Her father was a staff photographer at the Daily Mirror and her mother worked for local newspapers. With a naturalist’s command of technical vocabulary and a poet’s eye for simile, she can sound like a former scholar who’s broken free of the constraints of academe-which is, in essence, what she is. In “A Cuckoo in the House,” Macdonald considers Maxwell Knight, a British spymaster who inspired the James Bond character M and who was, in Macdonald’s words, “an inveterate keeper of animals.” And in “Symptomatic,” she chronicles her lifelong struggle with migraines.īut even when writing about humans, Macdonald makes frequent reference to the natural world, and what unifies the essays in Vesper Flights is her ardor for nature, her extensive knowledge of it, and her fear for its destruction. In the essay “In Her Orbit,” which originally appeared in the New York Times Magazine and is included in Vesper Flights, she profiles Nathalie Cabrol, an astrobiologist and planetary geologist who studies Mars.
Macdonald also, sometimes, trains her eye on humans. In Vesper Flights, she turns her binoculars on an array of other subjects: mushrooms, glowworms, deer, hares, and, as befits an author with a parrot on her shoulder, numerous varieties of avifauna-orioles, falcons, swans, swifts. In H Is for Hawk, she recounts her experience training a goshawk, which she named Mabel, as a means of healing herself after the sudden death of her father.
Readers of H Is for Hawk and Macdonald’s forthcoming essay collection, Vesper Flights (Grove Atlantic, Aug.), will not be surprised to hear that she prefers her nature wild. She invokes the ethologists Niko Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz, who said animals tend to divide themselves into hunters and farmers. “I’ve always had an ambivalent relationship with spending a lot of time pruning, and digging, and planting,” she says. She’s taken up gardening, which she resisted for years. Now, because of the pandemic, her dealings with the outside world have become circumscribed. She’s accustomed to exploring nature in a freewheeling fashion. Despite the idyllic setting, Macdonald feels, as most of us do, hemmed in.
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