Helen Macdonald: the six books that made me

H Is for Hawk, which has won the Costa book of the year, portrays a writer in urgent dialogue with the natural world. Which were the books that opened her eyes to nature?

Three months ago the fieldfares arrived in rattling flocks through gusts of hail, their chak‑chak-chak calls like handfuls of pebbles flung on a frozen pond. I love these migrant thrushes because they’re scraps of the arctic flown to my fenland home, and because they bring history with them too, a bewitching mess of it. They’re built of all the fieldfares I’ve ever known: birds in paintings, photographs, field guides, migration maps, books, conversations, articles in magazines. And they’re made, too, of all the times I’ve seen them before, and for an flickering instant as the fieldfares blow in, I’m a child standing on tiptoe on the edge of a playing field, squinting to work out what these bold, patterned birds in the frosted trees might be. I’m 10 years old again. It took me half a lifetime to understand that each encounter with the natural world pleats together all the things you’ve read and heard, and adds to them, making something more of the bird or leaf or landscape in front of you, so that the older you get the more meaningful these things become. A few of these nature books inspire me because they were there at the beginning; childhood favourites that taught me what things were. Others are here because they tussle with the questions at the heart of it all: who has the right to interact with nature, to define what it is, explain it, speak for it – all questions, ultimately, about who we are.

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