Corvus (19 page)

Spike’s beak, adapted for the multifarious purposes of magpies, could be alarming. ‘He’ll take your eye out,’ both girls said to me often. I never believed he would but, unusually charitably, thought that if he had it wouldn’t have been on purpose. He liked to sit on the high back of the dining chair to allopreen my hair. I was flattered but concerned. The force of his beak was much more powerful than Chicken’s and the memory never far of a revolting scene from Circus Lumière that I saw many years ago at the Edinburgh Festival, which involved a man miming the consumption of his own brain by way of a spoon dipped into the top hat he was wearing, collapsing further with every spoonful into a state of alarming, slobbering, decerebrate unconsciousness.

Not the picky gourmet that Chicken is, raw squid was Spike’s particular treat, the soggy fishmonger’s bag a sight to make him mutter and tremble with covetous delight as he waited for the moment of revelation, the sight of the slippery white body, purple dotted tentacles, slimy pouches of entrail. He’d stand and flap his wings in barely controlled anticipatory ecstasy, eyes rolling in alarming yellow circles, drooling horribly, saliva dripping down the feathery fringes at the sides of his beak, as I tugged off the heads with their beseeching, nacreous eyes, and emptied the envelopes of tough white flesh of their sandy, muddy contents, disclosing the tiny fish within which he’d lunge for and gobble. I fed him discarded pieces and he’d fly up to the top of the cupboard, trailing things disgusting and slippery from his beak. He cached them resolutely, committing to memory each ghastly morsel, some of which I’d find later, warm and beginning, ever so gently, to putrefy.

In common with many birds – owls, crows, ravens, raptors (but not Chicken, I’m not sure why) – Spike disgorged pellets from his throat and beak. The disgorgement was the end-game of a ritualistic and (to the hapless observer) disgusting spectacle of eye-rolling, drooling, gagging, a process that reduced Han to wails of horror. The pellets appeared to be seed cases, grit, bits and pieces of unidentifiable detritus, glued together into a compact slimy bullet.

One of Spike’s pastimes was to fly to the spare room, where he
could stand on the edge of the Victorian cot and gaze out over the garden.

‘Do you want to go upstairs, Spike?’ I’d say, and he’d fly towards the door, which I’d open for him, round the corner, up the stairs and turn into the spare bedroom, where he’d take his place on the brass cot rail. One day I walked into the room and saw Spike standing, as he liked to do, gazing from the window into the eyes of another magpie who stood on the outside sill, gazing back. He was not afraid. Nor was his compadre, or comadre, on the other side of the glass. (Spike seemed to understand glass, I think, a little more than most birds but still screamed in fear at the sight of a sparrow-hawk in the distant sky.)

In the same way that he would fly upstairs when told to, he would – when he chose – come when he was called, materialising in an instant on the worktop beside me. When he didn’t choose, he had to be pursued, then found, not an easy matter because a magpie intent on hiding can form itself into an imperceptibly tiny shard of magpie and insert itself into the narrowest space behind beds, in corners, under chairs. The moment I found him, he’d escape, run and launch himself gracefully over the banisters.

Like Chicken, Spike too bore out Konrad Lorenz’s contention that corvids hold a deep, lasting suspicion that many things black are the corpses of unfortunate corvids. Spike, though, was more outraged than afraid. Regularly, he’d attack a pair of scruffy black and white trainers I used to wear, on the grounds, presumably, that he suspected me of a crime of which I have never been guilty, that of wearing on my feet a pair of flat magpies.

Upstairs I have a stuffed-toy rook, as perfect in every detail as a stuffed, fuzzy black rook can be, from its stance to its eyes, its grey felt beak to its faintly curled toes. Made by a German toy company, it was bought for me as a birthday present by Bec, in a toyshop in Amsterdam. When I brought it home, I showed it briefly to Chicken, who was scared and displeased. I don’t know if she observed it merely as something black and unwelcome, like Konrad Lorenz’s bathing drawers, or as another rook, a rather static, stately one, but a rook none the less. Whatever she saw, she shouted vigorously and ran from it, clearly frightened and perhaps insulted, and I have never shown it to her again. I can only guess at what her reaction indicated: that she considers fuzzy German replications of rooks possible rivals, or that, for her own reasons, she’ll have no truck with graven images. She is however unconcerned by seeing her image reflected in glass, in the surfaces of kitchen equipment. She gives no indication of thinking, as many other birds would, that the reflection is another rook.

Spike too seemed interested by catching sight of his own reflection in a window or mirror, reacting with studied attention, as if he was appraising his own appearance, a reaction that bears out the findings of the research into magpies and mirrors quoted in I
n the Company of
Crows and Ravens
. Even then, before I knew of the research, I’d wonder what it was that Spike was observing and what it might mean, or indicate about the nature of his consciousness of self. That he had a high degree of consciousness of self was something I never doubted.

Consciousness in humans is a concept that defies definition, evades attempts to explain precisely what it is and how it may be described or
manifested (rather like intelligence, but even more elusive). There are degrees of consciousness, from primary consciousness, an awareness of our own being, to higher-level consciousness, what Gerald Edelman describes as ‘the state of being conscious of being conscious’. The neurological basis of human consciousness is being constantly analysed, examined, taken apart, the neural components and structures of what makes us thinking, imaginative, creative, self-examining beings, a dissection of the ways in which the material workings of the brain give rise to the immateriality of thought. Complex to describe and interpret in humans, how much more so it is in animals or birds. The evolutionary advantages of consciousness are clear, allowing anticipation of the behaviour of others, adaptations in situations of social complexity and change. The area of the human brain most intimately associated with what is broadly described as the mind is the neocortex, a structure similar in function to the avian nidopallium. Since the evidence appears to demonstrate that the anatomy of the brains of birds is sufficiently similar to that of humans to allow both cognition and consciousness, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to believe that some birds have a degree of consciousness of self – although since the purely physical examination of the mechanisms of the brain doesn’t fully explain consciousness in humans, it’s not likely to in birds either.

Because, where corvids are concerned, I am prepared to consider anything, I did think, from time to time, that Spike was cleverer than anyone or anything else I had ever met, that it was intellect that glittered from his eyes, radiated from him, a marvel trapped within his tiny feathered body. More than just conscious of himself, he seemed
also to have a distinctive sense of others, bird and human. It was as if Spike had an eternal patience, a self-knowledge, a confidence that told me that he, at least, believed that his and his kind’s day would come, that when we, humankind, had finally wrought our considerable worst, it would be then his turn, the turn of birds.

Louis J. Halle describes holding a swift in his hand and noticing the blankness of its eyes. It is, he says, impossible to imagine communicating with one as with a parrot, duck or canary. ‘I suspect that the swift inhabits a world of birds and insects, in which people are marginal …’ (Swifts live on the wing, copulate, feed and drink in flight. Our world and theirs do not meet.) Spike had beautiful eyes (which may or may not have signalled intelligence and depth) and enviable film-star eyelashes. On the frequent occasions we were close, Spike on my knee or standing on the pages of the book I was reading, we’d look into one another’s eyes in silent, inexplicably profound conversation. He would hold my gaze, look at me straight for a long time, and when he did I knew him in every respect my equal, more than my equal: he made me aware that my only advantage was one gained through evolutionary time.

Often I’d sit beside the stove in the kitchen, Chicken on my foot, Spike on my knee or shoulder, and do what I still do with Chicken, ponder our courses in life, seeing the division between us as nugatory, an illusion, the three of us forming an unlikely, harmonious triangle. There could be a silence between us, an ease that once I would never have thought possible, had I even been able to imagine it. To believe that humans have a monopoly of the things that deepen life on this
earth – memory, appreciation, imagination, emotion – seems both arrogant and simplistic; to imagine that, without a language we recognise, birds and animals exist in a world of thoughtlessness, of lesser communication, lesser feeling, surely wrong.

In time, Han left home. Spike, at my behest, would phone her at her university flat in Edinburgh. ‘HELLO!’ he’d yell down the phone as I held him in my hand, ‘HELLO!’ and she’d call her unbelieving friends to listen to this wonder, a talking, human-voiced magpie.

One day, when I was carrying a ladder through the kitchen, Spike, in fear and panic, flew across the room and collided with the wall. He fell to the floor, stunned. I picked him up and put him into his box. For days, he was huddled and listless. I fretted over him and, when he regained his interest in food, hand-fed him. Through good fortune or the sturdy qualities of the magpie constitution, he recovered. Birds die when they fly into windows or walls, not, as commonly thought, by breaking their necks, but by damaging their brains. Spike’s brain seemed, after the incident, as vibrant as it had always been.

A few years after Spike came here, I read in a copy of a wildlife magazine an article by Professor Tim Birkhead, author of a definitive book about magpies. He suggested that magpies, being ‘too obstreperous for domestication’, cannot successfully be tamed, that, not being subject to the long processes of domestication undergone by cats and dogs, like all wild creatures their own natural inclinations will inevitably conflict with
what he describes as ‘civilised restraints’. As I read it, I felt uneasy, sensing in it something I already knew.

Indeed, after a few years Spike grew in criminality. His aggression expanded, his area of operations, his private gangland territory, to encompass the cupboard where the dustbin bags were kept, the door of the dishwasher, the valve of the floor steamer. He flew with greater, more malicious intent. I could see the reluctance of some friends to come into the kitchen. ‘Just shoo him away,’ I’d say, but would note their wary, sensible fear. I had read Professor Birkhead’s article. I knew him to be right.

If people are frightened of Chicken, they were even more so of Spike. I was careful to keep him away from each nervous, cowering joiner, each terrified electrician, each visitor, imagining, as I chased him from kitchen to rat room, slamming the door between them, the lawyer’s letters arriving, accusing me of failing to keep proper control of a magpie.

I worried about the future. Unlike Chicken, he showed no sign of maturing into a contented adult bird. I knew him to be too vigorous, enquiring, demanding for the life he was being obliged to lead. It felt as if he had other things to do, other places to go. It increased my sense of guilt. What would have happened to him if Elizabeth hadn’t phoned me that day? For most of the time he was here, I believe that he was happy. He was, as far as I could judge by his behaviour, his appearance, his interest in himself and in what was around him; but it was not enough. As he grew older, he wanted to be elsewhere. I had the same misgivings and anxieties as I did with Chicken. I might have
decided differently about him had I known, but without him we, at least, would have missed so much.

It was only months after I began to wonder what would be when I came back to find Spike in his box, crouching, clearly unwell. He had been in fine and vigorous form when I had left. Within a day, he was dead. I don’t know why he died, what it was that made him wilt, as birds, do, decline within that very short time and die. He was as he had been when he had flown into the wall in fear at the sight of the ladder. I can think of no other explanation. Frightened by something in my absence, a cat at the window, the patrolling hawk, he may have flown against the wall. He drooped, beyond my ability to help, his eyes clouded. I sat on the floor by his box, stroking him.