Corvus (27 page)

Many birds have a preen gland, the uropygial gland at the base of the tail, which secretes a waxy oil that they spread over their plumage, while some, doves and herons among them, have powder-down feathers, which keep on growing, eventually disintegrating into the fine powder that helps their owners maintain their feather condition. When I’m in the doo’cot, I see the powder dispersing into air, hazing a fine coating over the water in which they bathe. It lies as a pearly film over the garden pond when, almost as the observance of a spring or summer rite, they march down the grass in procession to bob one by one among the water lilies, to the horror and alarm, no doubt, of the unfortunate frog. (Can this powder be a contributory factor in the disease known as ‘pigeon fancier’s lung’? For a time, I thought it must be the serial Woodbine-smoking I supposed was indulged in by pigeon fanciers of old, in the privacy of their well-kept lofts.)

The alula, or alular quills, usually three feathers projecting from the ‘first finger’ of the wing, are used for fine control, for hovering, slow flight, for flying at the steepest angles. A bird can alter the amount of lift by altering the angle between the wings and the oncoming airstream, the angle known as the angle of attack.

Feathers vary in strength and durability. Many pale or white seabirds have black-tipped wings, the dark feathers that, because of their
melanin content, are stronger than other feathers, being more durable for birds whose journeys entail prolonged flights over oceans. The larger ones with long, narrow wings have no need for the breadth of wing that would give them height. The wings of an albatross may be eleven and a half feet from wingtip to wingtip, the vast span that will carry it on its non-stop circumnavigation of the earth.

I go to stand on the edge of the cliffs a few miles south of the city, at Fowlsheugh, to watch sea-birds fly. Fowlsheugh – ‘the overhanging cliffs of birds’ – a place where the smell reaches you first, of bird and wind and salt. High paths trail the cliff-edges, seem to wander to the centre of the sky. A hundred and twenty feet of vertiginous rock fall away from the next careless footstep. Everywhere nests star the sheer, dark walls, guillemots and puffins, razorbills and fulmars. Nests scatter the ledges, balance in niches, hang on tiny spurs sliced halfway to the sea. The sea sends up its dragging, background roar, sucked from the deep caves cut into the cliffs below. The voices of birds, young and adult, mew and wail and chant, kittiwakes, black-backed gulls and herring gulls, shags. Birds rise in sprays against the high, cool sky, explode from faces of sheer rock into the rainbow haze of air, each wing, each feather carrying them on their dizzying spirals. (It’s now, looking down on to the backs of flying birds, that you feel the gods might give a little help, transform you, let you fly.) I watch their different wings, their different flights, the kittiwakes with their narrow wings, their irregular zig-zag flight, the slow rising of the herring gull.

 
part of the earth, part of the air
 

It’s early July but still cold. When it isn’t raining, a damp north-east haar swirls over the town, round spires, through the tops of trees, over the garden. We might have difficulty in recognising its credentials as summer, but of course Chicken knows. It’s moulting time and so feathers are on my mind – or, more accurately, under my feet. It is difficult to tell, but to judge from Chicken it looks as though moulting is an unpleasant experience for birds. During the weeks it takes, she’s hingy. (This Scots word perfectly describes her state of mind and body; listless, unenthusiastic,
hingy
.) Summer is the time when her rich plumage of winter and spring is shed, not all at once but serially, feather by feather.

Moulting is a necessary process. Feathers wear out and do not regenerate. After a year of hard wear, they become raggy, they thin and break and lose their colour. Birds tend to moult in summer, between nesting and migration, when the weather is still warm enough for them to survive. For most birds moulting is annual, although for some it is bi-annual, those who live in conditions that put the greatest climatic or environmental stress on their plumage, in great heat or among dense foliage. Some moult partially, losing only some of their plumage, others fully, when all the feathers are shed and regrown. It’s a time when enormous hormonal changes and adaptations overtake birds, affecting their blood chemistry, their metabolism, their susceptibility to infection and disease. They lose 30 per cent of their dry weight and
require 50 per cent more energy. Their flight can be limited by their loss of flight feathers, leaving them open to danger.

Not just Chicken but all the crows and rooks I pass appear similarly hingy. Patchy-looking corvids, partially grey, with scruffy, unkempt-looking neck ruffs and thinning wings, are to be seen skulking on every roadside, picking in a dispirited way in the grass of city parks.
Summer
?
their stance and posture suggests,
I could do without summer
.

The doves too are moulting, but their moulting seems lesser. A few older ones lose neck feathers and look for a time like small, grizzled white turkey buzzards, but the rest shed mainly down feathers, which drift into the corners of the dove-house, become caught in the spiders’ webs that coat the walls and corners under the nestboxes and perches. Inside the house, feathers are everywhere. Scraps of black feather scatter the study floor. Wisps of grey down drift over the favela-house floor and under the furniture. (Had I thought of it a long time ago, I might have collected them and achieved the unique feat of having a rook-down duvet.) Regularly, I pick up the long, strong remiges and retrices which Chicken has tugged angrily from her wings and tail before they fall out naturally. I use them as bookmarks. Pages bristle with them.

I pick up feathers and lay them in a line. Chicken’s are not just black. They’re tinctured sloe and ebony, ash grey, powder grey, charcoal, silvered navy. I read through a list of the names of the birds of the world and am dazzled by words of colour and brilliance, with a blaze of polychromatic multiformity: feathers, the meeting points of pigment and light, some of them pigments that exist nowhere else, the
porphyrins and psittacins, although there are the carotenoids too, the melanins, the biochromes, which tint and paint each feather of every species of bird on earth. The words used within the names of birds are heavy with colour, with gemstones, jewels, metals, minerals, spices, words that can only partially describe: violet-green, lavender, lilac, cream and ivory, cinnamon and chestnut, apricot and tawny, pearled, bronzed, copper, golden, opal, silver, sapphire, topaz, emerald, fire. ‘Fire-maned’. Words of
haute couture
too, employed to describe texture and form: crinkle-collared, velvet-mantled, striped, braided, spangled, forty-spotted, black-bibbed, crimson-hooded, the ways of granting a place to each parrot, each wren, tanager, weaver, sunbird, goose and hornbill.

The birds of our daily lives are as exquisite as any: starlings, which, close-to, look as if their plumage has been knitted on the finest needles from thread of drawn metal into verdigris and tortoiseshell, lit by flashes of light, shining black and brown, each pointed feather edged by a tiny vein of gold. Before I knew a magpie, I would have imagined its feathers to be simple, either black or white, but I would have been wrong. As Spike moulted during his first summer as an adult, the feathers he shed showed multiform gradations of black and white, feathers of white edged with black, of black edged with white, some of black bordered all round by white; all, from the largest contour feathers to the smallest, composed of the finest differences in the proportions of colour. He shed down feathers of soft grey, curled white feathers of pearlescent delicacy, long, gleaming wing and tail feathers of intricacy and perfection. Every year I’d gather them up in handfuls,
wondering what I might do if, as in some insoluble fairy-tale task, I had to reassemble his plumage from this mass of super-complex, subtle coloration, calculating how long it would take, if it would take as long as it took Time to make him. His wings and tail were iridescent, granules of melanin reflecting, absorbing light, turning them crystalline blue shot through with shimmering turquoise. In flight, a magpie’s wings are fans of glittering blue, edged by a fringe of white, a white cape, a Celtic torque of silver circling its back.

Like the colours, the names of birds mesmerise with a wild, descriptive poetry: spangled honeyeater, bronze-olive pygmy tyrant, fiery-tailed awlbill, forest elaenia, lovely cotinga, white-winged fairy wren, Bishop’s oo. (The latter, a Hawaiian bird, is either critically endangered or actually extinct. A lobelia eater, sadly it has no eccentric ecclesiastical connections, having been named for a naturalist called Bishop.)

Familiarity doesn’t dull me to the wonder of birds, what they are and what they do. Chicken becomes more mysterious, more miraculous the more I learn, the more I observe. I spread her wing in my hand. She grunts and, briefly, objects. Before she tugs it back under her own control, I look at the lovely arc of it; feel the fine bones under my fingers, feathers all in their symmetrical or asymmetrical orders. I think of the fact that she doesn’t fly, another of the deficits of our long-enduring contract.

Apart from treading on a carpet of feathers, it’s at moulting time that I get the true measure of birds, when I remember that they’re all illusion, con-artists, feathers a magnificent, often ostentatiously successful cover for not very much at all. Feathers are costume, all keratin and mirrors, covering creatures that are, without exception, smaller than they seem, scrawny things under their blanket of insulated plumage. Spike, apparently plump, full-chested, dense, under the lush feathers was tiny. Moulting time revealed his neck, the diameter of my own little finger, denuded of its thick, marvellous glowing blue-black plumage, a pink, goose-pimpled, frankly alarming manifestation of his true size and fragility. A dramatic moulter, he shivered and cringed and drew his tiny pink dinosaur neck and the rounded, shockingly nude back of his head into himself. He hunched under the counter lights in the kitchen, standing on the jar of shells, glaring, seeming full of mordent self-pity. Every year I was scared that his feathers wouldn’t grow back and that he’d proceed through life with a partially bald pink head and naked pink neck. Fortunately, it never happened. The pimples would expand, begin to form the small quills of pin-feathers which would break the skin, growing rapidly larger, unfurling from their keratin sheaths. As it does for Chicken every summer it kept him occupied, as, becoming refeathered, he grew in confidence, busy about the tidying-up of his feathers, picking off discarded casings, regurgitating them eventually in one of the revolting pellets he routinely disgorged from his beak with supreme thespian flourish.

Bardie too is moulting, the floor of his house feathered with tiny wisps of grey and white and orange, some so small that they seem too
tiny for their own perfection. At this season the treats I buy for him from the pet shop are special sticks of seed called ‘moulting-bars’ which contain ingredients designed to ameliorate the torments of moulting, oats and honey and many, many vitamins. (It’s difficult to tell if they work. Every year Bardie recovers, regrows his feathers, remains as hostile to me as he has always been.)