Corvus (14 page)

As for more serious concerns, infections, diseases, I try to reassure myself, as well as anyone else who asks. Chicken does not mix with
hoi polloi
of the avian world, the outside birds who might carry unknown diseases or infestations. Since the emergence of the threat of H5N1, I’m particularly careful to observe what’s now called biosecurity in my dealings with doves, outside birds and bird feeders, a procedure that involves much hand-washing, welly-scouring and the liberal involvement of disinfectant, measures more psychological, I’m sure, than either preventative or efficacious.

For a time, I recall, Saturday mornings were devoted in their entirety to maintaining the hygiene of an unfeasibly large number of creatures. First, the cleaning of the homes of two sets of rats, male and female, five or six or so of each, which involved moving them to temporary accommodation, being careful to keep the sexes well separated, then hefting their large glass houses onto the worktop, washing them out, scraping out the detritus, drying, replacing
bedding and rats, replenishing food dishes. That was just the first. Over the years, the numbers grew, fluctuated, fell. In a small checklist of the past, I tick off Miffy the rabbit, Max the starling, Bardie, Icarus, Marley, the doves, Joe and Rosie the canaries, and Chicken. Although it’s easier now, with a smaller number to clean, it can be neither ignored nor put off. Often, the anticipation is worse than the task itself. On cold days of winter, or days of horizontal rain when the light isn’t sufficient to illuminate the corners of the dove-house, I consider the prospect of cleaning them (which I do at least twice a week) with a certain lack of enthusiasm but I’ve learned that being properly dressed is the thing, welly-booted, fleeced, padded, gloved, when it becomes an odd pleasure, when I relish the balm of it, the rare delight of the bucolic, a faint nostalgic tinge at the memory of the intermittent physical work of my youth, peach- and melon-picking, scrubbing vast areas of communal dining-room floors. Now there’s a pleasing dissonance, sloshing and brushing as I listen to the sounds of the city beyond the garden walls, the traffic on the Queen’s Road, voices from the car park of the Red Cross building behind us. I hurl buckets of hot, soapy, disinfectanty water across the floor, sweeping it before me, swirling it with a dustpan back into the bucket, drying and laying fresh newspaper on the floor, a practice probably deeply at odds with the dictates of the ‘proper’ bird-house. This has all been made more difficult since the unfortunate advent of tabloid-format newspapers. Even the
Guardian
’s slightly larger ‘Berliner’ format is too small. Did anyone think of the hard-working animal keepers of the nation when they so selfishly redesigned their newspapers?

The cleaning of birds is levelling, as in Mao’s China, when the aetiolated thinkers, the university graduates, the professors and doctors were sent off on shit-shovelling duties in an attempt to reunite them with the land and remind them of the dangers of intellectual pride. It prevents me from imagining that I am anything other than a birds’ domestic help.

For all my failures in house-training, I suspect that it’s impossible anyway because, with corvids at least, there seems to be a connection between self-expression and defecation, for addressing Chicken in a particularly interlocutory way will bring about an answering, head-bending calling, followed by the luscious, liquid sound, by the
squeeeeak! splat!
that seems its natural adjunct. Spike too engaged in this colloquy of answer and response, and the parrots to a lesser extent – the action, more, far more than just the evacuation of the bowels, appears to be more even than a simple mode of reply, it seems to be an assertion of self. To try to train it out of them might deny them a basic avian right, the right of discourse and opinion. As for keeping a houseful of opinionated incontinents, if their immediate family don’t mind, why should anyone else? If I fail to notice a powdery, whitish streak on my skirt or jeans, so what?

(One learns unusual things. I can for instance differentiate, by scent alone, between a magpie, a crow and a rook. Were I to be blindfolded, presented with one of each,
à la
Confrérie des Chevaliers du Tastevin, I would know. Oh random, transcendent gift!)

Now, I’m quite used to sitting of an evening with a rook on my knee. If she’s in the mood, Chicken will hop from my knee to the
back of the sofa and thence to my shoulder. We sit together under the light, and I feel that she reads as I read, almost inclined to ask if she’s finished the page before I turn it. Sometimes, if she’s on my knee dozing, she’ll relax her objection to hands just enough to enjoy having the feathers of her neck allopreened, the process by which birds groom one another’s feathers, possibly for cleaning purposes or pair-bonding or both. I scratch and tug gently at the feathers of her head and neck, and stroke her head. She will, on occasion, return the gesture, standing behind me on the arm of the sofa and digging her beak into my hair. She’s gentle but with hair perhaps it’s difficult to judge. I want to be polite and so wince as little as I can. I read Dr Lawrence Kilham’s description in
The American Crow and the Common Raven
of his allowing his pet raven to allopreen his eyebrows. He says that, in spite of the power of the bills of crows and ravens, they are inhibited about using them ‘when performing pair- or social bonding rituals’. I’m happy to take his word for it.

I know that the bodily aspect of corvids, the black, the acute angles, doesn’t suggest physical warmth, the tactile pleasures offered by fur, but the perception is incorrect. I dig my fingers down, down into the feathers of her head. There, below the soft depths of her light-grey under feathers, her pink skin, her rounded skull. The deep black feathers at the back of her neck, a warm, rustling collar, provide the perfect spot in which to bury my nose. She groans slightly and makes her creaking sound. She appears to approve. (If she didn’t, she would make it clear. She would turn her head awesomely quickly to snap her beak at me.) Her scent is of yeast, of new wool carpet, of
warmth and dryness and feather. Rook-sniffing. A strange pastime. Asked once by Konrad Lorenz’s wife about the explanation for her husband’s love of geese, a psychiatrist friend replied, ‘It’s a perversion, same as any other.’

O
ne end of the mantelpiece in my study is known, in tribute to the banalities of a long-ago Scottish primary education, as ‘the nature table'. On it is an assortment of things bought, collected, given, found, many (but not all) bird-related: part of a duck's skull, the empty shells of some small birds' eggs, a rabbit's skull, a few small leg bones and a collection of vertebrae – whose, I do not know – a rabbit's tail. There is a Japanese dish filled with moss out of which sprouts a fan of black feathers, ones we pick up from the floor as Chicken moults, the ones I don't use as bookmarks, and two pieces of quartzite from a Lochaber hill. There is, too, a small collection of raven pellets and a rook's skull.

Birds' skulls fascinate. Hugh McDiarmid's beautiful poem ‘Perfect' describes the pigeon's skull he found on the machair on South Uist, the perfection of its emptiness, the absence of the brain that once
would have animated bird and wing. The rook's skull was found years ago beside the North Esk River, a smooth shell of grey and parchment bone, arches of eye socket and nostril; it's like a stone under sun, bleached, the long top beak still sheathed in its rhampotheca, the thin shield of keratin that covers birds' beaks. I can slip it from the bone intact, still beak-shaped although fragile. It looks burnished, like fine-shaved metal, like watered bronze. Underneath the skull, a tiny fretwork of interconnecting spurs and spans and broadening bridges. Matching it, I have still, between the pages of a book, the diagram David drew for me after we had found the skull, to explain what everything did and where everything went: nerves, foramena, zygomatic arch, middle ear cavity, the place where the optic and oculomotor cranial nerves threaded to work what this bird once was, all marked and labelled, foramen magnum, orbital cavity, foramena for the cranial nerves IX, X, XI, XII;
the cranial nerves,
he wrote,
which
work the tongue, voice, swallowing
.

The central nervous systems of all vertebrates are similar in their patterns. Our brains and those of birds, of long-ago common origin, are different in organisation although more similar than once was thought. Many functions appear to be analogous. Bird and human brains look different, however. The surface of a bird's brain is smooth, a human's folded and fissured, layered and convoluted with gyri and sulci. Like humans, birds have what they need for what they do – they have a large forebrain, a cerebellum which controls the muscle activity necessary for flight, large optic lobes for the most important of their functions, sight – and it seems that, whilst the structures may
be different, the neural connections that allow complex behaviour may work similarly, even when not ordered precisely as ours. Parts of birds' brains have capacities that ours lack, the capacity for neurogenesis, the renewal of cells; hormonally induced seasonal alterations in size of the hippocampus, the area of the brain involved, in both human and bird, with memory, which, affected by levels of melatonin, expands in autumn when finding and hiding food may become important for winter survival. Some birds have, like us, a high brain-to-body ratio, their brains, like ours, larger than is required for the size of their bodies, what is called the encephalisation quotient, a high brain volume suggesting a commensurate level of abilities and intelligence.

Talking of the intelligence of birds, indeed of any species other than our own, even of our own, is challenging. The concept of the intelligence of humans too is one that shifts and changes, is subject to pressures, historical, social, political. It's difficult to know what is meant, what is being measured, when we try to quantify intelligence. Knowing relative brain size, the existence of a cerebral cortex, a cerebrum, an amygdala, tells us only some of what we need to know. Human beings may well have the equipment necessary, the correct weight of matter, the correct number of neurones, axons, dendrites, synapses, all flashing and crackling and sending their illimitable millions of connections, messages, signals, to more or less the desired destinations; the appropriate lobes, all placed approximately at least, in the correct relation to one other; but, as experience has demonstrated historically and demonstrates daily, hourly, this is no guarantee of the
subsequent manifestation of behaviour that may be interpreted, even by our own species, as intelligent.

That birds are both intelligent and capable of complex behaviour is clear to those who carry out research into the subject and indeed to anyone involved in any way with birds, but announcements of research findings in avian intelligence are often greeted with amazement. Reports of tool-using New Hebridean crows or counting parrots are regarded as surprising, if not revelatory, for until recently the common belief was that the brains of birds were too small to allow ‘intelligent' behaviour.

‘Bird-brain' has long been a term used to suggest limited intellectual capacity, but the view of avian intelligence it implies is both reductive and incorrect. The names ascribed during the latter years of the nineteenth century by the German neuro-anatomist Ludwig Edinger to parts of the avian brain contributed in some measure to the widespread acceptance of the idea that the brains of birds were too small and primitive to permit the development of intelligence. His system of naming, relying on an Aristotelian view of the natural world, the
scala natura
which ranked creatures according to ‘the degree to which animals are infected with potentiality', combined with a straightforwardly linear notion of evolution by which fish and reptiles were at the bottom of the scale and humans at the top, was to colour man's view of birds and their abilities for the next century at least. Edinger's assumption was that most parts of the avian brain had developed from the basal ganglia or striatum, a brain area known to produce instinctive behaviour, whilst the human brain, being derived from
more advanced structures of the pallium, was capable of higher thought; accordingly, he attributed names to the different regions of birds' brains that reinforced ideas of their primordial dimness: archistriatum, paleostriatum augmentatum, paleostriatum primitivum, thereby limiting the opportunities for elucidating or describing any neuro-anatomical basis for complex and sophisticated behaviour in birds. Edinger's designations of birds' brains predominated, more or less unquestioned, until very recently, when increasing research interest began to cast doubt on the reliability of a system that, it became obvious, was both inadequate and incorrect. Scientific studies of the physical basis of bird intelligence and concomitant advances in research techniques into brain function and molecular structures have led to a realisation of the true extent of the prejudicial nature of Edinger's work, and recognition of the limitations it has imposed.

During the 1960s, on retiring from his clinical post at Massachusetts General Hospital, neuropsychiatrist Stanley Cobb began researching avian neuro-anatomy, discovering for the first time that forebrain areas of birds' brains are analogous to the human cortex. In the last few years, a group of international neuroscientists, named with pleasing exactitude the Avian Brain Nomenclature Consortium, have worked together in an extraordinary endeavour, painstakingly renaming the component parts of the brains of birds, relating function to evolutionary development. By so doing, they have elucidated and underlined the fact that the brains of birds are comparable in important respects with the brains of mammals, including humans. A long, detailed list of names demonstrates the changes; among many, the
archistriatum has now become the arcopallium, and the paleostriatum primitivum the globus pallidus.

One of the leading proponents of this undertaking is the neurobiologist Erich Jarvis of Duke University, who says of the new system of naming: ‘this nomeclature will help people understand that evolution has created more than one way to generate complex behaviour – the mammal way and the bird way. And they're comparable to one another. In fact, some birds have evolved cognitive abilities that are far more complex than in many mammals.'

In making his famous comment, ‘If men had wings and black feathers, few of them would be clever enough to be crows,' Henry Ward Beecher, the nineteenth-century American clergyman, wit and, like his sister Harriet Beecher Stowe (writer of
Uncle Tom's Cabin
), a staunch abolitionist, showed remarkable, indeed admirable prescience.

I have come to recognise too, the dangers of the subject of the intelligence of birds. For me, a chance and random happener-upon birds and their brains, trying to steer a median course between two schools of thought concerning birds and animals, what they think and what they do, is hazardous. I reflect on both. The proponents of one school, the behaviourists, accept only what can be reproduced when it comes to making judgements on animal behaviour, on the results of tests, rejecting, most often, any scientifically unproven suggestion that animals think or feel, or are capable of emotion, eschewing any feeble and unscientific recourse to their personal
anthema maranatha
, anthropomorphism. The other school, the ethologists and cognitive ethologists, are prepared to draw conclusions from studies and observation, to
allow what is to behaviourists the unthinkable: conclusions drawn from anecdote, from personal observation, from what just seems to be so, those things regarded as anthropomorphic, loose and gossipy, unrigorous and possibly heretical.

The great American corvid observer Dr Lawrence Kilham writes: ‘I have said to myself on a few occasions when watching a crow at close range, “That crow is thinking.” The selective advantages of crows forming images and thinking consciously are too great to be dismissed by the dodge of anthropomorphism.'

Anthropomorphism, the ascribing of human characteristics to non-humans, is, at its worst, reductive, a close and pernicious relative of sentimentality, or else it's self-justifying, the desire to mould ideas and images of animals in ways which allow humans to control or understand only within the narrow framework of what we ourselves may be, stemming perhaps from a desire to idealise, or from the atavistic fear of the other, the wish to order the natural world in a way that will reinforce or reflect a morality we may ourselves have lost or forfeited. The words that attribute the more meritorious of human qualities to animals mislead, but the ones that do the opposite, the ones that employ the vocabulary of judgement and superstition, the ones that call birds and animals cunning, cruel, evil, dirty, are the more harmful in both impulse and effect. At the same time, we are too ready to judge by appearance, to accept cultural determinations often made long ago by those who knew little about the animals they were portraying, sometimes incorrectly, as non-aggressive, benign, entirely other than they were.

The American writer and poet Mary Oliver, in her book
Blue
Pastures
, sums up in a short and glowing essay the differences between the man-made and the natural, observing that by describing the natural world in the language of diminution, using words such as ‘cute', ‘charming', ‘adorable', we give ourselves power, the power of parents and governors, we are complicit in seeing the world as a place either where we play or a place where we study its other, non-human inhabitants at our will.

But trying to understand, for humans, is only possible through the sole means we have, the filter of ourselves and our fears, our prejudices and often irrational beliefs. The lines we draw between sentiment and rigour are fine indeed. The evolutionary biologist and psychologist Gordon Burghardt puts forward the concept of ‘critical anthropomorphism', a concept that encompasses a wide range of critical approaches, physiological, sensory and ecological, which he uses in his studies of animals and their behaviour.

In the foreword to her book
Under the Sea Wind
, first published in 1941, Rachel Carson explains why she has chosen to describe the lives of sea creatures, fish and sea birds in terms that might be considered at variance with the demands of scientific writing: ‘we must not depart too far from analogy with human conduct if a fish, shrimp, comb jelly, or bird is to seem real to us – as real a living creature as he actually is'. For her, a tone of empathetic intimacy is a more powerful way of conveying to her readers the mystery of the world of which she writes than would be possible in the language of science with all its cool and measured distance.

In
Mind of the Raven
Bernd Heinrich describes an incident between a human, a raven and a cougar. A woman working beside her cabin in Colorado had her attention drawn by the repeated frenzied calls of a raven flying overhead. Only when it finally landed on rocks nearby did she raise her head to see the cougar that was about to attack her. Her own interpretation of the incident was that the raven, by alerting her, had saved her life. Heinrich's is that, far from warning her, the raven was alerting the cougar to a possible food source, for the likely benefit of both. The raven was behaving as ravens do, appropriately. The fact that some might prefer the raven's motives to be different suggests only that they wish the natural world to be other than it is, as if it might be possible, sensibly, to hope that a raven, for some unknown supra-moral reason, might elevate the interests of a human over its own, or those, incidentally, of a cougar.