Corvus (9 page)

Into this space in the kitchen wall she continues her unending work of posting and collecting. She enjoys the hiding of both food
scraps and paper in her excavation. A particular pleasure is in removing from my wooden trug of magazines, newspapers, assorted letters and things-about-which-something-must-one-day-be-done, a slip of paper – any paper, an old receipt, the envelope from a bank statement – which she then posts between the slats of the lathes before redeeming it for future use. (I assume that nothing of too great importance can have disappeared between the lathes in the years she has been busy with her filing, because no repercussions, final demands or angry insistences for immediate attention have occurred.)

I don’t mind the hole in the wall. Indeed, when recently, the kitchen was being redecorated, the principled decision was made not to disturb or alter it. It has its own aesthetic: not quite shabby-chic, more a bold counterpoint to the elaborate
trompe-
l’oeil
you see from time to time in interior-design magazines, the grandiose schemes, Greek temples or improbable pastoral idylls, marble blocks, Etruscan arches. I have on occasion been tempted to paint a
faux
mouse peering from a corner, but haven’t because I feel that this would demean the project and might, who knows, earn Chicken’s lasting contempt for my frivolity.

There is a way in which I think of the kitchen wall as more than just part of the pattern of her life. It belongs to her. Into this void, some things fall beyond even the grasp of her long beak and tumble, I suppose, into the space below the house, where they are either removed by the odd mouse to be shredded for bedding or else continue to lie, awaiting the day when the fabric of the house, like the fabric of all things, will founder, fall into desuetude, the day when
archaeologists, not knowing why paper might have been stored in the foundations of houses, will come inevitably to wrong conclusions. I reflect on the sadness of their loss, that they will be unable to wonder appropriately, to document and laud as they should, the indomitable qualities, the charm, the intelligence of corvids.

I
t didn’t take long for us to realise that our love of corvids was not universal. The girls’ friends in particular regarded us as an outpost of the Addams family, intriguing, strange, potentially sinister. The only grounds for their view (as far as I know) was the presence of Chicken.

By now, I’m not even surprised by people’s reactions to sight or mention of her. I try to explain. ‘Like a very small black Labrador,’ I’ve heard myself say, in an infinitely feeble attempt to find a way to make the matter comprehensible to those who assume that the rook I have is one who visits the garden from time to time, touches down, feeds, moves on. ‘She lives in the house,’ I say, trying to find a way to bridge the unbridgeable, the notion of ‘dog’ being the one most useful to invoke, that idea of comforting canine solidity with which most people in this society at least are familiar, yet which seems so at variance with the comparative smallness and fragility of birds, with the
alien concept of ‘bird’ for those who cannot imagine even being in close proximity to, or the experience or sensations involved in spending time with, a creature normally seen as wild. It’s not strange to share one’s house with a furred quadruped, but it is to share it with a feathered biped. I recount some of Chicken’s qualities in the face of their disbelieving gaze. Can anyone really accept that a rook might be companionable, intelligent, charming? With difficulty.

I still don’t know what to say of – as I didn’t know at the time what to say to – the person, friend of a friend, who recently, when I talked of crows, said, ‘Crows? Horrible birds!’ I’m still undecided about which shocked me more, her tactlessness or the bleakness of the inner world her words conjured for me. She’s a teacher of English. Don’t the frequent, resonant allusions to corvids in art, poetry, literature impel her to something better?

If others think it, few have said it. If they think it, I tell myself it’s because they don’t know. How can they know? But then I wonder why they don’t. These birds live among us, above us, beside us. How can we know so little, or nothing, of them?

It has been, for the long duration of Chicken’s presence in this house, the commonplace for every person who first sees her to ask (with a certain insulting casualness in the use of the pronoun), ‘What is it?’, the question demonstrating only that many people cannot distinguish between one corvid and another, between the passing carrion crow picking in the urban park, the hooded crow, the sharp-beaked, silver-eyed jackdaw, the baggy-trousered rook. Is there any reason they should know? Once I wouldn’t have known either.

‘Is that a raven?’ they’ll say on seeing Chicken standing on top of her house or perching on her branch. I suspect they don’t really think she’s a raven because they don’t know what a raven looks like either, that it’s a name, a word risen from that part of the ether in which is kept a small list of the names of black birds. (They probably won’t ever have seen ravens, except perhaps during a visit to the Tower of London.) What they want to know is which kind of crow she is. I tell them. I omit to say that, by contrast, she knows very well what they are.

Often, the people who ask are the same ones who, by worthy, rapt and enthusiastic attention to wildlife programmes on television, know the minutest workings of the inner lives of polar bears, of anteaters, hummingbirds, frogs. They’ve seen unfurled before their eyes the most intimate transactions in the lives of other creatures, wooing, mating, birth, all in magnificent colour and irresistible detail, each undreamt-of habit, each hitherto opaque, obscure aspect of nesting or feeding or defecation, but will say, ‘What is it?’ when confronted with the one bird they see every day, making me reflect yet again on the oddness of humanity, which, in its desires and its yearnings, wishes to find life on other planets, other civilisations, but knows so little of the civilisations around it. Implicit too in the question about what Chicken is, I realise, is the unspoken word ‘why?’

It’s not only that people don’t know what Chicken is, they don’t know what she does. The question ‘What is it?’ is prompted not by curiosity alone, but also by fear. People are scared of Chicken, unlikely people: huge men see her and instantaneously a shadow of anxiety alters their faces.

‘What is it?’ they say, hoping only that I’ll take it away. Lads only a generation or two from Aberdeenshire farming life hover nervously until, on shutting the door to the study or kitchen, danger is past. What is it? A rook, my boy, a rook, a bird of the kind by which, every day and in every place, on every roadside verge, overhead in every tree, you are surrounded. A rook, the like of which your farmer grandfather in Strathdon or the Mearns will have waged daily (if unnecessary and futile) battle. I want to ask them what they’re afraid of but don’t. I was frightened of birds, at the beginning, not simply ignorant. I remind myself that I was afraid not only of corvids but of doves too, of all birds, for I shared what now appears to me to be this near-universal apprehension, one that lies in not knowing what birds may do or wish to do, an unfamiliarity with their habits, their ability suddenly, terrifyingly, to fly. The history is too long, the fears and superstitions too deep-rooted for flippant questions.

The name of James I of Scotland is one we seldom mention in Chicken’s presence, because, for all the worthy civic efforts he undertook on his return to Scotland in 1424 after eighteen years of captivity in England (his visionary enterprise in rebuilding the palace at Linlithgow, recently destroyed by fire, his enthusiastic, new-broom frenzy of legislation relating to governance, law, the ownership of mineral rights, and the imposition of restrictions on playing football), among the many laws he passed in 1424 was one decreeing that rooks,
for their alleged damage to cornfields, should be killed in their nests, any farmer being found with nesting rooks at Beltane being obliged to give up the relevant trees to the king, until payment of a fine:

Doves, on the other hand, were given special protection, penalties being imposed on anyone who destroyed dove cotes.

Linlithgow Palace would, at the hands of James’s descendants, become one of the finest of Renaissance palaces, a gorgeous construction, galleried and fountained, embellished and carved and barrel-vaulted, the favourite of queens, birthplace of Mary Queen of Scots.

Whilst his son James II took no interest in the rebuilding of the palace, he appears to have inherited the unfortunate tendency towards prejudice against rooks, because on ascending the throne after the murder of his father he enacted further anti-bird legislation in 1457, widening the scope of the law to include other species:

(Beltane is the right time, if one is intent on such purposes, one of the old Celtic divisions of the year, more than just seasons, they are intervals of meaning between light and darkness, warmth and cold. Falling on 1 May, Beltane or Bealtuinn is the optimum breeding time, not only for rooks but for most other birds.)

Last spring, while I was buying an old book about crows in a shop in Deeside, the lady selling me the book looked at the cover: ‘They’re meant to be intelligent birds,’ she said.

I agreed.

‘Pity they’re regarded as vermin.’

The word reminded me of the history, took me away from my own small view of corvids – of corvids in ones, individuals – far in concept from the idea of ‘vermin’ with its manifold suggestions of low-life commonality, disease-carrying or wilful harm, its overtone of disgust, its hints of justifiable destruction.

The killing of corvids, and indeed most other bird and mammal species regarded as being in one way or another detrimental to human interests, has been permitted by law in Britain for centuries, and for longer in Scotland, to its discredit, than in England.

‘Vermin’ is a word that still sanctions all, explains and allows every inventive, malign, brutal method of destruction, every way in which birds and animals were and are trapped and netted and shot, ways
elaborated and refined through time (as humans, this seems to be one of our greater areas of expertise) and illuminating only the boundlessness of our own savagery, our feral cunning, our knowing less about our prey than about the methods of its destruction. With crossbows, arrows, in traps and snares of every elaborate and fiendish sort, with bird lime, a sticky substance smeared on branches to trap the unwary, with poisons – arsenic, mercury, strychnine – with modern pesticides – alphachloralase, cymag, aldicarb, carbofuran – by gassing, shooting, methods often involving something more purposefully cruel than mere disregard for pain, with our own knowledge growing in sophistication, we have damaged, often irrevocably, our native species.

In North America, it was, John Marzluff and Tony Angell suggest in their book
In the Company of Crows and Ravens
, the arrival of Europeans, bringing with them their old hatreds and superstitions, that introduced the idea of the undesirability of corvids, an idea that was to override and destroy (among the many other things in that territory that were erased, extirpated for ever) the protection extended by the traditional respect and mutuality of the indigenous inhabitants of the continent towards the birds and animals with which they shared the land, cultures in which corvids were, and still are, treated with greater degrees of respect than in Europe. Native American culture venerates ravens, admires crows. Magpies are honoured in Lakota dances because the black and white of their feathers represents both living and dead.

By the twentieth century, with true American enthusiasm for the task in hand, corvid colonies were being destroyed by dynamite. That
this literal overkill, the use of bombing against birds, doesn’t appear to have made any difference to corvid numbers can only be a comfort to those who might question, in general, the results of disproportionate balances of power.

It’s easy now to judge and to wonder, at a point so distant in time, but more difficult to enter into the small area of the mind, territory, vision and hopes of many of those who lived in times both brutal and precarious. It may be unreasonable to expect people to treat animals with greater benevolence than they do other humans, especially in the face of the unbridled terrors of life in past centuries, plague and war and famine, with no resources to ameliorate the capriciousness of nature, weather, bird or beast. Nor it is difficult to summon an idea of anger or despair as newly planted crops, the sole guarantee of life over death, were raided annually, serially, by birds, or when the birds appeared to be gaining ascendancy in a perpetual war over naturally occurring food.

England was later in its embarkation upon the processes of permitting, indeed encouraging, the slaughter of birds and mammals than Scotland, passing the Vermin Acts a century later, in 1532 and 1566. The first applied to rooks, choughs and crows and, like the Scottish acts, was designed to stop their plundering of cornfields. The 1566 act was extended, inexplicably, to cover virtually every creature, bird or mammal, from mice to buzzards, that occurred naturally in England, and was given an added guarantee of efficacy by the inclusion of bounty payments on presentation of the corpse of the offending creature.

At least part of the unfortunate reputation of corvids has been based, historically, on incorrect observation, lazy assumption and, on occasion, pecuniary advantage. Corvids rarely kill healthy lambs. They do attack weak, dying or dead lambs. They will peck out eyes and tongues, eat placentas. Reporting of corvid damage by farmers appears to be notoriously inaccurate; many, observing crows or ravens in the vicinity of dead lambs, make the assumption that it is they who are responsible for killing, and whilst seeing corvids pecking lambs’ eyes is not a sight most people relish, it isn’t the same as their killing of lambs. In
Mind of the Raven
Bernd Heinrich writes of accusations made against ravens for killing cows and calves, the result of one report being the implementation in Arizona of a raven-eradication programme, which included compensation payments for farmers’ losses. In Germany a few years ago, hysterical reports of ‘gangs’ of ravens killing calves appeared in the media. That the assertions were untrue, Heinrich suggests, is proved by the fact that ravens’ beaks are unable to penetrate the skins of even quite small animals. (He provides a marvellous example of raven ingenuity. Some ravens, although unable to pierce the skin of road-killed squirrels, are able to scoop out the innards through the mouth, to leave only an empty, perfectly intact, inside-out squirrel skin.) If ravens, with their large, powerful beaks, can’t kill calves, crows with their smaller ones can’t either. Ravens will also deliberately, carefully test to ensure that a creature is dead by carrying out ‘jumping jack’ behaviour near it before approaching closer. In Germany, subsequent investigations (including post-mortems) demonstrated that most calves were either moribund
or already dead when attacked. Once proof of raven-killing was required, government compensation was no longer paid.