Corvus

‘An enchanting memoir … [written in] beautifully warm prose … The nature book of the year by some margin’ Ben East,
Metro

‘[Woolfson is] possessed of the two most vital characteristics in a nature writer: a gimlet eye and a curiosity almost as insatiable as that of her birds …
Corvus
stands as a serious corrective to the prevailing notion that only exotic and unfamiliar animals are worthy of attention or protection … Blake found a world in a grain of sand; it seems Woolfson has managed the same trick with a rook’ Olivia Laing
Observer

‘The most unusual and compelling nature book’
Herald

‘In a humorously poetic voice Woolfson discusses the natural history, science and mythology of birds, of corvids in particular and the condition of her own life at home in the wild with birds in Scotland’
The Times

‘[A] wonderful, wonderfully odd, account’ Claire Allfree,
Metro

‘Part nature study, part memoir of a woman who grew (somewhat to her own amazement) to love birds and to “live thoughtfully with them”… Her birds emerge from the book with distinct personalities’
Scotsman

‘A stimulating blend of memoir and natural history’
Radio Times

‘Evocative and amusing … it all makes a fascinating and satisfying package’
Yorkshire Post

‘A quirky eccentric book by a woman who has shared her life with a series of orphaned or injured birds … full of well-written bird science … [and] acute observations that make this book fascinating … I thoroughly recommend [it]’
Irish Examiner

‘[T] his captivating book … seamlessly mixes expertise and anecdote in a beautifully written memoir’
Evening Standard

For Rebecca, Hannah and Leah, and for David

O
n an evening in spring, many years ago, I was given a bird.

The memory of the evening stays, although the details are lost: the weather, the month, whether it was late April or early May, everything else that might or might not have happened on that particular evening. I have an image, probably of a different evening, of spring rain, dusk in the street as I opened the door. Were it not impossible for it to have been any other season, even that would have been lost, but it had to be spring. What remains is that certain knowledge, and the bird.

As I write, the bird is behind me on her branch. From time to time she mutters, a sound softly bearing the imprint of the wind and the movement of trees, gentle approbation or comment, like the faintest creaking of an ancient door. Soon I’ll hear the fine clicking of her toenails on the wooden floor as she walks across to stand by my desk.
When I lower my hand to her, she’ll press into it an offering. It will be a damp morsel of bread, sodden, its substance now almost unidentifiable; this daily token of what I hope is love.

She’s venerable now, a bird of wisdom and experience, but then, on that evening long ago, she had been only recently hatched. (The term seems odd. We’re accustomed to birth but less so to hatching. How can one understand a creature not born but hatched?) Only weeks old, probably three or four, only weeks from the egg, from the unimaginable process of smashing and emerging, a bird-shaped creature four or five inches long, rounded and winged, warm, fast-breathing, pink skin glowing under a first veil of blackish, greyish fuzz. From the surface of her skin, pimples of pin-feathers were beginning awkwardly to erupt. The yellow frill round the edges of her beak gave her an air of benign and smiling calm. Clearly, an infant corvid, although the surprise was her eyes – un-corvid-like eyes, blue and bright and wonderfully, eagerly enquiring as she stared from the depth of the box in which she had been carried. (Like a human infant’s, her eyes changed colour as she grew older, transforming from blue to warm brown. Now, her left eye’s smoky, clouded by the cataract about which nothing can be done. The other, independent eye – for such are the eyes of birds – makes up in its unwavering acuity, for the deficit of the other.) At first we weren’t entirely certain what she was but later, as she grew older, the grey of her cere, the length and disposition of her beak, allowed us to confirm her as a rook.

This bird had been found, as fledglings sometimes are in spring, fallen, pushed, abandoned, lost in the process of learning flight, who
knows? I know only that she was still too unfeathered for flight, that the trees in the woods by Crathes Castle are high: larch and alder, oak and pine and beech, a canopy where another life exists above our own, another world where to fall is be cast irrevocably from the rich, raucous structures of corvid society, into a lone and lonely future.

‘Found’. The word makes me retrospectively anxious, causes me to reflect on the serendipity which brought her from there to here, from the spring woods near the Guide camp where my daughter Bec’s friends came upon her.

Spring is bird season. Thinking now, so many years later, of the ring on the bell, the cardboard box, is a vision of another time, opening the front door to the three eager, anxious girls standing on the doorstep, proffering box and contents, unsure if what they were offering was a gift or a burden.

A rook,
Corvus frugilegus
, named by Linnaeus in his great work
Systema Naturae
, a name meaning ‘food-gathering’. (I had hoped it meant ‘frugal’, because I enjoyed the idea of her being part of the tradition of rural Scottish frugality, but apparently it does not.) I say ‘her’ but there was no method we knew of to identify her sex. We designated her female arbitrarily, discovering only last spring, when for the first time at the age of sixteen she laid two eggs, that we were correct. We named her, a choice probably now too prosaic, too frivolous for the dignity she’s attained. It was derived from a piece in the edition of the
New Yorker
I was reading at the time, mention of a drag artist called, I think, Madame Chickeboumskaya. Thus, she is Chicken.

But for me, there is no name. All the ones I think of seem wrong.
They portray things I’m not: bird-keeper, bird-owner; ‘bird-keeper’ with its suggestion of zoos, of formality, lines of well-planted aviaries, a brisk person in overalls; ‘bird-owner’, which feels bossy and possibly custodial. It holds resonances of mills, cars, slaves. Ornithologist won’t do because I’m not one, nor biologist, nor twitcher, nor birder. I’m none of those. ‘Amateur domestic ethologist?’ a friend suggested, but I’m not that either. If ‘owner’ has resonances, ‘ethologist’ has more. ‘Ethologist’ sounds, and is, more, far more than I am. It is weighty and grave, too much so for me.

Chance, a single moment, the confluence of fallen bird and receptive human, has changed me from observer to something else, something I can’t even name: adoptive parent, housemate, beneficiary. Perhaps there is no name, no need for a name. A rook lives in my house and now, a young crow. I am
in loco parentis
for an elderly cockatiel. For years, a magpie, a starling, some small parrots and two canaries lived here too. A number of doves inhabit a small outhouse – more of a shed – a structure elevated from its lowly role of having once contained coal by being given the name of dove-house (or more correctly, as it’s a Scottish dove-house, doo’cot). The inhabitants, an assorted bunch, columbinidae all, are mainly white. Two or three are brown. Some of the white ones have markings of petrol, grey, navy, apricot on their bodies and wings, a few have feathered feet. They fly freely and return reassuringly each afternoon or evening at dusk, according to season, accepting, with the cool aloofness of those who know it is their right, the food I provide. I don’t know how many there are because I rarely count them. There are enough.

Birds have arrived, the chosen and the unwanted, the damaged, the accidentally displaced from nests. They have stayed, or gone, leaving, all of them, their own determined avian imprint, entirely unrelated to size or species, and with each has been established an enduring sense of connection, one that extends far, towards a world, a life, a society, of which once I knew nothing at all.

Of all of them, it has been the corvids, the rook, magpie and crow, who have altered for ever my relationship to the rest of the world, altered my view of a hierarchy of form, intellect, ability; my concept of time. The world we share is broad, the boundaries and differences between us negligible, illusory. That these relationships existed, and exist, surprises me no less than it does most people who know me, for nothing in my previous life, that now unimaginable birdless, pre-bird existence, presaged it, neither knowledge nor conscious inclination.

Had I ever thought of it before, I’d have judged myself an unlikely candidate (and, for the birds at least, an unwise choice), for I recognise that our respective worlds might have seemed, at best, separate, divergent: theirs sky-bound, high; mine more than just terrestrial but resolutely urban, differences I might sensibly have regarded as discrete, unchangeable, parallel for ever, beyond the point or possibility of meeting. I summon now, with shame and retrospective scorn, my past self and a display of abject panic, fear and horror on finding a pigeon dead in my mother’s garden in London. I had to ask a neighbour to remove it.
A dead pigeon
. (The neighbour, a well-known actor, removed the bird with heroic air. We all celebrated the feat with the ceremonial opening of a bottle.)

I think still of the dogs I was brought up with, of their names, their presence at significant moments of my life, of the one-sided conversations, the nameless comforts of a silent listener, the inevitable experience of a child’s loves and griefs. The last of them died shortly before I left home, and the death seemed to mark the end of childhood, the end of my life in one place, when I began a new one, of traveller, student, itinerant.

Now though, looking back, I see where it might have begun, the force that may or may not have influenced the future, or part of it at least. The Glasgow house where I was brought up had, in the way of houses of the time, no heating, only inadequate fireplaces, most of them unused, and a large stove in the kitchen. The house was large, built of stone and, winter or summer, glacially cold. The possibility of installing heating was, as I recall, briefly discussed, my father’s reluctance to have the Arts and Crafts panelling warped by the drying effects of central heating eventually overriding all other considerations, and so we continued to endure the almost universal experience of Scottish life of the time, ice on the insides of bedroom windows, fierce dashes from bed to clothes, the only warm piece of the anatomy at bathtime being the portion submerged. In winter we did the best we could, huddled over any available source of warmth. I don’t remember what we wore but I do remember that my father, concerned for their comfort and well-being, insisted that our dogs, three of them, wore
sweaters indoors. They were striped and short-sleeved, and transformed them into indeterminate creatures, somewhere between bee and dog (although, being peculiarly well-fleeced poodles, their need might have been considered rather less than our own). While other people thought it odd, we didn’t, which makes me wonder now if it might have contributed towards giving me a certain stout immunity to opinion. What it definitely did was prevent me from gaining any false ideas of the superior place human beings occupy in the world.

For years I moved around between countries and cities, a circumstance that prevented any thoughts of animal-keeping. My contact with creatures was tangential, incomplete, and when I think of it now, all I can summon is a set of impressions, random sights, remembered sounds that lead me back to a particularity of time and place: the voices of doves in the early days of a Galilean springtime, the cockroaches, patent black and brimstone brown, of alarming size that would appear with miraculous suddenness, apparently from the air of the flat where I lived in Jerusalem; of waking, bewildered, on one of my first nights back in Scotland, wondering where I was and what was the origin of the hellish sound that woke me, before I realised that it was a cat howling grievance from the darkness of an Edinburgh roof.

When I married David, who was going to be a doctor, I began still more years of itinerancy. Brought up in rural Zambia, David’s interests lay, at least in his youth, more in wild than domestic animals. The pelt of a civet which he had stalked, shot and skinned accompanied us everywhere as we undertook what was necessary then in pursuit of a career in medicine: moving every couple of years in a cyclic routine of
selling, buying, packing up, taking the slow steps towards readjustment, then beginning it all again. The remains of this unfortunate member of the family viverridae, which we used as a rug, was an unlovely object, vaguely sparse and balding in places, sprouting in others with patches of coarse, spotted fur. The interest in hunting appears, fortunately, to have expired with the civet.

During the years of moving, we didn’t think of keeping anything besides ourselves as we shifted us and chattels and eventually two small children, Rebecca and Hannah, from one place to another. We’d both been at university in Edinburgh and left it when David got a job in a hospital in Lochaber, the first of the moves – some undertaken with more anticipation, more joy than others – that would, over the next ten years or so, take us from Fort William back to Edinburgh, then to Aberdeen, to London and back to Aberdeen again. We seemed to be forever poised to go, migratory, only partly related to place.

A further development on the road which led to birds, I trace to the first time we lived in Aberdeen, to our home on the lower two floors of a terrace house in an eighteenth-century street in the centre of town. Behind the elegant row of houses, in smart streets of boutiques and delicatessens, courtyards and outhouses opened on to quiet lanes. In one of the outhouses in our back yard were cages of rabbits kept by the couple who lived upstairs and ran an informal boarding house for oilworkers, brickies, scaffolders and the many other ‘boys’ who seemed to do nothing all day but sit in the living room with the television, and smoke; a rag-tag lot, both human and rabbit. The owners of the establishment were Georges, a Belgian,
ex-Foreign Legion, ex-mercenary, and Fee, his plump Aberdonian fiancée with the exotropic eye and voice of a triumphant seagull. I don’t know why they kept rabbits but the enterprise was haphazard, the cleaning of the rabbit sheds sporadic. I still occasionally have dreams about those sheds, about damp straw and filthy cages, a focus no doubt of some uneasy guilt of my own about things not done and tasks neglected.