It was the autumn of 2006 in Uzbekistan, a few months before my father died. I’d driven with a group of other fieldworkers in a Russian jeep down to the banks of the Syrdarya river in Andijan province. Once we’d pitched our tents, I went for a stroll in the hot, blank forest sunlight. It was very still and quiet. My feet crunched on salt-crusted mud and across leaf litter sparking with grasshoppers and sinuous silver lizards. After a mile or so, I found myself in an open clearing and looked up. And that is when I thought I saw a man standing in a tree. That’s what my brain told me, momentarily. A man in a long overcoat leaning slightly to one side. And then I saw it wasn’t a man, but a goshawk.

Moments like this are very illuminating. Despite my lifelong obsession with birds of prey, I’d never thought before, much, about the actual phenomenology of human-hawk resemblance, which must have brought forth all those mythological hawk-human bonds I’ve studied for so long. Back in the early 2000s, I had been working on my doctoral dissertation in natural history at the University of Cambridge, but I never finished it. I wrote a book about falcons instead. I recounted tales that didn’t fit in my PhD – of the mafia threatening to drive a falconer out of New York City because his falcon was a threat to their pigeon-flying activities, stories of fan dancers, jet pilots, astronauts and the diplomatic shenanigans of early modern royalty. But everything I’d written about this strange symbolic connection between birds of prey and human souls felt as if it had a different kind of truth, now, one forged of things other than books. I looked up at a hawk in a tree, but I saw a man. How curious.

This goshawk must have been 80 feet away, so dark against the bright sun I couldn’t see whether he was facing me or the river. His short head and snaky neck craned: he was looking at me. I raised my binoculars to my eyes as slowly as I could. There he was. I could see his edges very clearly. The light was very bright but I could faintly see the horizontal barring on his chest feathers. This was an adult male goshawk, and he looked very different from the ones at home.

He had a dark head with a flaring pale eyebrow, and the bars on his chest were close-set and far from the thick, broken lines of European birds. He was standing on a bare branch and making up his mind what I was, exactly, and what he should do about it. Slowly, he unfolded his wings, as if putting on a coat, and then, rather quietly and leisurely, he took to the air, one long leg and loosely clenched foot trailing as he went. I was astonished by how long-winged he was, and how much he looked like a big – albeit long-tailed – falcon. This was a migrant hawk, one who had travelled down mountains and across plains to find himself here.

It wasn’t until that dark year with my own hawk Mabel, captured in H is for Hawk, that the visceral truth that we use nature as a mirror of our own needs became something I understood, rather than merely knew. But even so, that sighting of a goshawk in Uzbekistan was the start of my education, the start of understanding the difference between knowing something intellectually and feeling it deep in your bones. That migrant goshawk, and that momentary lapse of focus that made me see him as a person, not a bird – I wonder, now, if he was also part of the reason I cleaved to a goshawk after my father’s death.

It is crucial that we try to understand what lies behind the meanings we give to wild animals, including hawks and falcons. It’s a project that teaches us about human minds and cultures and the complicated workings of social history, natural history, art and science. But most of all, and more than ever before, we must look long and hard at how we view and interact with the natural world. We are living through the world’s sixth great extinction, caused entirely by us, through habitat loss, climate change, chemical contamination of ecosystems by pesticides and herbicides, and urban and agricultural development. Piecing together how and why we see landscapes and creatures as we do, how we value them and why we think we should protect them – these are questions whose importance is far and above mere academic interest. They are questions to which the answers are simply about how we can save the world.

• A new edition of Falcon by Helen Macdonald is published by Reaktion.