Candida Meyrick in conversation with Bill Price

Be More Bird

Life Lessons from a Hawk

Be More Bird is Candida Meyrick’s first work of non-fiction. She has published six previous novels under the pen name Candida Clark and written journalism, short fiction and poetry. She has restored a five-acre historic walled garden and founded the award-winning botanical drinks business, Positive Potions, and the popular wellness destination, The Retreat, New Forest.

About Be More Bird

2020: while the world is grounded, Bird arrives in the life of writer, Candida Meyrick, living with her young family on Anglesey.

The twelve-week-old Harris Hawk, Sophia Houdini Whitewing – aka Bird – is trained over the following months by the author and her children to be most herself: a skilled hunter and dazzling aerial gymnast, whose flights enrapture the family and set the author on a deepening love affair with life on the wing.

Working with her Harris Hawk over the following years reveals a new world: confronting mortality daily, moving through a liminal landscape, part sky-, part earth-bound. And every day’s hunting brings a new life-lesson. Bird opens up a way of being that is everything the author most longs to be: courageous, compassionate, independent, full of joy – free as a bird.

Through daily adventures across field and woodland, through bog and briar, the author comes to realise that Bird is showing her the way, guiding her soul, revealing truths about her life that would otherwise have remained hidden.

Be More Bird charts this deepening relationship between bird and woman, set in one of Britain’s wildest landscapes. It reveals the subtle dynamic possible between human and avian – the species most closely related to the dinosaurs – and in poetic prose illuminates the ancient, worldwide art of falconry and its urgent relevance for the modern mind: the importance of untethering our souls and belief-systems and re-establishing a connection with the wilder world.

Structured around a series of ‘life lessons’, this astonishing and mesmerising book, executed in lyrical and emotionally charged prose, will transport readers into the wildness hidden within themselves as it encourages us to think profoundly about our connections with nature and our lives.

Joy in adversity, the freedom of travelling light, the power of strength and patience, the certainty of change and importance of letting go – all this and more Bird has taught the author. By embodying the age-old rites of the hunt and the supreme skill and subtlety of the hunter, Bird suggests a way to honour and more deeply inhabit the lives we have been granted.

Be More Bird is a true story, still unfolding, of a wild predator who by choice flies in partnership with a woman as her earth-bound helper. Bird crosses boundaries: between species, cultures, sky and earth. In this way, Be More Bird is a fable for our times.

Dare to be more. Be more Bird.

Joining us at the event will be Alan Gates from Mere Down Falconry, with R2, his own female Harris Hawk for you to see at close quarters.

Praise for Be More Bird

‘A small masterpiece, written with heart, self-belief and wisdom. Wonderful!’

Paul Theroux

‘Philosophical, questioning, alive with wonder: this is a book that looks inwards and outwards, learning from the wildest creature with which humans have formed a partnership. Even the cover is a delight’

Country Life

‘if any past traditions are to be revived, then let it be falconry. That is the feeling one is left with after reading Candida Meyrick’s part memoir, part beginner’s guide, part self-help, but wholly wonderful book … The life lessons Candida draws from Bird are universally applicable, and it’s a real treat to read these nuggets of winged wisdom’

Mail on Sunday