The goshawk is the great forest hawk of the Northern Hemisphere, breeding across the boreal and temperate woodlands of Europe, Asia, and North America. Females, far larger than males, take prey as large as hares and capercaillie. In Gould’s day the species bred regularly in France, Germany, and Scandinavia, which he called the bird’s great “nurseries,” but in Britain it had been reduced by gamekeeping to a rare and irregular breeder, chiefly in the old Caledonian pine forests of Speyside. It was effectively extinct as a British breeding bird by the 1880s and returned only in the twentieth century, largely from falconers’ escapes and releases.

Wolf knew the goshawk from his falconry work in Leiden, where it was a classic bird of the falconer’s mews, and from living birds; Gould’s text records Wolf as an informant on its behavior. The goshawk mattered to Victorians as a falconry bird, as a symbol of the wild northern forest, and as the arch-enemy of the game preserver, a combination that made its status in Britain a recurring topic in the sporting and ornithological press.

An adult female sits deep in the crown of a Scots pine, her body turned three-quarters away and her head in sharp profile so that the eye, a hot orange-yellow ringed in black, catches what little light there is. She is watching. Wolf has placed her where cover ends and open country begins.  At left, beyond the last screen of needles, a pale plain recedes under a low and smoky sky, its middle distance broken by scattered conifers; at right, the pine closes in again, dense and unlit.

The slate gray of the mantle and folded wing is laid in broadly and then largely left alone, so that the bird’s mass reads as a single dark silhouette against the warmer browns of the trunk. Against that reserve, the barring of the underparts is drawn almost feather by feather in fine opaque strokes, each bar faintly irregular, following the rise of breast and flank. The undertail coverts are built up in bodycolor to a soft, woolly bloom, and the yellow legs and toes, closed on a lichened bough, supply the only note of fully saturated color. The pine needles are struck in with a dry brush over dark washes, giving them a bristling, backlit quality.

The sheet is related to the goshawk plate in the first volume of The Birds of Great Britain but differs from it in a telling way. The published plate shows the adult female with “a reduced figure of a young bird in the distance,” a device Gould favored because it allowed a single plate to show both plumages of a species in which they differ markedly. Here the young bird is absent, and an open landscape takes its place; comparison gives way to a study of a predator in its covert, with the far horizon supplying atmosphere and scale. The sheet alone cannot determine whether the change originated with Wolf or was imposed by Gould, though Palmer leaves no doubt that Wolf resented having others adjust his designs. Dated 1861, before the first part of The Birds of Great Britain was issued in 1862, the drawing belongs to the earliest work undertaken for the publication, among the raptors that open its first volume.

Two passages in Gould’s text bear directly on the drawing. Gould notes that the species breeds northward as far as the Scots fir extends, and his British localities are the old pine forests of Darnaway, Glenmore, Rothiemurchus, Abernethy, and Castle Grant. Wolf’s choice of Scots pine, and of conifers along the horizon, therefore, argues for where the bird belongs rather than for generic scenery. Gould also describes the goshawk sitting motionless for hours under the canopy, close to the trunk rather than on exposed branches, from which it scans its surroundings and steals upon its prey, and that is exactly how Wolf has painted her, half absorbed into shadow, with only the barred breast and the eye declaring her presence. Wolf’s original designs for Gould rarely come to market, and among them the raptors have always been the most sought after.

Gould’s letterpress opens with praise for “this truly noble species of Hawk” and records two remarkable birds he examined in the flesh: an immature female shot at Somerleyton, Suffolk, in January 1859, and an adult female from Normanby Park, Lincolnshire, taken in March 1864, so broad-shouldered that it reminded him of an eagle. He credits Wolf by name as a witness to the bird’s behavior:

Mr. Wolf tells me that he has known it, when pressed by hunger, dash out of its retreat and give chase to a Short-eared Owl.

The remark shows Wolf acting as one of Gould’s informants on behavior rather than merely the hand that drew the plate and helps explain why his birds of prey convince where so many Victorian raptors do not.