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In July 2020, Candida Meyrick, better known as the novelist Candida Clark, became the owner of Sophia Houdini White Wing, better known as Bird. Bird is a Harris hawk, a feathered killing machine who hunts the rich Dorset fields on the edge of the New Forest. She can take down a rabbit but much prefers cock pheasants. Recently she has been eyeing up the peacocks that the Meyricks keep on their estate.
Meyrick’s starting point in this puzzling book is that Bird has a rich interior life that we flightless clod-hoppers would do well to emulate. What follows are 20 brief “life lessons” inspired by the hawk’s assumed musings. So, for instance, the fact that Bird prefers to hunt her own dinner rather than accept substitute snacks from Meyrick is used to urge the reader to “stay true to your higher self”. Likewise, her ability to keep cool under threat from a pair of thuggish buzzards becomes an exhortation to “hold your ground, you’re stronger than you think”. Other maxims include “Stay humble. Keep working at it” and the truly head-scratching “Just show up; and when you can’t, don’t”.
The pity of all this speculative anthropomorphising is the way it edges out the genuinely gripping existence of Bird’s bodily life. Such as the fact that, as a female, she is a third of a size bigger than any male. That her mother could bring down a roe deer. That the Harris hawk is more equable than the goshawk which tends to be “psycho” and is likewise steadier than the peregrine which may be too speedy for a child to handle (Bird was originally bought for Meyrick’s young son).
Bird’s physical life is as tightly calibrated as any elite athlete’s. Her ideal hunting weight is 2lb 4.2oz. If she creeps up to 2lb 6.5oz, then she is apt to become “fed up” and may take off for the wild, convinced that she can manage on her own (and, strictly speaking, she could, although she probably wouldn’t last the 25 years of a captive hawk). If her weight dips too low, to 2lb 2oz, then she will likely become sluggish and wait for Meyrick to toss her some bloody snacks, at which point, presumably, she has failed to follow her own advice to “stay true to your higher self”.
Then there is the moult. Between the spring and autumn equinox when hunting by hawk is illegal, Bird lies low and grows a new coat. Meyrick, though, cannot resist heaping on the metaphysics: “Everything bad she takes into the moult – all the crappy feathers, grudges, grievances, mess, broken bits – she sheds … she emerges whittled down, left with new plumage and most herself.”
This might be inspirational if you are a human and after a New Year’s pep talk rather than a Harris hawk gearing up to get the better of a scrumptious peacock. Ironically, it is at these moments of hyperbole that Meyrick seems to realise that she is overreaching and begins to berate herself for missing the mark. She frets that “Bird’s revelations elude me. I grasp at them, hating the rising phrases, pretentious, unwieldy – not what I mean at all.” But that doesn’t stop her from piling on those “rising phrases” to the point where they totter and collapse in on themselves. When Meyrick declares “memory, the gift of memory, is celestial, airborne, just like Bird”, I honestly can’t work out what she means.
Meyrick’s decision to build her book around these avian “life lessons” may arise from a desire to put several ploughed fields between herself and Helen Macdonald, whose H Is for Hawk covered similar ground in 2014 and has just been released as a film starring Claire Foy. Then there is Raising Hare, Chloe Dalton’s 2024 memoir about saving her lockdown sanity by rescuing an orphaned leveret. Whether or not Meyrick is consciously cashing in on the popularity of this subgenre of nature writing, she has written a book that feels contrived and ploddingly earthbound. Exactly the sort of thing about which Sophia Houdini White Wing might surely have something stern but uplifting to say.
English (US) ·