In one scene in H Is for Hawk, MacDonald describes feeling disgust when the director of the British Falconry Club displays a taxidermized hawk that was a present to the club in 1937 from Herman Gӧring, the head of the Nazi Luftwaffe, as thanks to the British government, which was focused at that time on Nazi appeasement. MacDonald sees the taxidermized hawk as a symbol for Nazi ruthlessness. In this way, the dead hawk stands in for the living hawk, becoming a showcase for the personality of its observer. We can easily see this error when equating the hawk to such a repellant character as Gӧring, but MacDonald warns us that we are all capable of putting ourselves in front of nature in this way. It is this attitude that is a wellspring for the environmental damage that will eventually subsume us and make all of our lives irrevocably worse. Recognizing the special relationship nature has to itself outside of human interpretation is the key to preserving it.

The wonder of flight is a motif that shapes both MacDonald’s and her father’s emotional journeys. MacDonald’s father spent part of his youth entranced by identifying planes in the post-World-War-II era. With a keen eye he would one day use to document the news in photography, young Alisdair would keep a notebook of the planes he saw overhead.