Corvus (6 page)

If corvid distribution is uneven, it’s because each species has its preferences, or imperatives, dictated by the physical, evolutionary, climatic and social factors that have made it what it is. Ravens are birds of high, quiet places, of mountains; rooks, birds of farming country, in Scotland predominantly easterners; whilst ‘hoodies’, hooded crows, are the opposite. Choughs like rocky coasts, and jays woodlands. Jackdaws and magpies, like rooks, prefer the east. (Of all of them, the only ones that appear to like the north-west of Scotland are hooded crows and ravens. It may be that, in order to choose to live there, you simply have to like rain.)

From the first, I realised how little I had really observed the birds around me. It may be that the very ubiquity of corvids makes them all but invisible, beyond or beneath the interest of those who see them every day. Paradoxically, this may be why they appear to be noticed less, because they’re just there, part of an accepted background, because their beauty is subtle, or unrecognised as such, their forms appearing at first glance to be clothed in unvarying blacks and greys, revealed only when close to as complex, shimmering, gilded with iridescent purple, blue, green. Their voices are perceived as harsh, unvarying, and except in rare cases, denying humanity the opportunity to hear reflections of themselves.

Perhaps, if the corvids we see around us were rare – had they, as others, already set their neat, black feet on the increasingly swift
pathway to extinction – voices would be raised, and money, and campaigns set up, but since they are neither they require no such attention.

In time, Chicken developed her full adult plumage and became as she is now, beautiful, as are all crows, rooks, ravens, magpies. She is in every aspect, as they all are, in every movement, a sharp, tenebrous grace in her stillness, in her wings and feet and head. Corvids’ beaks are balanced, proportionate, burnished and striated like the metal of a Damascene sword. The Japanese word ‘
shibui
’ most encapsulates for me what they are and how they look, a word defined as ‘austere, simple, quietly beautiful’. (It is no surprise to me that they are portrayed at their most exquisite in the art of Hiroshige, Hokusai and others, the art of a culture that sees crows so differently from our own.)

Because we seldom have the opportunity to be close enough to see the colour of their eyes, we may not know the depth and expression of the chestnut irises, the black pupils of the rook, the darker, fulvous plum and brown of crows and magpies.

Corvids, by being in the main black, are seen as representations of darkness, sources or conduits of evil, possibly messengers of dark forces. In fact, black feathers are protective, the strongest of all feathers, offering both camouflage and metabolic advantages over white feathers in their greater absorption of solar energy, which allows corvids to live more easily in the wide span of geographical territory they do,
protected from the sun’s rays and insulated against the Arctic cold.

As Chicken’s feathers grew to thick, piled black, the irises of her eyes too changed from blue to grey-blue, then to deep, rich brown. She began to show the characteristic grey cere of the rook, a mysterious, ever-changing landscape. It’s one of the aspects of her I could know only by closeness, by watching over time; that the grey portion of her face is not static. The texture of the skin, which reminds me of lizards (and makes me think of her distant dinosaur relatives), is of a strange and wondrous beauty, like lava or pumice, porous rock which erupts, melts back, is smooth then pocked, in an ever-altering pattern beneath the folds of grey skin under her eyes.

In summer, when she was small, we would take her into the garden. We began to clip her wings after the occasion when a sudden sound – I don’t know what, a door opening, a voice from the next garden, a siren, another bird calling from a tree – sent her into panicked flight into a neighbour’s garden. A child was dispatched over the wall and Chicken retrieved. Clipping involves the careful removal of secondary feathers, watching for their regrowth. When recently I omitted to do it, I realised only when, to my shock (and Chicken’s), startled by something outside, she took off and flew round the high ceiling of the study in two stunned and fearful circuits. Her relief on landing was clear. The possibilities of danger for her, of becoming tangled in lights, colliding with walls, was too great. Again, I wielded the clippers.

wonderfully, eagerly enquiring

For the first years, when there were fewer cats in vicinity, we’d let her peck in the grass, investigate the flowerbeds under the bushes. Most of the time though she’d sit with us, on the back of the garden bench eating the aphids from the overhanging roses, their fine green legs waving helplessly from the sides of her beak, or ‘sunning’ – spreading her wings to the warmth and light (neither particularly abundant entities in north-east Scotland). The first time I saw her do it, I was transfixed by horror and panic – Chicken in sunshine, sitting on the edge of the garden bench, beak hanging open, head to the side, wings held wide and drooping (a posture we now call ‘dying rook’), eyes veiled, apparently in the throes of a trance or coma. I didn’t know what had befallen the unfortunate bird while my back was momentarily turned. A tentative calling of her name appeared to summon her back from this unknown realm, from her innocent pursuit of sunbathing.

No one knows the true purpose of birds’ sunning. They may do it to help regulate their temperature, to increase their exposure to vitamin D, or to reduce feather parasites, but whatever it is, pleasure too appears to be involved. Since first seeing it, I notice birds everywhere spreading their wings in the sun, beaks gaping – blackbirds in the hedges of Union Street gardens, a thrush on the grass, the tiny robin on the garden table – all of them looking to the uninitiated as if they’re in the last, painful throes of some alarming, rapid, fatal avian malady.

Adjusting to life with a rook was gradual, mutual, for us all, a process of interpretation, supposition, trial, learning the gestures of another’s culture, the avoidance of the causes of fear or offence, matters of etiquette, slowly stepping one cautious step over the sacrosanct boundary into an unknown country.

Chicken seemed to enjoy being with us, perching under the table while we ate, hopping speculatively, carefully, on to someone’s foot and, in time, their knee. We learned not to extend our hands too quickly towards her, or indeed towards any bird. Her wariness of hands, maintained until today, is entirely reasonable. One doesn’t know what hands, or their owners, intend to do. But then, if Chicken is wary of fingers, we are equally so of beaks.

Corvid fears seem cultural, innate, rational as well as irrational. The Nobel Prize-winning naturalist Konrad Lorenz, in his book about animal behaviour
King Solomon’s Ring
, describes his jackdaws’ responses to seeing him holding a black, fluttering object (in his case, what he refers to as his ‘bathing drawers’) and being immediately surrounded by a crowd of angry jackdaws, trying to peck his hand, for they interpreted the object as one of their own, a dead jackdaw; other black objects, such as his camera, were regarded with equanimity. Chicken is used to most black objects by now, obliged to be perhaps by living in a household inhabited by inveterate and unregenerate wearers of black. She will though occasionally still complain loudly at the sight of a black dustbin bag.

The parrots we have kept, by comparison, have always seemed less afraid, more rational, less flighty in their fears, disliking cats and
sparrow-hawks but regarding everything else with either calm or a degree of interest. It may be their different experience and history, being reared in aviaries, distant from their places of origin and from the circumstances of life in the wild that allows them a greater ease, but it may just be the way parrots are. (Bardie is afraid of chessboards. It may be that the bold pattern of black and white looks too much like the pattern of a snake’s skin for relaxation in its presence but he may just dislike the game of chess.)

I don’t know what she thought of ours, but we began to discover the grace of Chicken’s demeanour. She made, and makes, me think of the fastidious conventions of courtly love, the way in which, with such refinement, she initiates and responds: each movement is careful. Not only rooks but even birds with reprobate reputations like magpies could shame humanity by their exquisite attention to manners, effusive displays of gratitude. Nothing, we discovered, is gracious like a corvid. Nothing displays such old-world, mannerly attention to others, such elaborate
politesse
, such greetings and such partings. Never, before meeting Chicken, could I have imagined the rituals, worthy of Japanese life at its most effulgently ritualistic, of coming in and going out, of waking in the morning and retiring at night, in acceptance and rejection, in speech and gesture, in meeting and making acquaintance, in the presentation of gifts; the bowings and callings, circlings and head-bendings, the solemn placing, as a morning gesture, of one cool black foot on the bare skin of my own.

At the beginning it had seemed simple, a question of responsibility. Then it started to seem less so, as I began to think of what it meant to
keep a wild bird, one whose life in its natural setting would be so apparently alien, so dissimilar from our own. Dogs and cats are different. They have been bred for centuries for the lives they are to lead, for the small circuit, the delineated future. They live as they do, in a close relationship with humans, for the most part dependent on them because in the universe they have nowhere else to go. Birds, except for those bred in captivity, have plenty of other places to go. I am always aware that rooks are sociable, and that Chicken is without other rooks. But she isn’t, as a member of the family, on her own. She’s always with one or other of us, always within the sound of other birds, and if they’re not the ones she might have expected, I hope it’s consolation of a sort.

For years now, I’ve reflected on the facts of our coming by the wild birds we have, considered their prospects and their alternatives, what would have been their fate had they been anywhere but here. For each, Chicken and later Spike the magpie, the alternatives, I believe, would have been limited. Both birds were small when they first came here, too unfeathered for flight. Why they fell or were dislodged from their nests is impossible to know. Larger nestlings dislodge smaller ones while spreading their wings, practising for flight. Or, active creatures, they fall of their own accord. The trees from which they came are far too high for them to be restored to their nests by any practicable means. Reintroducing them to the wild might have been possible, but at best, in amateur hands, with individual birds, success is limited (everything I’ve read confirms it). Where would I have done it? How? Around us are urban gardens, busy streets, traffic.