In July 2020, Candida Meyrick, also known as novelist Candida Clark, acquired a Harris hawk named Sophia Houdini White Wing, or Bird. The hawk hunts in Dorset and prefers cock pheasants, though she has recently taken an interest in the peacocks on Meyrick's estate. Meyrick's book attempts to derive life lessons from the hawk's behaviour, but the result feels forced and cliché-ridden.
The book presents 20 brief 'life lessons' based on Bird's assumed thoughts. For example, Bird's preference for hunting her own food is used to urge readers to 'stay true to your higher self', while her calmness under threat from buzzards becomes an exhortation to 'hold your ground'. Other maxims include 'Stay humble. Keep working at it' and the confusing 'Just show up; and when you can't, don't'. This anthropomorphising often overshadows the more fascinating realities of Bird's life.
Bird's physical existence is tightly calibrated, much like an elite athlete's. Her ideal hunting weight is 2lb 4.2oz; if it rises to 2lb 6.5oz, she may become 'fed up' and attempt to go wild, though she would likely not survive the 25 years of a captive hawk. If her weight drops to 2lb 2oz, she becomes sluggish and reliant on Meyrick for food. The moult, a natural process between spring and autumn equinox, is also laden with metaphysical interpretation: Meyrick describes it as shedding 'crappy feathers, grudges, grievances, mess, broken bits'.
Meyrick occasionally seems aware of her overreach, fretting that 'Bird's revelations elude me. I grasp at them, hating the rising phrases, pretentious, unwieldy'. Yet she continues to pile on such phrases until they collapse. Declarations like 'memory, the gift of memory, is celestial, airborne, just like Bird' leave the reader puzzled.
The book may be an attempt to distance itself from Helen Macdonald's H Is for Hawk (2014) and Chloe Dalton's Raising Hare (2024), both popular nature memoirs. However, Be More Bird feels contrived and earthbound, exactly the sort of book Bird might have something stern but uplifting to say about.
