Meyrick’s Be More Bird uses a hawk to deliver life lessons, review says

Candida Meyrick, better known as the novelist Candida Clark, became the owner of a Harris hawk named Sophia Houdini White Wing — known as Bird — in July 2020, and her book Be More Bird is built around the bird’s life. The hawk hunts the rich Dorset fields on the edge of the New Forest, can take down a rabbit, prefers cock pheasants and has been eyeing the Meyricks’ peacocks.

The book’s organising device is 20 brief “life lessons” framed as the hawk’s assumed musings. Meyrick turns Bird’s habits into maxims: the hawk’s preference to hunt her own dinner becomes an exhortation to “stay true to your higher self”; her steadiness under threat is used to urge readers to “hold your ground, you’re stronger than you think”; other aphorisms include “Stay humble.

Keep working at it” and “Just show up; and when you can’t, don’t”. The reviewer argues that this speculative anthropomorphising sidelines Bird’s gripping bodily life: as a female she is a third larger than any male, her mother could bring down a roe deer, and Harris hawks are described as more equable than goshawks and steadier than peregrines.

The book gives precise detail about the hawk’s ideal hunting weight (2lb 4.2oz) and the thresholds at which she might leave or become sluggish, and notes the moult that occurs between the spring and autumn equinox when hunting by hawk is illegal — a process Meyrick casts in metaphysical terms.

Key Topics

Culture, Candida Meyrick, Be More Bird, Harris Hawk, Dorset, New Forest