“Once upon a time, when women were birds, there was the simple understanding that to sing at dawn and to sing at dusk was to heal the world through joy. The birds still remember what we have forgotten, that the world is meant to be celebrated.” –Terry Tempest Williams
Every now and then, a book opens a portal to our primal connection to Earth, something we need more of in this time of rapidly destabilizing planetary systems.
Be More Bird, Life Lessons From a Hawk, by Candida Meyrick, is such a portal. Candida is a falconer, novelist, mother, and cancer survivor, whose experiences with her Harris Hawk provide a window into the numinous, extraordinary potentials of connecting with, and creating with, the more-than-human world.
Rachel Clark: Could you briefly describe what beckoned you to write Be More Bird?
Candida Meyrick: The answer to this has a long root! I’ve always written and always painted. My mother is a writer, my father was a painter, and I have long tussled with individuating myself with these totemic forces.
Bird’s arrival allowed me to rise—to see the larger landscape of my life and the foolishness of struggling within reductive dualities. Bird for me is a cosmic weaver, moving with grace between opposing states.
She delivered a hawk-inspired point of brisk decision: Write this! Also: Paint this! Just make the attempt. Because if you don’t, what are you, exactly?
RC: What first inspired you to welcome Bird into your life?
CM: I had had cancer five years earlier, which offered me the gift of saying Yes to things I might otherwise not have had the courage to accept. So when my children became interested in birds of prey, I said, why not? It spoke to a yearning buried deep in my childhood, which I had abandoned. By their wholehearted involvement in the acquiring, training, and flying of Bird, my children unwittingly performed a life-changing miracle of healing, ushering in a process of ongoing transformation. There are resonances here with shamanic and family constellation therapies.
RC: You have a way of writing about Bird that evokes our natural kinship to the more-than-human world. How did this sense of kinship begin for you? How has it evolved?
CM: This sense of kinship began the moment I first glimpsed her—caught her eye. That combination of power and terror—the fact that strength and vulnerability were in some way co-dependent was a revelation.
So I set myself an impossible task. To try to say this unsayable thing—to underline the reality of this kinship. Not through hubris but humility, because I knew that the attempt was doomed to failure: It could only be experienced in the moment.
Realizing this, I remember feeling a huge burst of lucid power—a sort of upsurge of spiritual revelation: just to make the attempt to convey how she had crossed the boundaries of species to move me in this way would be enough. Words were a poor vehicle—but the best I had. Just to make the attempt overwhelmed me with that sense of kinship with all living things.
This is of course ancient wisdom. And it’s well that we should learn from organisms and systems that pre-date us by millennia and will likely outlive us. It’s weird that we don’t.
RC: What inspired you to write the book as a series of life lessons for people?
CM: I was gripped by the desire to convey what she had taught me. I didn’t want to declare "This is what falconry is" but more "This is what I have witnessed, what I have learnt"—and by extension suggest what any living thing can teach us, if we only look, attend, connect.
When I had cancer, I spent hours in a hammock between a venerable oak on one side and a huge ash on the other. Those trees were my healers. How to explain that? I’d have to write a book to fully articulate it. Learning those lessons from nature at that low point in my life set me on the path where I met Bird.
RC: What were the gifts for you of writing Be More Bird?
CM: Just the attempt to articulate what she has shown me has given me the gift of self-respect—honoring the child in me, asserting what she believes in and cares about.
It also feels like a form of precious groundwork: I have cleared my path, planted my values, accepted the sound of my own voice when it states what really matters to me. Now, everything has Bird at its heart: she is my touchstone and spirit-guide. The full articulation of this will take a lifetime.
RC: What gifts do you hope it offers to readers?
CM: I set out to write Be More Bird with a far more outward intention than with my novels—in the spirit of humble gift-giving and intense gratitude. That I was still alive to fly this bird and write this story was joyous.
It was also a love letter to my children. The act of writing this story became a discovery of how maternal love is, in essence, liberating. I love that the book might be a gift of strength and purpose, a revelation of joy in adversity, an underlining of the power of mothering—what it means to "be more bird."
References
In conversation with Candida Meyrick. Meyrick is the author of Be More Bird: Life Lessons From a Hawk, published by Greystone Books (2026). As Candida Clark, she is also the author of six acclaimed novels. Novelist Paul Theroux calls her "one of the most gifted novelists of her generation." Meyrick is also a falconer and artist. (Bio drawn from the author's website.)