Corvus (10 page)

Now, though, we know enough to be able to judge the balance between the harm corvids cause and the benefits they bestow. The crows and rooks who feed on young crops significantly reduce numbers of crop pests, lessening the need for pesticides.

The sight of crows feasting on the aftermath of the Great Fire of London was deemed so shocking – despite the fact that they were carrying out a task of clearing and cleansing that would inevitably have to have been done by someone – that the ensuing opprobrium damaged corvids’ prospects for centuries, in the sorry equation that made their feeding on the dead almost worse than the deaths themselves. Battlefields, those bloody drifts of the wantonly killed, of men destroyed by their own, drew (and no doubt draw) crows to feed, yet human disgust is for the feeding birds, not for the pointlessness of war, for the instigators, the perpetrators, the paymasters, the makers of arms, or indeed for the apparently insatiable human desire for the often illusory attainment gained only by conflict. Corvids seem to absorb and reflect our guilt. We are casual in our waste of the lives of other humans but reverential in the treatment of their remains. The vital role of the carrion eater to the eco-system continues to be misunderstood, or disregarded. A ghillie in the West Highlands described ravens to a friend of mine as ‘the housekeepers of the hill’.

The things we do to animals that are similarly, indeed more, unpleasant are done carefully out of public view, in slaughterhouses, and factory farms, the egregious places where intensive rearing and killing in all its cynical, venal brutality is carried out. (About the things we do to fellow humans, it would seem we feel not even that degree of shame or remorse, for those, as television news bulletins show, we do not even bother to conceal.)

In Scotland, it was the aftermath of the Jacobite wars, following the defeat at Culloden, that saw the most determined campaign against the natural world begin, when the disintegration and destruction of clan society initiated a relentless process of change and obliteration beginning with people and ending, inevitably, with birds and animals. The land, emptied of people, was overtaken by the ruinous advent of those apparently harmless, landscape-destroying, all-nibbling sheep. As the sheep destroyed the land, birds and animals deemed inimical to the interest of landowners and farmers – eagles, sea-eagles, corvids, foxes, polecats, martens – were themselves relentlessly destroyed. With the ties to land and obligations to tenants loosened or removed altogether, large-scale alteration in land use heralded the development of wild areas of Scotland as places where grouse and pheasant could be reared for shooting. As it was with sheep, so with grouse and pheasant: every species that threatened ‘game’ birds had to be removed.

Victorian fashion too brought wealthy people north to the newly expanded Highland hunting estates. During the Edwardian years, the gamekeeper came into his own. Their numbers were the highest they would ever be, their duty the ferocious z stock by relentless destruction of birds and animals that threatened it. Magpies almost disappeared from large areas of Scotland. Even now, Scottish newspapers regularly report the finding of poisoned birds – ravens, red kites and even golden eagles – killed in order to protect pheasant and grouse.

eye-pecking, flesh-eating

In 1746, Linlithgow Palace was destroyed by fire for a second time. The symbol of Stuart power was reduced in a night, to ash. On its lovely site overlooking the loch it remains, still beautiful, standing in emptiness and ruin, its walls and rooms open to the sky. It is, though, inhabited again. By a strange, suitable turn of corvid fortune, jackdaws live there instead of Stuart kings. They fly through the ruins of the Lion Chamber. They dive with their black and sinuous flight, swoop, loop, spiral through lancet windows and oratories, round mural gallery and clerestory, through the empty rooms of James’s vision. Time changes all things, if not always for the better, then sometimes at least; Linlithgow makes me hope there may be a day when some humans will no longer think it desirable, or even acceptable, to kill one species in order to protect another, specially nurtured, carefully bred for the sole purpose of being shot for sport. 

The fear that maintains the invisible barrier between human and corvid (on the corvid’s side, at least, entirely justifiably) is more than just physical fear. For humans, large, noisy, powerful though we may
be, the feeling is real and complex, fear both of what birds might do and what they may or may not represent. Beyond the physical is a darker fear, more profound and atavistic. It is a sense that may share roots with arachnophobia, living in us deeply, perhaps so ancient in its origin as to stem from our and their dinosaurian roots. It persists in words and ideas, in culture and memory, in folk tale and nursery rhymes, in the famous Scottish ballad ‘The Twa Corbies’, with its eye-pecking and flesh-eating, its final, memorable image of an eternal wind blowing through picked and empty bones; in the Grimms’ version of
Cinderella
, the ugly sisters having their eyes removed (perversely enough by pigeons); in swarms of pursuing malevolents in
The Birds
, absurd though the vision of the birds in Hitchcock’s film actually is, as is the story on which it’s based, Daphne du Maurier’s dark, apocalyptic tale, seen by some as a prescient herald of coming environmental disaster, unfortunately using, as the symbol of foreboding, species more victims than instigators in the irreversible processes of destruction and decline.

Superstition blends with cultural association, undiminished until now. In the north-east of Scotland, corvids are associated with people who practise ‘the black airts’. (I don’t know what the black airts involve but they sound darkly enticing.) Corvids are reputed to form pacts with the Devil. I look at Chicken. I can’t imagine what she might gain from the association, but if she does, she keeps it very quiet. In an e-mail, a friend tells me of the sighting by a mutual friend in the north-west of a raven in his garden. The sighting was deemed, a posteriori, to have been one of ill-omen because of the discovery a few
days later of the illness of a near relative. I reply in robust and forceful terms. I suggest that the raven sues. (I’m greatly cheered by discovering that rooks, according to one legend, escort the souls of the righteous to heaven, a pleasing thought indeed for the righteous, rooks being kindly, sociable types.)

The story that, for me, illustrates most powerfully the force of superstition was written by Truman Capote in 1964, about his relationship to his raven, Lola. For all the beauty of his writing, the characteristic humour and sharpness, I find difficult it to read. The account, which appears in
A Capote Reader
, was written twelve years after the winter when, living in Sicily in the early 1950s, Capote exchanged Christmas presents with the village girl, Graziella, who came to his house every day to clean and cook for him. He gave her a scarf, a sweater and a necklace. She gave him a fledgling raven that she had caught, with considerable effort, in a ravine in the hills above Bronte in Catania. Capote, who writes of his previous dislike and fear of birds, describes the raven, as he first saw it, as ‘both dreadful and pathetic’, with severely clipped wings, ‘black beak agape like the jaws of an idiot, its eyes flat and bleak’. With revulsion, he shut it away in a spare room, visiting it with reluctance. Only in spring, when one day the bird disappeared, did he realise, through his sense of loss, his affection for her, deciding in an instant that she was Lola, a name that ‘emerged like a new moon overhead’. In panic, thinking of her possible fate, he and Graziella searched until Lola was found in an unused room, the moment from which she became integrated into Capote’s household, ruling his two dogs, taking advantage of them, stealing
food, riding around the garden on the bulldog’s back. The bird thought, Capote writes, that she was a dog: ‘Graziella agreed with me, and we both laughed; we considered it a delightful quirk, neither of us foreseeing that Lola’s misconception was certain to end in tragedy: the doom that awaits all of us who reject our own natures and insist on being something else than ourselves.’

Lola was, like all corvids, inclined to steal and cache. Among her prizes were the false teeth of an elderly guest, who was very upset, obliging Capote to find where it was that Lola cached her treasure:

Two tragedies were to change the lives of both Capote and Lola. The first was the stroke suffered by Graziella’s father, the second, occurring the following day, the accident in which her (somewhat
disreputable) fiancé, Luchino, knocked over and killed a child, ending his and Graziella’s prospects of marriage. Graziella blamed Lola, saying that she was a witch and had the
malocchio
, the evil eye, that what had happened had been brought about by the bird as punishment for her capture. The taint of
malocchio
spread to Capote, with Graziella and everybody else refusing to enter his house. People in the streets, on seeing him, crossed themselves and made the sign of the horn. After having lived there for two years, Capote decided in a single night to leave. He packed the car with belongings, dogs and bird and drove on a journey marvellously evoked, with Lola on his shoulder, to Rome.

The story, like all Capote’s writing, has profound qualities, light undershot by darkness, of dazzle foreshadowed, the dangerous edge familiar from
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
, from Holly Golightly, a slightly less charmed ingénue in the book than in the film (who, in her former incarnation as Lulumae, fourteen-year-old bride of the luckless, elderly Doc Golightly, was given as a love token the crow he had tamed and taught to say her name). What it doesn’t have is the hard-edged glint, the knowing bitterness that underpins so much of the work as it did the life, the prevailing sense that trust is foolish, love evanescent.

The language Capote uses of Lola is the language of admiration, bewildered affection. Writing of their subsequent life together in a fourth-floor apartment in Rome, he describes Lola’s pleasure in sunbathing on the balcony, of providing her preferred mineral water for bathing, of the admiration too of his ninety-three-year-old neighbour Signor Fioli, who liked to watch Lola, smiling if she did anything ‘foolish or lovely’. It is as if, in this unlikely fellow inhabitant of the
earth, a sad and complex man formed one of the few bridges that spanned the overwhelming loneliness of his life.

It is the ending of the account that is terrible. Frightened by a cat, instead of flying, Lola jumped from the balcony, landing on sacks on the back of a lorry, to be conveyed away. Capote describes his rushing down six flights of stairs after her, calling, falling, losing his glasses, which smashed against a wall – how, running, blinded and crying as the truck turned the corner, he didn’t quite see as Lola disappeared from his life for ever; and I find it almost unreadable, thinking of the shadow of the
malocchio
, the blighted future for both man and bird.