Corvus (11 page)

Image, as we know, is all. One particular poster for a horror film shows a crow – a crow not doing anything very much, standing, looking as crows look, neither threatening nor ominous, looking merely crowish and utterly benign, but it needs do no more. Its portrayal is enough.

After people have visited, wondered, commented, shown their fear, I let them go on their way, perhaps slightly enlightened: the men who come to check the gas boiler, the coalman, the lady from one of the Scottish wildlife organisations, visiting on fund-raising business, who seemed in Chicken’s presence as bemused, as uneasy as all the rest. I donated money. She left some leaflets which, shortly afterwards, Chicken removed from the chair in the study where I had left them
and shredded before stuffing them into the hole in the kitchen wall where she keeps her important documents.

It may, too, be the notion of wildness that is frightening.

‘Is she a wild bird?’ people ask. I don’t know what to say. When I think of the concepts of ‘wild’ and ‘tame’, they seem wrong together, the words ill-fitting. They are not opposites, not antitheses. I try to fit the terms with what I know of the birds but can’t. They may be ‘wild’ depending on the word’s own definition of itself but they are neither tame nor tamed:

I realise that if ‘wild’ was once the word for Chicken, it still is, for nothing in her or about her contains any of the suggestions hinted at by the word ‘tame’. Chicken, Spike, Max, all the birds I have known over the years, live or lived their lives as they did by necessity or otherwise, but were and are not ‘tame’. They are afraid of the things they always were, of which their fellow corvids are, judiciously, sensibly: of some people, of hands and perceived danger, of cats and hawks, of things they do not know and things of which I too am afraid.

‘Not tamed or diminished’. I walk past two crows paying attention to some dropped food on a pavement. They notice me but carry on. I pass them at an appropriate distance. We co-exist and do so because we have both learnt necessary boundaries, theirs the boundaries of fear. Where does wildness begin and how far does it extend? It’s more than what they are, what we are. Wildness is a continuum. Swifts or terns or albatrosses are wild because there is no point of meeting between them and us, but for other birds, the ones who live in greater proximity to man, their wildness is other, knowing, watchful.

In
Arctic Dreams
Barry Lopez describes walking one evening on the Ilingnorak Ridge, in the Brooks Range in Alaska, among tundra birds, the calm stares of the horned lark, the Lapland longspurs, the golden plovers which abandoned their nests at his approach; of the snowy owls, the one that looked into his eyes when he began to move. He writes of their ‘wild, dedicated lives’, birds that have little or no knowledge of man, living in a place where man’s influence may be insidious, even pernicious, but is not immediately obvious to the creatures who live there. I find it moving, the extent of their wildness, the lark who stares back ‘resolute as iron’.

Domestication is a different process, a long one, the true process of ‘taming’ for humanity’s benefit or use, but even birds reared in captivity – the parrots and parakeets – seem to relinquish as little as they can of the essence of themselves, far from their long and terrible experience of trapping and trade, unaffected by the destruction of their fellow species and, now, the destruction of their natural habitats. In this at least, corvids are fortunate. Unlike parrots, whose brilliant,
vibrant beauty and astonishing vocal abilities have made them vulnerable, corvids’ beauty is subtle, their voices lacking the qualities to make them prey to human traffickers. All the birds I’ve encountered, amenable or not, intelligent or not, capable, all of them, of far more than we have yet discovered, have been, always, their own birds.

Barry Lopez’s words resonate, make me realise again what I already know, that they are all like this, none of them tame, all of them resolute as iron.

Often, I measure the distance we have come, Chicken’s acceptance of people, my own, still sometimes surprising, ease in the presence of birds. I look at the crow on the horror-film poster and think it sweet. Now, I see others’ fear and I almost forget my own.

T
here are traces of him still around the house, perceptible, often indelible. There is, on the fly-leaf and the first pages of my hardback copy of Anne Michael’s
Fugitive Pieces
, a faint, penetrating stain of red-brown, a bloodstain, where a beakful of mince was hidden. There is the large paper butterfly I have kept, a Red Admiral, concealed on top of a kitchen cupboard, discovered only recently when the room was being repainted. There is the feather I have suspended on a thread above my desk lamp, the feather that turns slowly, glowing marvellously, enamelled blue-gold in the warmth and light. Signs of various and varied depredations remain, uneven pieces torn from the lower edges of wallpaper near the skirting board in the spare bedroom, the occasional stain on a carpet, many forgotten rips in book pages which I remember only when I take the book from the shelf.

On most days I drive or walk past the tree where Spike was hatched,
the tree from which, gracelessly, he fell or was pushed by parents who perhaps saw in him a deficit I never did. In a street at right-angles to my own, the tree, a towering, bare-stemmed monkey puzzle,
Araucaria araucana
, stands in the garden of a house then owned by friends, a tree that must have been planted, with Victorian pride, sometime in the 1880s when the house was built. The houses in that street are like all the houses in the district but larger, detached, grander, the gardens stretching on the south side to lanes behind, lined with the remnants of the coach-houses where once carriages and horses were kept, now garages, and on the north side down through fringes of trees to the waters of a small burn that flows fitfully through the city.

There is another old monkey-puzzle tree in the area, even nearer my house than my friends’ tree, old enough for the stiff, dark branches to dip low, sweeping towards the ground, in the front garden of a Queen’s Road mansion, now turned into a social club. For all the years I’ve lived here, I’ve watched the progress of magpies to and from this tree, two, three, four of them at a time, darting with shifty vigour into the dense centre of stiff, symmetrical branches, towards a nest barely visible in the dark centre of the tree, or emerging, slightly startled, into the cold light of Aberdeen day. The nest is almost completely concealed. Only the glimpse of an untidy trail of twigs hints at an elaborate construction behind. Magpies’ nests are large, layered, well designed, executed with care against weather and predation. They can take longer to construct than many modern houses: weeks spent transporting twigs, mud, grass, forming them into deep, domed superstructures, lining the curved sides with feathers, sticks, hair,
objets
trouvés
. Some are dome-roofed, accessible by side entrances, magpie cathedrals, magpie palaces; all, I like to imagine, fan vaulting, Romanesque arch and
piano nobile
. In the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow, there is a magpie’s nest constructed, along with the usual assemblage of twigs and leaves, from metallic objects, old coat hangers, builders’ waste, barbed wire, a glittering object of strange charm and beauty.

From my bedroom window I watch magpies, flying, criss-crossing, I believe, from one old tree to the other, over the steep Parisian-style mansard roof of the house opposite, as members of two magpie families (clans, perhaps, Macdonalds and Campbells, Montagues and Capulets) or one extended family exchange visits, for what purpose, peaceable or otherwise, I do not know.

For a long time I liked the idea of magpies, admired their beauty and their flight, their presence always seeming to me new, unusual – perhaps because, outside their depiction in books, there were no magpies in my childhood. Had there been, I’d have remembered. Their jewelled brilliance would have lit the grey Glasgow of my youth, in gardens, during walks in Pollok Estate where they would have added a gilded edge of magic to an already-enchanted child’s world of clear streams, small wooden bridges, conker trees, or in Maxwell Park, flitting over the enclosed hollows of privet hedges – but there were none then, in those days before they began the steady move north, at least before they reached the Scottish cities.

In a book on the wildlife of this city I read that, for a long time, there were few magpies in Aberdeen. They began, it is suggested,
inhabiting suburban locations in the late 1940s, moving over the decades to establish themselves in urban parks and gardens. Where were they before that?

I ask a friend, a native speaker, possessor of a fine Doric voice, if he can tell me the Doric names for crows and magpies. Doric, the language of the area, of north-east Scotland, is the language of Aberdeenshire, of Buchan, Fraserburgh and Peterhead, of the country to the south of Aberdeen, round the Mearns, farming country, deepred-earth country, rich, green tree and field and hill country, the country of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s wonderful trilogy
A Scots Quair
. It’s mainly a rural language, named, possibly ironically, for the Greek rustic tradition, a counterpoint to the sophisticated Attic traditions of Athens, translated for Scottish use into a comparison with snooty, sophisticated Edinburgh, ‘the Athens of the north’.

There are, my friend says,
cras
and
corbies, pyots
and
pies
. Magpie, and indeed corvid, history must be long in the area, for were Doric to innovate linguistically, it would not be in order to invent a name for magpies. (In Doric, a common greeting was, and still is, ‘Foo’s yer doos?’, F being commonly subsituted for Wh or H. The question suggests that if your doves are well, it may reasonably be assumed that you are too. The required response is ‘Aye peckin.’)

Not only Doric, Gaelic too has names for them all:
cathag
the jackdaw,
pioghaid
the magpie,
rocais
the rook,
feanna
the crow,
fitheach
the raven, the raven that, before this spring, I’d only seen once, high on Na Gruagaichean in the Mamores, gliding serenely, darkly on a bright summer afternoon with his three companions into the blue-white
mist over the mountain. Gaidhealtachd, the area where Gaelic is spoken, used to extend south and east, far beyond its current territory of the north-west Highlands and the Western Isles. Language, the custodian and mirror of history, seals the past in its words, tells of what there was, if not what there is; the Doric word for magpie, and the Gaelic too, telling that once magpies were abundant in northern Scotland. Although the names were there, for many decades it was only the memory of a presence that remained because, in the main,
pie, pyot, pioghaid
had gone.

Magpies were common even in the north of Scotland before the relentless persecution by nineteenth-century gamekeepers reduced their numbers severely. Over the decades since the Second World War, their numbers have increased and they have migrated south to north, country to town, spread, become, in their uncommon way, common, although to me they still seem exotic, almost out of place, wilfully glamorous, super-confident among the quieter-toned brown and black birds of our environs, traversing houses, roofs, chimneys with their joyous, undulating flight, soaring, dipping triangles of frill-edged wings and iridescent tails.

Knowing that there were magpies in my friends’ tree, I asked, on a visit to their house one winter, if they would let me know if they ever found a fledgling that had fallen out of its nest. They said they would, but the way they said it made it clear that they considered the request one that might be made only by the frankly deranged. I asked, I realise now, without thinking that it would happen, without considering what I might do if it did. At the time of my asking, we still had plenty
of other birds in or around the house. They were by then mostly longtime residents, some, in bird terms anyway, already elderly, Max the starling, many of the doves. Chicken and Bardie, at around five and eight respectively, were still in human terms pre-pubescent. About the age of Marley, recently acquired, we knew nothing.

They’ve left now, my friends, Elizabeth and William, the ones who owned the house, the tree, the nest of magpies, going to live in Edinburgh when they retired from university, from distinguished academic careers as teachers of divinity. A suitable household from which to acquire a magpie.

It was in spring of that year, a morning in early May, when Elizabeth phoned. A magpie had fallen from the nest. If I wanted it, I had better be quick because the neighbour’s cat was taking a close interest. I snatched a brown-paper bag and drove the two hundred or so yards in my anxiety and impatience to be first to reach the bird. It was still there, an object on the sparse grass under the tree, barely recognisable as a bird. It neither walked nor flew. Rather it rolled, fast, a movement more like that of the joke wind-up spider I have in my desk drawer – a roundel of black fuzz with a key, two protruding legs and glued-on eyes which, when wound up, rolls maniacally from under the bedclothes, or wherever it’s been concealed – than a bird. Whatever it was, I chased and it rolled, for several embarrassing minutes, round and round the trunk of the tree, watched from the top window by William, an undignified progression which felt, and was, unequal until, eventually getting up the speed or wile necessary to gain on a three-inch fledgling, I
grabbed the thing and put it into the brown-paper bag. Together, we drove home.

Transferred from paper bag to table, the thing was definitely a bird. Barely feathered, the faintly contrasting fuzz on his body the sole indication that he was a magpie. He was as all fledgling corvids, a pimpled, boggle-eyed
joli-laid
in a wispy suit of down and pin-feather, a covering of faint black and white overlying the pink; yellow-gaped, the delicate primrose crown of infant feathers standing up like a mad crown around his head. He looked at me, this infant – as Chicken had been, only a couple of weeks from the egg – with calm and perfect equanimity, assessing me as completely, as thoroughly, as I was assessing him. A magpie. I put him into a newspaper-lined cardboard box, deep enough to confine him, not sufficiently deep to prevent him from seeing what was around him.

Magpie.
Pica pica
. The name alone conjures demons, prises open narrow apertures into deep wells of superstition. Even to reflect momentarily on the word ‘magpie’ is to burden one’s mind with other people’s fears, to unravel a Western ragbag assemblage of all that’s non-scientific, primitive, atavistic. I assembled some of the names I knew, the stories, the omens, the auguries, thought of the careful, time-worn formulae that might help prevent or ameliorate the terrifying damage this tiny fledgling could perpetrate, just by being; the words, greetings, kind and degree of respect that must be shown to
those of mystic power in order to appease, to soothe or flatter or otherwise take the creatures’ minds from the evil, myth and legend suggest they carry with them. ‘Good-morning Mr Magpie!’ I would have to cry, presumably frequently if we were to share a house. I would have to cross myself, or spit over my right shoulder and say (or better shout), ‘Devil, I defy thee!’ I would, according to one suggestion, be wise to carry with me, at all times, an onion. Names from books of folklore stacked up: chatternag, chatterpie, haggister. The counting rhymes: ‘One for sorrow’. Ordinary words of description were no better: ‘noisy’, ‘hectoring’, ‘thieving’, ‘aggressive’, epithet and accusation, this long history of guilt. ‘Scandalmongers’, Ovid called them, with what justification or provocation I don’t know. A creature, according to Scottish legend, that carries a drop of the devil’s blood under its tongue. (An unsurprising idea for Scotland, a place that regards eloquence with equal fear and mistrust.) What was it about a magpie that brought on its very small, pristine head this sustained vocabulary of opprobrium? ‘Bird of ill omen’. I looked at him. He opened his pink, gilled beak, squeaked, flapped his unfeathered wings, already hungry.

I took out my falling-to-bits copy of Kenton C. Lint, to refresh my memory, resisting the desire – at least until I had fed the bird – to stop and read, to find out whathorn-bills, thick-knee Australian tanagers. I fetched out my ready and waiting box of all-purpose bird food made specially for insect eaters, a kind of bird muesli of strangely enticing smell, reminiscent of juniper, sumac, a bit like Marmite but nicer, a substance you’d like to taste but
don’t quite dare to. I mixed the stuff up with water into a gritty paste. The bird, a considerable gourmand from the beginning, ate with gratifying enthusiasm (as well he might: the ingredient list rivals in its variety anything sold by Fauchon, by Dean & DeLuca; fruits, seeds, aerial insects, honey, oils, shrimps, vitamins – more vitamins than I had known existed). After this, his first human-administered meal, he settled into the corner of his box and dozed. I went into the garden to cut a small branch to make into a perch.