, including T.H. White's tortured masterpiece, The Goshawk, which describes White's struggle to train a hawk as a spiritual contest. When her father dies and she is knocked sideways by grief, she becomes obsessed with the idea of training her own goshawk. She buys Mabel ... on a Scottish quayside and takes her home to Cambridge....

Peregrine Spring, Nancy Cowan’s memoir of thirty years living closely with raptors, gives us a new perspective on the relationship between humans and these "feathered monsters." --Publisher

Follows Helen Macdonald as she trains a new goshawk and observes a family of its wild counterparts in the Northern English forests.

A baby great horned owl, Second, so called because his sister, First, is already out of the nest, is reluctant to hunt for himself, but when his mother is injured he is forced out into the forest; Maureen is a human girl pulled out of her grandmother's violent home and placed with an aunt--but her Aunt Beatrice is involved in falconry and runs a mews where injured raptors can heal, and it is here Maureen and Second (now called Rufus) meet and learn...

In twelfth-century England, Matty grows up to be a master falconer, able to communicate with the devoted birds who later help her and Fynn, also known as Robin Hood, to foil Prince John's plot to steal the crown.