In Montrose one can be in the presence of birds without always being aware of it. Authorities believe that in the autumn eighty thousand geese migrate here. At the Montrose Basin Visitor Centre a large whiteboard is meticulously updated many times a day with all the different species sighted through the powerful telescopes and binoculars arraigned along the panoramic windows which take up one whole wall of the building. The naked-eye view of the Basin—a two square mile tidal lagoon, an area of special scientific interest, and one of the great wonders of the world—is nowhere better than from the footbridge crossing the double tracks at Montrose Station. This position also allows the birds to be heard, and the smells experienced directly. During the few glorious hours when the high tide is purposefully ebbing, an ocean of shallow-lying food is uncovered in the salty sand. Shortly after the farmers have ploughed around the town, birds pop out of the air in their dozens to enjoy the all-you-can-eat buffet served as the soil is turned over.
“H is for Hawk” (Film4), showing now at the Montrose Playhouse, is undoubtedly at its best when informing its audience about birds. Alisdair Macdonald, an excellent character of robust stature who always wears a suit, played by Brendan Gleeson, uses his professional commitment as a newspaper photographer to hone his talent for identifying, recording, and relating the habits of more unusual birds in his area—he is a birder of the type who visits, say, Montrose for vacations. He swears by his ability to notice and his willingness to spend hours waiting patiently. Birds enchant his heart; they are here to stay and he never worries about running out of subjects for his enquiries. “Dad,” his daughter Helen proudly says, “I just saw a pair of goshawks. At one point they got mobbed by angry crows.” Alistair dies early in the film while “covering the storm for the paper.” Helen stands inside her parents’ home eavesdropping on her mother and brother—who are talking conspiratorially in the garden outside—through the glass of the window, the volume of the conversation perfectly calibrated for the cinema audience. It’s very nicely done, and is reprised later in the film—this time with Helen furtively spying from her staircase. Initially Helen gets over her grief by seeking company. When a man she meets disappears in the morning, she telephones a friend. “Is it retrievable?” her friend asks. “I don’t think so,” Helen says. “He saw the self-help books.” But she starts dreaming of those goshawks. “I want a goshawk,” she says. “I think…I need one.” Despite a warning from a companionable expert that “seriously, they are a handful,” she pays for one with a thick brown envelope of used banknotes and brings it up in her house. As her depression worsens, and her obsession with the hawk becomes pathological, and her house becomes a squalid hovel, and she becomes “feral,” and she doesn’t answer her front door, the film nosedives into the colourless rabbit hole with her, never to re-surface.
At the beginning of the film, in a scene whose significance only becomes clear much later, Helen is especially careful to save a single spider, talking to it softly—as if to a baby—while gingerly carrying it in her open-cupped hands. But then she acquires the hawk. “The trick with goshawks is murder,” the breeder says. “Get her out hunting as quickly as you can. And let her kill a lot.” A group of students challenge her robustly about the morality of urging her goshawk to murder, say, small birds. “How can you justify killing for fun?” one student asks. “Why wouldn’t you feed her bird seed?” The cinematic audience makes the link back to the spider straight away. Last year’s charming film “The Salt Path,” which I reviewed in June, directs our eyes upwards and outwards towards a substantive spiritual horizon—a horizon conspicuously absent from “H is for Hawk”—and relies less on the foregrounding of one unreliable character to illustrate the truthfulness of coping with loss.
“Whoever gets to tell the story wins the prize,” says Helen. This adequately summarises the whole enterprise. The loveliness of the Montrose Basin is enough without exaggerating—and its human visitors always take a back seat to the avian ones. (Our names don’t have a place on that whiteboard.) There are live web-camera feeds from various points around the perimeter to watch from home. But if I have a few hours, I can amble over to the Visitor Centre, enjoy the wondrousness of it all, be taught about the non-human life in Montrose, and nurture some of that patience in which birders excel. “Please come back and see us soon,” one of the staff recently said to me, smiling.
Adam Poole
27th January 2026
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