Corvus (7 page)

Scattered by every roadside, the black corpses of corvids lie, feathers ruffled slowly by the wind. I don’t regard their lives as cheap; the opposite, only infinitely fragile. The birds who have lived and live here have done so for much longer than they would have lived in the wild, although I am always aware of the ways in which they haven’t lived, what they have been denied, either by my actions or by what might loosely be described as fate.

People have, I tell myself, for as far back as one knows, kept birds but there is no consolation in the telling because, for as far back as one knows people have similarly done things that are wrong. If I believe, or hope, that what I did was the best I could and can for them, I have to be ready always to answer to my sternest critic.

As we began to look at all corvids with new interest, we saw Chicken do as the corvids around us did. In time, we could recognise the complex series of movements of body, wings and feathers that told of mood and inclination. It may be the apparently sober colours, the lack of sexual dimorphism in corvids that obliges them to a subtlety of behaviour required less by birds that have more to show, more to flash, males with more brilliantly coloured feathers, sets of magnificent head plumes, vast, apparently bejewelled tails, elaborate songs with which to woo and win. We began to discern her state of mind from her stance, her walk, her feathers, to know that, when going about her day-today business, untroubled and busy, her head feathers would be
smoothed to her skull, her auricular feathers (the panels of feathers by the sides of her head that cover the openings that are her ears) flattened, with no ‘eyebrows’ or ‘ears’ visible – the raised head feathers that indicate alterations of mood – no raised, irritated crown of Dennis the Menace feathers round the top of her head, a posture that indicates surprise, alarm, anger. Annoyance or some other stimulus, we saw, could bring this about instantly; when teased, or crossed in any way, she’d fluff her feathers, lower her head, adopt an aggressive stance, her leg feathers bagged out and full. When teased, as she often was (and still is) by Bec, she’d lower her head and spread her feathers, bow, fan her tail and lunge herself towards Bec in full, rookish fury. (Theirs, like Han’s with Chicken, has always remained what appears to be a sibling relationship.)

‘Crow!’ Bec will say to Chicken, who becomes angry, begins to strut and spread her feathers. ‘CROW!’ This is clearly offensive, a crime against taxonomy. In our midst, a shape-shifter, a smallish, smooth-feathered, glossy rook one moment, a strutting, baggy-feathered, almost large, self-important, angry one the next. When, years later, we had an opportunity to observe a magpie, we’d know that the appearance of ‘ears’ on Spike’s perfect, shining black head was a warning signal.
I’m getting angry
, it said, in preparation for violence and attack, the controlled fury of the probably dangerous;
why did you have to annoy
me?
Get ready for the vengeance of one small and angry magpie, it said. One did. Their raised ‘ears’ always remind me of Batman’s ears and are perhaps similarly indicative of righteous indignation or the highest moral intent.

We’d watch amazed as Chicken did what Bernd Heinrich (in his book
Ravens in Winter
) describes in ravens as ‘jumping jack’, when birds will leap up and down, hopping and calling, behaviour that occurs in the presence of an unfamiliar food source, a carcass perhaps, in a process of investigation. She does it still, leaping into the air, both feet off the ground, wings wide and flapping, tail raised, uttering quick, high yelps, ‘Wup! Wup! Wup!’, continuing for a half a minute before she stops and stands, slightly out of breath. In the absence of carcasses it’s difficult to know why, what inspires her, what initiates it, and although I have tried to see a pattern or a cause, I never have.

I began to read books about corvids and to appreciate that what is known of their lives, the patterns of their behaviour and social organisation, has most often been learned by careful, painstaking and sometimes dangerous research, undertaken among the most observant, the most wary, quick and communicative of birds. I often read the accounts with awe, admiration and gratitude, knowing that if people who carry out research into corvids and other bird behaviour didn’t climb trees, the very high ones that are the first choice of most corvids, didn’t spend long, freezing winters in cold, wild places, watching, tagging, measuring, didn’t set up experiments that, because of corvid wariness, fail after lengthy preparation, we would know considerably less than we do and people like me would not be able to exclaim from their armchairs in revelatory recognition at a piece of corvid (or other avian) behaviour they read about in one of these astonishingly detailed accounts. Bernd Heinrich describes climbing high trees, precariously, dangerously, in storms in order to reach a
raven’s nest; he writes too of those who have sustained injuries while carrying out research, of Thomas Grunkorn who fell out of a tree and broke his back, of Gustav Kramer who was killed falling from a cliff while studying wild pigeons.

In their book
In the Company of Crows and Ravens
, researchers John Marzluff and Tony Angell describe being picked out from among forty thousand others on the campus of the University of Washington by crows who, while happily walking among other people, fly away from them. Kevin McGowan of Cornell University was routinely identified among crowds, followed and shouted at by crows he had studied (and some he had not). Bernd Heinrich, attempting to discover what it is that allows ravens to identify each other, describes experiments with his own ravens, who happily accept him but no one else. Using a variety of techniques – swapping clothes with other people before approaching the ravens, changing his outfits or elements of his outfits, wearing masks, wigs, sunglasses, making grotesque faces, limping, hopping, carrying a broom – he proves that if it’s him they’re not fooled for long by any subterfuge, that, just as the visual clues the birds use in recognition of humans are diverse, so probably are those they use in identification of other birds. (Included in the account is the unforgettable sentence ‘After my thirteenth approach in the kimono, they again allowed me to get next to them.’)

Interestingly, the broom was the one thing the ravens never accepted, as Chicken will not. Even after years of close, daily acquaintance, Chicken still runs away at the sight, hides under the table until it’s put away. Corvids must know something I don’t about brooms.

Gradually I began to realise how much more there was to know, that what I had learnt, what I had observed from Chicken, was just a beginning. I read in the introduction to Kenton C. Lint’s feeding instruction for corvids that crows and ravens can live for twenty to twenty-five years in well-planted aviaries. While this isn’t a well-planted aviary, I wondered if it might do instead. It seemed that with good fortune, or whatever else it might take to look after this bird properly, we could well have some time to spend together. I hoped it would be so.

D
uring the years of sharing this house with birds, the kitchen and rat room have always been communal space, inhabited democratically, equally, by both human and bird. The study, on the other hand, is the
salon privé
, a place where no flying is allowed, no high-level depredation, no intrusion by the unwarrantedly curious or wilfully destructive.

It’s a long time now since Chicken moved into this room, and although we work in it together, our status in it is different. For Chicken, the room is home, where her house is, while I am a mere sojourner, spending time in it during working hours and sometimes in the evening, when I prevail upon her generosity to share with me a room that, although clearly not mine, is known erroneously as my study. It’s a room with large windows and a French door which opens on to the garden, on to bushes and stones and bird feeders, a stretch
of grass beyond, the dove-house, a small and overgrown pond. Outside the window, the garden birds and doves are perpetually busy, doing what they have to do, while inside Chicken and I occupy our time as we do on most days, me writing, she pottering earnestly with deep, driven intent, hiding things, perching on her branch in contemplation, eating, bathing; throughout the year, carrying out the many demanding imperatives of each season – in spring, preparing for nesting, in summer, dealing with the uncomfortable time of moulting.

Chicken’s house, while beloved to her, is not beautiful. It’s a shanty house, a dwelling more suited to a
favela
than an otherwise elegant, high-ceilinged, corniced room. The favela house was constructed hastily by David years ago, when Chicken was moved from the rat room at the back of the house to this more central, sociable situation, an arrangement she appeared to welcome.

The house, which stands on a worn, holed, raggy Persian rug of pink and dark blue, has a wooden back and door and sides of galvanised garden mesh. A metre high, a metre and a half long, it has stout, removable and, more importantly, washable plastic trays for the floor, which I cover every day with fresh newspaper. It has a wire door with hinges of wire and string. The door is rarely closed but if it is, during the cleaning of the floor perhaps, it is swiftly reopened thereafter by Chicken who pushes it triumphantly with her beak. She has a set of feeding dishes of white plastic with hooks, which I can attach to the wire of her wall. She can, equally, unattach them when, in response to whim, she decides that she would prefer her meal to be
eaten from the floor. In spring, when her behaviour changes, she likes to carry the empty dishes in a clattering procession through the house. Often, it’s the first sign, the first small intimation, even on days in mid-February when fierce wind blows a few flakes of reluctant snow or on the grey, pouring days of early March, that beyond one’s own narrow perceptions of prolonged and dreary winters, others have already begun to scent and sense that the season is about to change.

Two perches made from stout branches from the garden are secured on different levels, at different angles, on to small wooden brackets and held with screws. A passerine, a perching bird, her feet close as her ankles bend, the tension of the tendons curling her toes, which hold and tighten to keep her safe.

On the floor are two large stones upon which Chicken likes to stand, as the stag in a Landseer painting, nobly, next to the water dish of heavy stoneware, which is also her bath.

Hanging from the wire of the roof of the favela house there is a series of bells of different sizes and types which Chicken rings with the boundless, energetic enthusiasm of the church bell ringer, except that, in her case, protest rather than campanological fervour is her motivation, an expression of outrage or disgust, at the sound of music she doesn’t like, perhaps, or at the regular appearance of cleaning equipment, to which she holds stern, enduring objections.

Chicken and I are both used to the favela house and although David often offers to improve it or to renew it completely, on Chicken’s behalf I decline. She’s not concerned with home
improvements. She loathes change, reacts with terror, running to hide in the kitchen or behind the sofa in a torrent of loose-bowelled shouting, when one of her branches, unnotched from its moorings, falls down. She notices the smallest of changes to her environment and reacts with suspicion, fear and scowling resentment. When, a few months ago, I bought a cupboard for my papers to install in the study, Chicken was shut in the kitchen while furniture was shifted from place to place. There was, of course, no thought of moving the favela house. The room was reorganised around it, table moved from one side to the other, cupboard installed, lamps and pictures replaced, and when the room was satisfactorily restored to order, the door opened to allow Chicken to return. Her caution was total. She peered round the corner, hopped back, peered in again, a portion of beak, part of a small grey face appearing, retreating, reappearing, retreating again in the minute process of establishing that her house at least was untouched, in every manner and respect the same as when she left it. She looked with suspicion and probably contempt at our attempts at interior decor but, since her own establishment was intact, she was prepared to live and let live.

While the favela house lacks style, it’s in this modest dwelling that Chicken has place and opportunity to do at least some of what all corvids do: preen and perch, roost, hide and retrieve, call and feed and bathe.

In spite of our years together, aspects of Chicken are difficult to know. Her sight, being markedly different from ours, is one. Birds are thought to have the best vision of any vertebrate, the placing of their eyes determining not only nature and scope, but their capacity, depending on their species, to watch for predators or prey. Raptors and owls, both predators whose eyes are at the front of their heads, have binocular vision as we do, whilst birds such as doves, whose eyes are on the sides of their heads and are more often prey, have monocular vision, the ability to see objects with only one eye at a time. Birds with monocular vision usually have a very wide visual field; some, such as the woodcock, whose eyes are placed far back on its head, can see what is behind it more accurately than what is in front. (‘It could better tell where it has been than where it is going,’ according to the distinguished political scientist and nature writer Louis J. Halle.) Whilst human vision is limited by having three light receptors, or cones, by which colour is seen, birds have four or five spectrally distinct cones, sensitive to a far greater range of light waves, including ultraviolet, than humans, which may allow them to see twice as many colours as we do. They can also distinguish between wavelengths of the ultraviolet spectrum, a visual acuity that gives them fine perception in foraging, letting them identify a wide range of colours of food and natural objects. Raptors, although the most visually acute of birds, are thought to be able to see fewer colours than passerines.

Chicken’s sight, once alarmingly acute, the sense which in birds is most highly developed, must by virtue of her useless eye be lessened, although most of the time it doesn’t seem so. (David has given his
opinion on the neurosurgical, or at least neurological aspects of her eye problem, which is possibly a cataract. His sister Zanna, an ophthalmic surgeon, has been consulted on the ocular. Both have agreed. The combined weight of their knowledge suggests that they’re not entirely sure what it is and in any case there’s nothing to be done.)

Chicken’s right eye appears to compensate for the deficit in her left, for she is still able to see very small objects, a pine nut I have given to her lying on the floor, a crumb of something she considers desirable under the fridge. Because of the limited movement of the eyes in their sockets, birds’ necks have greater flexibility. Chicken has the enviable attribute of being able to turn her head upside down to look underneath the fridge or sofa. When we’re sitting together as evening wears on, she’ll descend to a roosting position, her feathers spreading a warmth across my knee, and she will appear, on one side, to be asleep. On the other, her eye is wide and bright and totally awake. ‘Is she asleep on your side?’ we’ll ask. The hemispheres of a bird’s brain alternate in waking and sleeping, the eye on the side of the somnolent, slow-brain-wave hemisphere closing. They can also sleep with both hemispheres at once. Research among ducks has shown that the ones at each end of a row of sleepers will keep the appropriate eye open, watching.

Chicken trips sometimes over an item left lying on the floor, a piece of paper, something small, and I don’t know if it’s age or sight that causes her to do it. My heart stops briefly when she does, for whatever this is it is quite new.

For reasons unknown, she nurtures a residual hatred for my specs,
as a result of which I operate most of the time (as I suppose she does, on one side at least) in a hazed fog caused by her habit of standing on my shoulder and inserting her beak behind my ear to tweak my specs off by one leg before sending them skimming, with the sound of lens scraping wood, across the floor. The fog lifts only if I have time to replace my scratched, semi-opaque glasses when, for a short while, I’m astonished anew by the fine-etched clarity of the world.

Almost equal to her dislike of my specs is her dislike of cleaning or electrical equipment, usually because of a dangerous combination of the sight and sound. She is scared of vacuum cleaners. In common with many people, she hates computers, their blue-white stares, their sudden vulgar, explosive bursts into colour, their tendency at certain moments to talk. She has accustomed herself only reluctantly to mine, grunting with mistrust and displeasure at the sight of the screensaver (sentimental images of the natural world, forests in mist, ladybirds, dew-laden plants, chosen with her in mind, since she disliked even more the alternating planets on my previous screen). She dislikes too printers, cameras, laptops, music-making machines of every sort, the television (which is not kept in the same room as her and is, in any case, never watched): their winking, malevolent green eyes, their watchfulness, the inscrutable nature of their intentions. She was distressed, it was clear (as I was), by the single terrible scream, the loud and dangerous whirring and gusting, as the logic board of my quite new computer succumbed one Saturday evening in March to the equivalent of a ruptured brain aneurysm, and died. Perhaps she knows, as the rest of us suspect, that of all of this no good can come.

simply for pleasure

Chicken does not like to be ignored. She’ll pull insistently at the legs of my jeans as I cook or iron. She’ll try to knock the book from my hand if I don’t pay her attention, pecking at my sleeve or elbow to invite me to talk. Often she’ll burst, like the alien in
Alien
, through my newspaper, leaping on to my knee as I sit trying peaceably to read.