Be More Bird review by Candida Meyrick – Self-help that’s less for birds than parroting tired clichés | Science and nature books

IIn July 2020, Candida Merrick, known as novelist Candida Clarke, became the owner of Sophia Houdini’s Whitewing, known as Bird. Bird is a Harris’s hawk, a feathered killing machine that hunts the rich Dorset fields on the edge of the New Forest. She can take down a rabbit but much prefers a pheasant. She recently was observing the peacocks the Merricks keep on their property.

Merrick’s starting point in this bewildering book is that Bird has a rich inner life that we flightless hoppers would do well to emulate. Here are 20 brief “life lessons” inspired by Hawks’ supposed musings. So, for example, the fact that Bird prefers to hunt her own dinner rather than accept alternative snacks from Merrick is used to urge the reader to “stay true to your higher self.” Likewise, her ability to keep her cool under threat from a pair of thuggish hawks becomes an exhortation to her to “hold your ground, you’re stronger than you think.” Other sayings include “Stay humble. Keep working at it” and the truly amazing saying “Just show up; when you can’t, don’t.”

What’s so pathetic about all this speculative anthropomorphism is the way it disposes of the real presence of Bird’s physical life. Like the fact that as a female she is a third the size of any male. That her mother could bring down a roe deer. The Harris hawk is fairer than the goshawk which tends to be “psychic” and is also steadier than the peregrine falcon which may be too fast for a child to handle (the bird was originally purchased for Merrick’s young son).

The bird’s physical life is as finely calibrated as that of any elite athlete. Its ideal fishing weight is 2 pounds 4.2 ounces. If it crawls up to 2 pounds 6.5 ounces, it will probably get “fed up” and may set off into the wild, convinced it can get by on its own (and strictly speaking, it can, although it probably won’t last the 25 years of a captive hawk). If her weight dropped too low to 2 pounds 2 ounces, she would likely become sluggish and wait for Merrick to throw her some bloody snacks, at which point, presumably, she would have failed to follow her own advice to “stay true to your higher self.”

Then there is the shedding. Between the spring and autumn equinoxes when hunting with hawks is illegal, the bird lies low and grows a new coat. However, Merrick can’t resist piling on the metaphysics: “Everything bad she takes in—all the bad feathers, the grudges, the grievances, the mess, the broken pieces—falls out… comes out scattered, and is left with new feathers and most of herself.”

This might be inspiring if you were a human and after a New Year’s pep talk rather than a Harris hawk poised to get the best of a delicious peacock. Ironically, it is in these moments of exaggeration that Merrick seems to realize that she is overestimating herself and begins to berate herself for missing the mark. She worries that “Bird’s discoveries escape me. I internalize them, and I hate lofty, pretentious, impractical statements—that’s not what I mean at all.” But this does not prevent it from accumulating these “rising statements” to the point that it falters and collapses on itself. When Merrick declares that “memory, the gift of memory, is celestial, airborne, just like a bird,” I honestly cannot understand what she means.

Merrick’s decision to base her book around these bird “life lessons” may arise from her desire to put several plowed fields between her and Helen MacDonald, whose book H Is for Hawk covered similar ground in 2014 and has just been released as a film starring Claire Foy. Then there’s Raising Hare, Chloe Dalton’s 2024 memoir about saving her sanity during lockdown by rescuing an orphaned crane. Whether or not Merrick is consciously capitalizing on the popularity of this subgenre of nature writing, she has written a book that feels contrived and plodding. Exactly the kind of thing that Sophia Houdini Whitewing would certainly have something tough but refreshing to say.