Anders Mickelson

“Those old ghostly intuitions that have tied sinew and soul together for millennia had taken over, were doing their thing, making me feel uncomfortable in bright sunlight, uneasy on the wrong side of a ridge, somehow required to walk over the back of a bleached rise of grasses to get to something on the other side: which turned out to be a pond. Small birds rose up in clouds from the pond’s edge: chaffinches, bramblings, a flock of long-tailed tits that caught in willow branches like animated cotton buds.”
― Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk

“A sparrowhawk, light as a toy of balsa-wood and doped tissue-paper, zipped past at knee-level, kiting up over a bank of brambles and away into the trees.”
― Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk

“I was looking down at a little sprig of mahonia growing out of the turf, its oxblood leaves like buffed pigskin.”
― Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk

“Old because her feet were gnarled and dusty, her eyes a deep, fiery orange, and she was beautiful. Beautiful like a granite cliff or a thunder-cloud.”
― Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk