Corvus (17 page)

Although Christianity dominates in ideas of creationism, it’s not the only religion to hold similar beliefs. Creationist wings exist in Islam and Hinduism as in Judaism, although many of the more prominent Jewish theologians – Maimonides and the Gaon of Vilna among them – believed the Torah to be a theological and not a scientific text and therefore not inimical to ideas of evolution. The Jewish mystic tradition, Kabbalah, embraces ideas of evolution, one theory of creation being that of the sixteenth-century Safed kabbalist Rabbi Isaac Luria, whose idea of
zimzum
, or the contraction of light, in some ways presages future theories about the origins of the universe.

ancient wings from the printing stone

The view of at least one trend in current ultra-orthodox Jewish thinking is that Genesis must be interpreted literally, a fact recently impressed on me by discovering the reluctance of a near relative, member of an Orthodox community, to pass on to her many children the single wall-chart, among dozens given away free by one of the newspapers, that related to dinosaurs. Those depicting stars, planets, clouds, amphibians, spiders, rodents, sheep, wild berries, fungi, goats, trees, farm animals, poultry, gemstones and apples met with no such censorship, being deemed, apparently, safe to be given into the hands of the impressionable young. ‘Hey,’ I say to the cousin who tells me this about his sister, ‘I didn’t know we don’t believe in evolution.’ ‘We do,’ he says. ‘They don’t.’

Genesis is beautiful in concept and expression but, as a document upon which to base one’s belief in the origins of the universe, imprecise, sketchy on the details. Birds, according to Genesis, were created on the fifth day: ‘
ve’of yeofef al ha’aretz al p’nai rekei hashamayim
’– ‘Flying creatures shall fly on the face of the heavenly sea’ – and on the sixth, creatures: ‘
tozi ha’artez nefesh chaya l’minah behema v’remes
v’chayeto artez le minah vayehi-
chen
’ – ‘Earth shall bring forth particular species of living creature, particular species of land animal and beasts of the earth. It happened.’

Thus, the creation of birds preceded the creation of beasts, obliging creationists, in their unwavering adherence to the blankly literal, to spend inordinate amounts of time and energy in elaborate refutations of palaeontological evidence to the contrary, using bad science to disprove good science. Some insist that the evidence is faked, that the world just seems and looks old but isn’t, thereby allying the Almighty with a particular type of disreputable antique dealer in making what is a mere few thousand years old look millions of years older.

It’s not only fundamentalist belief that has cast doubt on the palaeontological significance of archaeopteryx and its contribution to the understanding of evolution of birds from dinosaurs. The late Nobel Prize-winning astronomer Professor Fred Hoyle and his colleague Dr Chandra Wickramsinghe deemed the fossil specimens themselves to have been forgeries, suggesting, against all available evidence, that feathers had been mischievously and fraudulently added. Since they were also the people who suggested that insects are more intelligent than human beings but choose, by means of an insect-wide conspiracy, to keep it to themselves (in addition to a broad array of theories most tactfully described as ‘controversial’), there might be place for some doubt about their claims.

Much is still not yet known about the origins of birds, although the discovery in north China, at Liaoning and Gansu, of feathered dinosaurs, some flightless, has been illuminatory, exciting, for
Microraptor gui
, who lived during the early Cretaceous, 125 million years ago, with its long tail feathers, and flight feathers on its hind legs, is regarded as another transitional creature between small carnivorous dinosaurs and birds, as is
Caudipteryx zoui
, a dinosaur with short down feathers on its body and long tail and wing feathers, a creature denied the possibility of flight by the shortness of its ‘wings’.

Confuciosaurus sanctus
, a Liaoning resident of long standing who may be of similar age to archaeopteryx (although unrelated), has a pygostyle – the bony fusion to which long tail feathers attach (a parson’s nose, by any other name) – large claws and a wing shape not unlike the wings of modern birds. He is a rival for archaeopteryx in terms of world firsts, being the first beaked, toothless bird. He is named, aptly enough, for another elderly, venerable, possibly similarly toothless inhabitant of the Middle Kingdom, the great philosopher Kung Fu-tzu (transliterated into the Latinate ‘Confucius’), a man whose ideas on the desirable nature of ordered relationships between people have been sufficiently enduring, history and time notwithstanding, to have exerted a lasting influence on interpersonal and intergenerational relations between Chinese people everywhere.

The discovery at Gansu in 2003–4 of many well-preserved fossil birds dating from the early Cretaceous, subsequently named
Gansus
yumenensis
, has been described as the finding of a missing link in bird evolution. The specimens, particularly well preserved by the fine
sediments of the ancient lake at Changma, are similar to birds we know today, with at least some of the same physical features, including webbed feet and feathers.
Gansus yumenensis
were probably like small grebes or ducks and have been credited with leading birds through an aquatic phase, to emerge and fly far from their heavy, dinosaurian beginnings.

The wide diversity of bird-life around us began in the south of the earth, in that vast territory known as Gondwanaland. In the branches of beech and conifer and pine forests, amid the mosses and flowers and ferns, the wild richness of flora, neornithes (modern birds, or most of them), have their origins. A hundred million years ago, Gondwanaland, now Australia and New Guinea, was beginning its slow disintegration, a shifting, breaking jigsaw-piece-scattering that transformed the surface of the planet, moving continents, thrusting land areas north, spreading oceans between them, allowing and encouraging the spread of species northwards. The Cretaceous, 65 million years ago, seems to have been a particularly busy time for birds, with species expanding, radiating, evolving into what would today be familiar species sharing the sky with species no longer in existence. (Unlike most animals, some birds seem to have survived the K-T mass extinction event of 65 million years ago, which is believed to have been caused by the collision of a meteor with Earth.) By the early Eocene, 50 million years ago, all major orders of birds existed, and over the following 15 million years most modern families appeared. The Miocene, 23 million years ago, seems to have been boom time for passerines – most of the species with which we are now familiar would have been extant. (How easy it is to talk of millions of years, how hard to stop in this moment
and try to expand one’s imagination to see the slowness, or the fastness, of time.)

Bio-geographical and phylogenetic studies of corvids and other birds have allowed biologists to trace the movements of birds through time and place, to find their relationships and origins and the genetic closeness of species now found continents apart. The oldest passerine found in Europe, a hummingbird, dates from the Oligocene, 30 million years ago. Named, originally enough,
Eurotrochilus inexpectus
, ‘Unexpected hummingbird’ (presumably because of the singularity of its being the first hummingbird fossil discovered outside the Americas), it was found at Frauenweiler in Germany, putting the first appearance of passerines earlier than had previously been thought. Corvids appear from the evidence to have been around in one way or another since the Upper Miocene, the time when passerines in particular were expanding, moving from their origins in Gondwanaland as far as North America – where fossil evidence shows their presence during the Pleistocene – and Europe, where one of Chicken’s more recent ancestors, the fossil corvid
Miocorvus larteti
, dating from the Middle Miocene period, 17–14 million years ago, was found in France in 1871, and
Miopica
, the ancestor of magpies, in Ukraine. Corvid fossils in North America date from the Pleistocene, 2 million years ago.

Evidence for the existence of human or pre-human life in Britain suggests that first attempts at settlement were made some seven hundred thousand years ago and, whilst further approaches appear to have been made at intervals by Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons, the vagaries of water and ice overcame them all. Continuous human
habitation seems to have begun in what is now southern England a mere twelve thousand years ago.

In
Birds and Men
, E. M. Nicholson writes of the first settling of Britain by humans not yet in possession of the implements of development – spade, plough and wheel – of a land, now densely populated, covered by trees and water, and of the ‘first long phase of human colonisation’, the process by which man’s role evolved from hunter to cultivator and farmer. It must, he says, have been jackdaws and crows, ‘sharp-eyed opportunists’, already here, already long-established, that were the first to adapt to life with humans. They must have been the first birds to witness and indeed experience man’s anger in defence of what he regards as his own, the first to lose sovereignty to the ways he chose to live on earth, those ways that have brought us to where we are today. The time since its inception seems so recent, after the airy talk of MYA, the processes of man’s effect upon the earth, quick and quickening, so sudden, and accelerating, and I want to freeze the frame, myself and Chicken in our miraculous, chance convergence, the time of which Louis J. Halle writes in
Spring
in Washington
, his beautiful, acute observation of spring 1945, of the nature of human existence, of the clock that marks out eternity:

S
ometimes, not often, I play the recording I have of Spike’s voice. ‘Hello!’ it yells, brightly, with assertive confidence. No one who didn’t know would think that the voice belonged to anyone other than a person.

These days, I see fewer magpies than when Spike was still here. When he was, they were everywhere. They seemed to surround us, in the tall tree in the neighbour’s garden, dipping every day in pairs round the garden pond (no doubt persecuting the unfortunate frog), flying to and fro across the sky with their glittering, lilting flight. Now occasionally I see one or two, standing perhaps on the tall chimney of a building nearby, the place where the doves, when let loose, like to congregate. I greet them, not from superstition but from the desire to communicate again, however distantly, with a magpie.

I think about why I don’t see them round the house and wonder frequently if the neighbourhood magpies knew that Spike was here, if an unimagined network of magpie communication spread the news that in that house,
that one there
, one of their own was imprisoned. I might have been spotted catching him. The scene might have been witnessed from high in the prickly branches or a nearby chimney, that undignified chase around the foot of the monkey-puzzle tree, the moment of snatching, the stowing of the small creature in the brown-paper bag. They might have followed the car home, watched me carry out my prize, my tiny prisoner.

I think of all those moments, the one when I reached him under the tree, the one when he spoke, the moment when his word became the definitive decision on his future, when it was obvious indeed that he was ours for life.

Spike settled as Chicken had done, easily, slipping with reassuring calm into his place in the family, becoming one of us, a family member. With no discernible anxiety, he ate and thrived and grew. As with Chicken, I consulted Professor Lint, reading with the fervent anxiety of the new parent, as one might with an infant moving from milk to solid feeding. In deference to his advice (but still eschewing rodents and chicks) I bought mealworms from the pet shop, cautiously untying the knot in the polythene bag, emptying the squirming, tumbling mass into the small dish from where Spike would gobble them with horrifying, rapacious delight, cramming the pouch under his chin to bulging. He’d hunt escapees relentlessly across the tiles of the rat-room floor, snapping them in one by one, where they’d
wave and squirm between the rictus bristles at the sides of his beak.

It was Spike’s perspicacity that I began to notice first, the piercing quality of his observation, the sense I had that among us was a stern beholder. Almost immediately, he asserted his own place in the family order, and while I can’t say that he responded to parental discipline, he appeared to know that in theory he should. He showed a certain juvenile’s respect for David and me, whilst his relationship with Han was from the beginning utterly different, that of a combative sibling, with whom it was possible, if not desirable, to fight and banter and swear. By the time he came to us, Bec had already left home. He seemed always to be uncertain with her, watching her vigilantly, knowing that she was part of the family but unsure about precisely what his own relationship with her might be. Eventually, he decided that she occupied a place between Han and me, a sibling but one who should be treated with a degree of measured respect.

As he grew, his running, climbing, clambering, scaling, swarming became more confident. There was no point in doing as we had done with Chicken and clipping his flight feathers, since he could climb as easily as he could fly. He established his own flight routes, his stopping places, areas of interest, floor to chair-back, chair-back to fridge, reaching in an instant his favourite place, the top of the kitchen cupboards, his personal realm. (We disconnected the cooker hood. The consequences of a meeting between a powerful air extractor and a magpie were not to be contemplated. Spike employed the unused cavity as a cache site.) He would run up the flights of stairs to the top floor, poise himself on the edge of the banister then launch himself into the
deep space of the stairwell to spiral downwards to the ground floor, where the breathless pursuer would find him already taking his ease, preening his feathers casually on the kitchen mantelpiece. If I left the kitchen door open, I’d find him in one of the girls’ rooms, investigating. I began to be more concerned about open windows.

As I had with Chicken, I worried about Spike, knowing that the same Faustian pact would carry the same uneasy guilt. The bargain, though, was the same. In the wild, magpies live short lives; short, although brisk, busy, vital and pugnacious lives. The disparity between the longevity of birds in captivity and those in the wild is remarkable. According to Kenton C. Lint, ‘Magpies are long-lived … reaching ages of fifteen to twenty years in well-planted aviaries.’ In the wild, they fare less well. One study, quoted in Candace Savage’s
Bird Brains
, suggests that a fifth of fledgling magpies are killed by predators within two weeks of leaving the nest. Most live for two and a half years, or less. It’s unlikely that Spike would have survived had the cat arrived before me. I reminded myself again of the difficulties of reintroducing a bird to the wild. Again I told myself that the choice had been not between this life and freedom, but this life and death.

In everything, Spike lacked Chicken’s innate caution. Suddenly I understood those photographs in the books, of magpies squaring up to buffaloes, eagles, wolves. He was without fear or inhibition. His curiosity was terrifying. As an infant (quite a large one) he squeezed
himself one day into Bardie’s empty house. Bec, at home for a holiday, had taken Bardie upstairs, as she used to do in the days of their youth when they’d spend hours together in her room at the top of the house. I watched in amazement as Spike, even then considerably larger than a cockatiel, forced himself through the small door of Bardie’s house and, hunching, folding himself small, managing to perch awkwardly, like Alice in Wonderland in the White Rabbit’s house after she has drunk from the bottle marked DRINK ME, on one of Bardie’s perches. His tail stuck awkwardly from between the bars (‘Sure, it’s an arm, yer honour!’). As soon as he noticed me looking at him, before I could call everyone else in the house to see, he shot out, if one can carry out so swift an action while squeezing through a door much too small for one’s size, and flew to his lair above the kitchen cupboards (‘Catch him, you by the hedge!’). I can’t think of any reason he might have done it apart from curiosity, a desire to see the world from another point of view.

Chicken, even in these days of her maturity and wisdom, is scared of everything. Spike, with the exception of sparrow-hawks, ladders and the Portsoy snake, was scared of nothing. No other object daunted him, no lawnmower, no hairdryer, no electric drill. Everything had to be approached, examined. In response, every movable object had to be stuck down or removed. Experience taught us what could safely be left on the table or worktops and what could not. The former category narrowed itself quickly to lump hammers, cast-iron pans and (had we had cause to place any there) objects made of concrete, marble or granite. The latter category included virtually everything else. Small
though he was, he developed the strength needed to precipitate most items off the table or work surfaces to smash on the tile floor. He’d push cups to the edge, pause speculatively before giving a final nudge and then stand back waiting as the smash came, walking to the edge to peer over and look at the results. Small coffee cups, easy items to overlook, suffered the most. By the time we had accustomed ourselves to greater care, an entire set was destroyed. We learnt eventually not to leave anything – glasses, plates, cups – anywhere whence they might be launched to certain destruction. Anything requiring a permanent place, tea jar, candlesticks, everything, was stuck down with Blu-Tack. He would run across the table, over cutlery and plates, sample from glasses, perch on the edge of any left unguarded, dipping his beak in to drink. We had to be quick when alcohol was involved, his sober behaviour being sufficiently exuberant. He loved anything with bubbles, mineral water or lemonade, reacting swiftly to the opening of a champagne bottle, carrying out a small toenail-tapping pavanne on the worktop with an eager celebratory air, appropriate for any occasion. (An old Tyrolean belief was that drinking the broth in which a magpie had been boiled would cause madness. I still wonder if, according to the principles of homoeopathy, inadvertently sharing a glass with a magpie might have a similar effect.) He stole and cached ice-cubes.

After we devised the system of establishing his bedtime, sending him to bed before we ate, as one might with a toddler, in order to have an evening of calm and peace, we began to test his skills of observation by refining the process, reducing what we said, from calling, ‘Spikey, into bed!’ until we needed to say nothing at all, until a glance would
do; eventually it seemed that all it took was the thought for Spike, standing watching from above, to fly across the room to his box. He, of course, had observed the slight alteration in our manner of which we ourselves weren’t even aware. He began to know by himself that on the second playing of
The Archers
’ theme tune, it was time to launch himself bedwards.

His box was commodious, the size of a child’s playpen, equally well stocked with what we had given him to play with and what he had found. We’d close the flaps loosely over the box after dark. He seemed to like both being enclosed and having the freedom to fly out at will in the morning. If the doors between rat room and kitchen and the rest of the house had been left open, any one of us might wake to see a small, curious black face, a pair of scrutinising dark eyes, peering round the bedroom door.

In time, too, we discovered Spike’s delight in books. Until I learned better, I would leave the pile I was working on or reading on the kitchen table. His passion was, I suspect, more sensory than literary but it was love none the less. The physical qualities of books delighted him, the secret interstices that lurk between pages, the presentation of a manifold profusion of caching sites. The turning of each page was an opportunity, each a place where an item could be stored safely, unseen, remembered: half a prawn, a piece of Brie, a tiny sliver of cod. He loved the sensations of paper, the feel and sound of ripping, the unimaginable delight, after effort, of watching the scatter and fall from the table’s edge of a fine shower of magpie confetti. He destroyed two pages of a library book on a very sombre topic I had inadvertently
left on the table. (An act of financial contrition was required.) Konrad Lorenz talks of an animal’s capacity to cause damage being proportional to its intelligence. How true.

We had decided in the usual arbitrary moment that Spike was male. It’s difficult to differentiate by appearance between male and female magpies; females may be slightly smaller but to make an attempt at a correct assessment we’d have to have had a line-up of other magpies to compare. My use of ‘he’ should suggest no judgement on the basis of behaviour. I don’t know if female magpies display any more discipline and sobriety than male ones. After I began to look closely at other magpies, I saw that Spike was quite small, but his unorthodox upbringing may have been the cause rather than his sex.