Reading T.H. White’s masterpiece The Goshawk as my train left for Edinburgh it occurred to me that, as far as wildlife holidays go, you can’t get much closer to wild life than the ancient art of falconry.

I’d always imagined the falconer’s hawk was a flying pet but White’s account of the months spent training Gos, a six-week-old goshawk chick, in order to hunt with him soon banished this idea from my head completely. It seems that no matter how long you spend training hawks they instinctively remain completely wild.

Happily for anyone wanting to get close to such magnificent creatures they are also inherently lazy, which explains why they don’t fly off into the horizon whenever the opportunity arises. Once a hawk has been trained to accept food from a falconer it starts to see the strange human being as a far more efficient and reliable food source than taking its chances out on its own.

So, for the entirety of the relationship, which can last anything up to 30 years for a falconer with a harris hawk and up to 80 with a golden eagle, the hawk chooses to stay with its human companion – providing the falconer keeps it well fed.

Gleneagles, an hour by train from Edinburgh, is the home of the British School of Falconry where I was booked in for a two-day course. I arrived full of trepidation. White’s account of hawking seemed to go from bad to worse and I was nervous at the prospect of being so close to a wild killing machine. Emma Ford, one of the school’s founders, soon put me at ease when Spey, a three-year-old harris hawk, began eyeing me up from my gloved left fist ten minutes later.

Almost immediately my sense of unease gave way to one of total privilege and wonder. Spey weighed little and seemed happy to lift her talons as I pulled the “jesses” (the leather straps you hold to keep the hawk from flying off when you’re walking around) between my thumb and middle fingers. Her head twitched constantly, looking for potential prey, as the wind buffeted the short brown feathers at the back of her head. Occasionally I turned my fist, trying to create the perfect perch position, and she would raise her wings and change her footing slightly to keep balance.

Then she would remind me of her untamed nature by opening her beak and squawking in my face with what seemed like indignant anger. For someone who normally peers desperately at specks in the sky hoping to just get a glimpse of a bird of prey these were unforgettable moments. Emma then took me through a brief demonstration of the training steps.

By the end of the lesson Spey was flying happily to my fist once Emma had placed small scraps of meat on it as a reward. Moments before landing she used her wings to brake from flight and seemed to step effortlessly from the air onto my fist. There was hardly any impact when she landed.

The next morning I met another instructor, Duncan, who took me out hunting for rabbits with a pair of harris hawks. Out in the Perthshire countryside the experience of having a hawk on your fist was dramatically different from my lesson the day before. Twelve-year-old Madison and two-year-old Saunders were the perfect combination of experience and enthusiasm. Almost immediately Saunders had flown from my fist.

“Don’t worry, she just knows she’ll do better on her own than with you,” Duncan said. Sure enough she glided to the top of a nearby barn to get a better view of the terrain below. Moments later she saw something that we hadn’t spotted. Duncan let go of Madison and the two hawks darted off across the field. Their speed was astounding. Between them a rabbit had unwisely decided to go for a stroll and a thrilling chase ensued. The two hawks turned this way and that as the rabbit darted along the ground; they gained height slightly before folding in their wings and plummeting down to catch their prey.

I have to admit to a slight Watership Down moment at this point but if you want to respect and enjoy wildlife then it’s surely absurd to get sentimental about what that word actually means.

The most fascinating thing about hawking was how I found my perception of the world around me changing. Everything seemed to slow down. With Saunders on my fist I found myself being led by her reactions and seeing the world more from her perspective than from my own. Occasionally, she would leap to the ground from my fist as we walked along and I spotted what she had seen, too. How often do you notice mice and voles when walking through tall grass?

Tiny, previously imperceptible, senses in her behaviour helped me to begin to notice things in my environment that I would normally blunder through. The experience left me with a newfound respect for the natural world and a hunger not to be parted so far from it in future.

Need to know

Dan Kieran took a falconry course at The Gleneagles Hotel in Auchterarder, Perthshire (0800 389 3737, www.gleneagles.com). One night’s stay with an introductory lesson for two people sharing a double room costs from £455 per room. The half-day hawking is extra, at £150pp.

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