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These verses are from goshawk observations since 1955; the author's first experiences of the bird in the wild overseas – anecdotes of camp life, falconers, birds and probable escaped or released individually, few enough anyway, are considered largely irrelevant in this naturalist's view. Few publications, bar the 1995 Goshawk Lives booklet, so well and generously prepared by Harry Gilonis' Form Books, have been used; most of this edition is new. The authors has almost exclusively used notes made at the time, in now well over 500 notepads, and diaries and letters.
Colin Simms – poet, naturalist, and lifelong independent observer – was born in 1939, and lives as an author and freelance naturalist in the North of England, with journeys throughout the northern hemisphere, wherever his objectives live – his homes have been where the martens, otters, birds of prey and other enthusiasms are. He is not an orthodox conservationist, but insists on the privacy, 'isness', for wildlife which modern trends deny. He also demonstrates the poet-naturalist's concern for precise observation, apposite language and cadence. This concern for sound, including northern dialects, mark him a true heir of his long-term mentor, Basil Bunting, a fellow-Northerner. He has published thousands of natural-history letters, articles, reports, scientific notes and papers, broadcasts and (above all) poems, and his scientific work has an international reputation. He has given hundreds of readings, and produced several paintings and prints of mustelids and other predators since 1953, which have been exhibited and are available in very limited editions. He has also made a number of photographic studies of these same subjects. Most of his 1200-plus published poems have been in small-press publications, and his Shearsman volumes are the largest-scale publications of his work to have seen the light of day. In each case they collect related poems and present them as small Collected editions, within the capacious overall oeuvre..
