Corvus (12 page)

‘Thieving’. ‘Aggressive’. ‘Cursed’. What was it about this bird? Could it be as simple as the fact that magpies are black and white? It seemed too much for one small bird to bear, all that’s contained, all that’s implied in the cultural and religious canons of Western civilisation, the symbolic, iconographic poles of culture and ideas: black and white. Heaven and earth, life, death, good, evil, light, darkness, all things fundamental, elemental,
reductio ad absurdum
, a universe of fears combined to obscure the evolutionary process that delivered this startling bird into a world that appears still unready for it. Even mythic explanations of magpies’ attire do them no favours; magpies, being black and white, are cursed by God because they did not don full mourning after the death of Christ. (An alternative version is that the magpie refused to console Christ, as the other birds did, during the crucifixion.) The magpie alone refused to go quietly into the Ark, instead standing on its roof shouting and swearing for the duration of the Flood. So, even by the time of Noah, the magpie had already made some serious enemies, the weight of the Church against him although his dress is monastic, black hood over white, a tiny, hobbling Dominican. In an unsurpassed, unsurpassable slur, French legend suggests that evil priests become crows, evil nuns magpies. Is the magpie’s black hood that of the Reaper himself? Not that a magpie’s black feathers are black. They’re electric blue, violet, emerald, they’re overlaid by gold, by bronze, the dazzle of shot silk and taffeta. The white of his chest dazzles. It reflects almost blue, like light on silver or on snow.

a tiny hobbling Dominican

Magpies seem, oddly enough, to have been involved, certainly more than the average person or indeed bird, in discourse with the Almighty. A twelfth-century bestiary,
A Book of Beasts
translated by T. H. White, reports a magpie’s conversation with God: ‘I Magpie, a talker, greet thee Lord, with definite speech, and if you don’t see me, you refuse to believe that I am a bird,’ and indeed God seems to have taken a personal hand in disciplining magpies over a variety of indiscretions, from ignoring dress code to interfering in others’ affairs by usurping the power of prediction. Might the magpie be something other than he seems? Satanic magpie? Heretic magpie? Cathar, Albegensian, Manichean, a representative of duality, this small, bright bird, hovering between God and Satan. (Thinking of it, it seemed strangely appropriate that he should have come from the background he did.)

China, paradoxically – a nation not universally acknowledged as a haven of animal rights and protection – is kinder, in literature and myth at least, to magpies, and to the other birds in classical Chinese poetry that represent all that’s wistful, longing; images of distance and of love are summoned in the subtle, exquisite allusiveness of T’ang poetry, and when Li Bo writes of ‘autumn wild geese’, of ‘cold crow
perching on a branch’, his readers know that he is writing of the sorrow of departure and the pain of separated lovers.

Part of the character for ‘bird’ – radical 196 in that most elaborate of linguistic orderings by which it’s (almost) possible to systematise all Chinese characters and thus look them up in the dictionary (by way of identifying the radical and counting the number of pen strokes that make up each character) – appears in the names of most birds, including magpies. The name for a magpie
xǐ qùe
,‘auspicious magpie’, a welcome, graceful reverse of all the malicious, nasty, gossiping maledictions of Western anti-magpie ideology and propaganda. The Chinese equivalent of Valentine’s Day, in the seventh month of the lunar calendar, celebrates two parted lovers reunited for a night by a bridge of magpies in the sky.

Black and white do not hold the notion of opposing duality in China that they do in the West. Yin and yang, the two principles that order the earth, are represented as black and white, unified in a symbol of wholeness – yin, all cold, shade, moon, female, is only the obverse, the partner, of yang, sun, heat, brightness, male.

That spring, Han was still at home, in her last year at school. When she arrived back, we took the magpie out of his box. His eyes, as Chicken’s had been, were not yet black. His were grey, fringed by dark, feathered eyelashes. ‘We can’t keep him, you know,’ she said, bowing to the good sense that told us both that we had enough birds to look after, that if there was an alternative to keeping him it should be sought. We both knew that we would not find it easy to part with this enchanting bird. After our conversation, I phoned Kevin the bird
man who, years before, had so sagely and with such success chosen a suitable mate for my bereaved and grieving dove. We discussed the matter of the magpie.

‘Lively birds, magpies. Need a good thirty feet to fly in,’ he said. ‘Bring him to me when he’s ready.’ We didn’t discuss whether Kevin would keep him or release him. I measured the length of the kitchen and rat room.

How was I to know when he was ready? Did I ever intend to let him go? I can hardly remember what I felt then. I knew the facts, the same doleful tally with which, over the years, I had comforted myself about the nature of Chicken’s existence, the ones concerning longevity in the wild, the hazards of reintroduction to the wild, the facts seeming to point only to the evanescence of the lives of birds. Uncertain as to the future, we named him none the less, a name of Han’s choosing. Spike. The name was good. It felt appropriately pugnacious, containing everything one might have wanted to convey, a certain raffish creativity, an energy, with the echo of his Linnaean designation,
Pica pica
.

Han and I bathed Spike, or rather allowed him to bathe himself. We gave him a wide, shallow dish of water which we put in the bottom of the deep Belfast sink in the rat room.

Bird infancy is short. Spike snoozed, woke, fed, like an infant from a well-ordered nursery, and over the days of spring began to grow into his role and status as magpie. Fluffy, still-thin black and white feathers
began to blossom from the pink of his skin. He began to show an interest in flight, launching himself from his box, from the edge of a chair onto which he had managed to jump, and on one occasion from an open window. (We were sitting in the garden below and managed to apprehend him as he plummeted, clearly not yet ready for flight.) He was amiable, bright, watching, with the confident air of the child who requires telling only once.

Early, we began to notice the ways in which Spike was different from Chicken who, as an infant, enjoyed a brief interlude of wayward behaviour, soon adopting the settled, staid habits she has retained ever since. Spike was vigorous, enquiring. He climbed, hopped and, eventually, flew. His ability to climb and leap allowed him to negotiate any obstacle with ease, floor to chair to top of fridge to kitchen cupboard, all without flying. He did eventually learn to fly the length of kitchen and rat room, a reasonable distance for an indoor magpie, slightly more than the designated thirty feet or so of clear flight-path. He ran, fast. He hopped. He ascended the stairs by hopping, descended by flying. He still rolled, when chased. I have no idea if this is common magpie behaviour or was unique to him.

Spike’s eyes were different from Chicken’s. Chicken has a slight, modestly pearly nictitating membrane, the protective cover that can be drawn over a bird’s eyes at moments of need, obvious in her only when she’s nearing sleep. She has too the hint of a feathered line across the eyelid, a feint giving her the appearance of being awake when she is in fact asleep. Spike’s nictitating membrane was flagrant, a crazed curtain of saffron yellow which he used as much for expressive
purposes as protective, rolling back his eyes, pulling down the yellow hood to demonstrate frustration or contempt, as a teenager will raise their eyes heavenward in inchoate rage or despond at a parent’s failure to grasp the essentials of the given argument. Delight too caused him to shutter his eyes, the prospect of mince, the sight of a tub of chicken livers, a morsel of raw fish, all would induce an eye-rolling, yellow moment of anticipatory relish.

I don’t remember when it was that I began to appreciate the capacities of magpies, when I began to realise that the prejudice, superstition and myth are based on observation, but observation misinterpreted, on beliefs so misguided that, in their judgements, generations of humans have mistaken acumen for evil.

I noticed in every natural-history book concerning corvids photographs of magpies fighting, either fighting one another or squaring up to something of disproportionately larger size, usually terrifying: a buffalo, a bison, a wolf, a fox. In one photo in a book I have, three magpies surround an irritated-looking golden eagle, interrupted at his bloody dinner of an unrecognisable object lying in the snow. They have a
Well, what are you going to do about it?
air of chippy thuggishness; in another, a group of magpies forages casually among reddened ribs and empty pelt, watched by a patient coyote, his muzzle and chest stained rufous by the blood of his disappearing meal. Every representation expresses remarkable confidence, an
Are you looking at me?
blend of smallness and pugnacity. (Spike, though, was frightened of some things: ladders, sparrow-hawks glimpsed through the window, flying dot-sized in the sky, a long striped red and yellow fuzzy object on a stick – a child’s toy we called the Portsoy snake, after the small north-east harbour town at whose annual boat festival we bought it.)

But if magpies are aggressive (and I write as one whose sole, incomplete piercing – that of an ear – was carried out by a magpie) so are doves, and the word is not usually applied to them. Butterflies? Visiting the butterfly house in Amsterdam’s botanical gardens, I watched, amazed, as one butterfly raised its wing, much as I’ve seen birds do, both to me (usually when I’m in the dove-house removing eggs in an attempt at post-coital contraception) and to each other, and struck its neighbour. Magpie aggression is only in the nature of our own aggression, territorial, sporadic, to do with the essentials of life: space, sex, food. It has nothing to do with intoxication, greed, revenge and the other dismal range of human banes. There are days when, contemplating the news, it seems worse than simple irony that we should dare to call magpies aggressive.

‘Thieving’.
La Gazza Ladra
, ‘The Thieving Magpie’. The word in itself suggests intent, a quite inappropriate application of human morality, consciousness of culpability, definitions of ‘yours’ and ‘mine’. I never believed it was from the intent to steal that Spike would, if I injudiciously left my handbag in an accessible place, nick the odd tenner. Simply, he liked paper. The ensuing fight under the kitchen table indicated more venality on my part than on his. Professor Tim Birkhead, magpie expert, says that he’s never come across shiny things
in a magpie’s nest, that it’s observations from pet birds that lead people to the belief that they are attracted to jewellery. Spike, while delighted by glitter, was by flowers too, children’s plastic teacups, hair ornaments, ribbon, coins, letters, silver foil. Magpies, like all corvids, cache. A cache of mince, a cache of bread dough, of stolen prawns, a cache of torn-up pieces of the pages of a book of poetry, a cache of oddments that might come in useful later. A cache of all things considered, with an avian eye, beautiful.