But everything I’d written about this strange symbolic connection between birds of prey and human souls felt as if it had a different kind of truth, now, one forged of things other than books. I recounted tales that didn’t fit in my PhD – of the mafia threatening to drive a falconer out of New York City because his falcon was a threat to their pigeon-flying activities, stories of fan dancers, jet pilots, astronauts and the diplomatic shenanigans of early modern royalty. Back in the early 2000s, I had been working on my doctoral dissertation in natural history at the University of Cambridge, but I never finished it. Despite my lifelong obsession with birds of prey, I’d never thought before, much, about the actual phenomenology of human-hawk resemblance, which must have brought forth all those mythological hawk-human bonds I’ve studied for so long. And then I saw it wasn’t a man, but a goshawk. A man in a long overcoat leaning slightly to one side.

That’s what my brain told me, momentarily. And that is when I thought I saw a man standing in a tree. After a mile or so, I found myself in an open clearing and looked up. My feet crunched on salt-crusted mud and across leaf litter sparking with grasshoppers and sinuous silver lizards. Once we’d pitched our tents, I went for a stroll in the hot, blank forest sunlight.

I’d driven with a group of other fieldworkers in a Russian jeep down to the banks of the Syrdarya river in Andijan province. I t was the autumn of 2006 in Uzbekistan, a few months before my father died.

Helen macdonald goshawk