Corvus (21 page)

When it snows, I confine the doves in case they can’t find their way home. They mutter between themselves but I don’t know what their opinion is of snow. On these mornings I open the kitchen curtains for Bardie, whose house is placed carefully so that he has a good view of the garden. He looks out, and at the sight of the altered light, the
white ivy outside the window, he shrieks like a delighted child with many loud, repeated exclamations of excitement. I like to think that he’s expressing true Antipodean enthusiasm, a loud and hearty expletive at the wonder of it all.

This year there has been only intermittent snow. In the main it has been damp and dark and wind-blown. Chicken and I lurk together in the study or beside the stove in the kitchen. She climbs onto the arm of the chair beside my desk on the dark afternoons and stands close. In the evening, she warms herself under the reading lamp as she sits on my knee. She in turn warms me with her small, hot feet. I envy her her feathers. The wind screams around the granite of the walls.

In late winter, my cousin Roger visits. It’s a long time since we saw one another last but we have things to talk about. That time was, by chance, 11 September 2001, also the first time we had been together for many years. We remember, retracing as everyone may do the circumstances, where we were, how we heard, all in the kind of close detail we achieve over nothing else. On this occasion, however, we want to go to look at birds.

We drive in cold sunlight up the bleak north-east coast, through the dissonance of a countryside half agricultural, half industrial, the flatlands between Aberdeen and Peterhead and Fraserburgh, all fields and oil-related sites, factories and yards stacked with giant lines of pipe, equipment for locating and drilling and making the undersea yield up its oil. We stop at the harbour in Peterhead and park on the slipway to watch a ship prepare for sailing. Everywhere, gulls scatter and scream in the chill wind. Our aim is to visit geese.

We turn down the road towards the Loch of Strathbeg and park under the awning with its wooden stanchions. We are the only people here. It has felt intermittently today as if we’re the only people anywhere. There is a farm building, now converted to a hide. We look out of the broad windows over the loch. The literature on the table tells us the facts, the numbers, that 20 per cent of the world’s population of pink-footed geese are to be found here at this time of year. On this particular day, though, they’re not. I don’t know where they are, the 20 per cent (which is many, many geese. On some days, thirty thousand.) I don’t know where they’ve gone but they’re not here. The loch is empty. Like us, they have gone out for the day. No one, no bird, stirs. There are no whooper swans, no wigeon, no teal. As bird watchers, we have failed. The grey water and reeds are stirred by wind. There are no geese.

We make coffee from the machine and, clutching the plastic cups to keep us warm, sit and peer through the fixed binoculars, although we have our own. Beyond us, the timeless calm of winter. Just past Imbolc, the Celtic winter festival, still in the wolf-month, that reminder of the terrors of the past. The window seems a symbol, invisible glass between us and the water and the winter sky. There are no birds and then there is one bird, a black and white duck which appears on the surface of the water. We decide that it’s a tufted duck although it’s quite possible that it’s not. We discuss what it might be and come to a far from certain conclusion. From the grey attenuated light of this February afternoon, a heron assumes bird shape from a haze of flying shadow, drifts down to stand with ancient, ancestral dignity,
his air of grey, ecclesiastical solemnity, in the shallows in the fringes of reeds. We watch him intently in silence for a long time, until at last he takes off with slow, considered grace, flies low to merge languidly back into the faint winter mist from which he emerged. Ahead of us, empty water and quiet. We are satisfied. There is no disappointment as there was no expectation. This is the obverse of bird-watching. We are in a place beloved by birds, chosen, for this time, by us. Birds just happen, today, this afternoon, not to be here.

We carry on. Farming country, the quiet time. Cliffs fall, sheared from green fields, the roads long and quiet unlike most other roads, ones further south, choked and clogged with traffic. Pensive hawks stand on fence posts, circle in their slow watching above us. We drive to Pennan, down the terrifyingly steep, curving approaches, looking down, like birds ourselves, on to roofs and chimneys. It’s the village made famous by the film
Local Hero
, quiet and perfect; and, just as there were no birds at the loch, there are no people in Pennan. The village round its tiny bay is closed for winter, silent except for the sounds of sea on stone. The sun’s bright although it’s freezing. Ice travels on the wind. The famous phone box is there but no one is phoning from it, as people do, to Japan and America, to say that they’re in that phone box, the one in the film. Roger, a film director, explains how the filming would have been accomplished. Two large crows fly round the headland towards the cliffs. It will all awaken again in spring but just now it’s like a Sleeping Beauty village and I wonder if everyone’s really still there, inside their tiny fisherman’s houses, asleep, suspended, liminal, in diapause, between worlds, between seasons, behind their
small windows and their whitewash, evading the winter storms, the power and anger of the waves only a few feet from their walls. It is a village under a spell, under an enchantment of sea and sky and winter.

We drive back to Aberdeen in early dusk. (The geese will be returning to the loch. Our timing was wrong. We were too early, too late. They will be flocking in their hundreds, their thousands, calling and crying, their wings sounding like beaten metal.) Roger peers at his satnav while I tell him the way. We don’t agree on every point, the sat-nav and I, but I bow to its wisdom and between the two of us we get here, home, after a day I will cherish, of cold, of winter sun, of laughing at everything, the occasion when together Roger and I failed to see 20 per cent of the world’s population of pink-footed geese.

L
ate February. It is spring. Few external signs, neither the temperature nor the unrelenting grey of the sky, even hint at it, but it is so. Authority for the assertion is impeccable, beyond question. True, it’s a little warmer than is usual at this time of year, although from this I draw no conclusions about wider climatic upheavals. Last year at exactly this time, there was so much snow that I took a photo from the study window on my phone and sent it to a friend, accompanied by a cryptic message which might or might not have suggested that I was in St Petersburg. He didn’t recognise my garden under the unprecedented depth of late winter snow. ‘When do you get back?’ he texted in reply, but this year we have had, apart from a derisory inch or so lasting for no more than two days, no snow. It rains instead, a grey, intense, wet rain, attended by a fierce, bone-gnawing wind.

I know that it’s spring because Chicken alerted me to it. It’s three
weeks since I recognised the first intimations, the sound of plastic against wood and tile as she began the inexplicable, now annual ritual of removing her food dishes from her house to clatter them across the study, the hall, the kitchen floors. The sound began early one morning and has continued, with interruptions for shouting, eating, sleeping and nesting under the dining table, more or less ever since. Most of the rest I understand, but the role and significance of food-dish-clattering as an indication and necessary activity of spring remain obscure. The clattering stops only when she takes up her other, alternative spring obsession, that of tugging at the wires of the ineffective anti-cat sonic device that, years ago, I rigged up on the outside lintel of the study door, long disconnected because of its general uselessness in scaring cats, left there only because it has the sinister dark air of a powerful yet unobtrusive security device. The disconnected wires enter the house under the garden door of the study, lying hidden behind the curtain, until spring when they are tugged, dragged across the floor, tugged again, shaken, dragged back, then tugged again. Chicken is about to begin nesting.

I don’t know how Chicken knows it’s spring. She was a fledgling when she first came to this house, still in her own first spring. I don’t know what she thinks, how she discerns, what she remembers. I don’t know how spring stirs in her. I have no doubt that she knows, senses, as we all may do, what she has missed or never knew, and for me to suppose otherwise would be to regard her with less respect than I do myself. This spring, as every spring, when it becomes clear that her yearnings are for other things, for mating and reproduction, I’m sad,
guilty, regretful. I have obliged her to trade nature for her additional years. I can’t, at this time of year, be sure that she considers it a suitable exchange.

Chicken’s response to the first, invisible, and – to me at least – undetectable stirrings of spring leaves me bewildered every year. She lives indoors. What is visible of the world is through the windows – from her viewpoint, grey sky and rain, the tangled, trailing stems of a leafless clematis, the empty branches of the next-door beech tree – and yet she knows. Some clock within awakens, then wakens her. The sound of the outside birds perhaps, or more likely the increasing length of the days. The temperature of her existence is dictated by me, as are the switching on and off of lamps, the times of lightening and darkening of rooms, but since she will not allow the closing of curtains she’s aware of the first beginnings of morning, the fall of night. Outside, it is still winter. The clocks have not yet changed. How does she know? The moon, new or full, waxing gibbous, waning gibbous, glows in its nightly arc, progresses in its pearled diminuendo beyond the study windows, through the branches of the apple and the pear trees against the wall before it slides off into invisibility above Queen’s Road. Is it the moon that tells her? Is it a sense of the day, or night? Does the vernal equinox, just past, send her invisible, spectral, lunar messages? Does the slow, precise alteration in the slant of the rays of the sun communicate with her in ways I cannot even imagine?

After the initial dish-clattering, she begins to show other signs of what is clearly preoccupying her. Spring has always provoked sexual display as she bends, fans and quivers her tail, spreads wide her wings,
lifting them, dropping the edges low, behaviour that is common to both males and females. Her behaviour is not specific; she does not display only to me, the person with whom she spends the most time. Anyone will provoke the same response, male or female. She displays particularly when addressed. She excretes copiously (even more than usual), on the rugs, the wooden floors of hall and study, the tiles of the kitchen.

Alerted by Chicken, I begin to pay attention to the garden. I notice, among the small birds, the robins and sparrows and blue-tits, activity of a kind that indicates that they too have noticed something in the season that I haven’t. A lubricious play-chasing is taking place through and round the viburnum, over the dense branches of potentilla. Voices are heard in loud, calling excitement above the sound of rain. I have noticed sparrows carrying twigs. There are no leaves yet on the
Hydrangea petiolaris
on the wall to conceal the old, abandoned blackbird’s nest which is exposed and empty, a small, useful store from which birds come to remove sticks and straw for use in their own nests.

There are the beginnings of coquettishness and display, even in cold rain, on the roof of the rat room as the doves limber up for spring. Males huff and puff and march, with an air of solid certainty of their own irresistible beauty, across the wet and gleaming slates. For me this must be the beginning of a time of vigilance if I don’t want uncontrolled population explosion.

Last summer, for the first time, a pair of doves moved from the comparative comfort of the doo’cot to nest in the thick ivy which
we’ve encouraged to grow on the house wall to ameliorate the unrelieved greyness of the granite. Over the years, it has grown up over the wall behind the kitchen, outside the study, become a rich habitat, a kind of tenement for birds, equal in its well-ordered, vertical, utilitarian structure to the venerable architectural styles of Scotland; the Edinburgh Old Town sixteenth-century model of desirable urban living, the gracious eighteenth-century New Town crescents, Glasgow’s wally-closed tenements, all noise and society and thriving life. During late spring and summer, birds small and large rush in and out of the wall of leaves in an apparent harmony of ingress and egress, a many-storeyed dwelling-place, an example of multi-speciesism as blackbird takes its place above sparrow, blue-tit, thrush. The doves began their work of site management and construction (the first time I had ever seen any of them nesting outside their own house) in sunshine, squirming their well-fed bodies in and out of the ivy with a difficulty the smaller birds don’t encounter, eventually laying and sitting, the fledglings hatching to bitter rain. I sensed them all season as a flickering, repetitive movement in the corner of my eye as I worked and they nested, tier upon tier in the ivy hierarchy, one tier up or one tier down, whatever this placement indicates, either the feral principles of the housing market or some unsuspected but elaborate system of avian social ascendancy that deems that blackbirds should be higher on the wall than sparrows or that doves, on account of some failure of timing or taste, be obliged to squeeze their way into the last available place, the least desirable, the one no one else wants.

Although I didn’t quite see them I still became anxious if the
rhythm of their coming and going stopped, or when a flurry of sound, disputatious or frightened, erupted from the garden. I watched but last year, as far as I could tell, there were no cats, no jackdaws, no magpies to disturb the progression towards fledging, no speculative raptors. After I’d been out, I’d come in to check to see that all was well – as if there might be anything I could do if it wasn’t. The doves peered out from the ivy as they sat, calmly, implacably incubating and then feeding their young. As I always do, I wondered who was more aware of the fragility of the enterprise, them or me. Often I think of our shared vulnerability, the gales which seem to have increased, the heat, the rain, the debates about our one and only future that swirl in the air beyond this small, secluded realm.

I don’t know why they nested there. Perhaps it was the observation of others, or the modish thing to do, the dove equivalent of a holiday home in Provence. It may have been the unusually warm weather during the nesting period. Perhaps it led to a proliferation of insects. (The rain began last year after the young had hatched, cold days interspersed with ones of unusual heat. This cold and dripping summer, they did not replicate their adventure.)

I watched all through the period of incubation. On hot days, I sat near them at the garden table, reading, working, waiting for the inimitable squeaking of a new-hatched bird.

There was one offspring. He has survived, but is confused. He was not there last night, in his usual place in the doo’cot. This morning, I couldn’t see him. I imagined him strewn in his disassembled pieces, feather and disarticulated legs, stripped and disembodied feet, but
there he was again, late in the morning, just outside the window, swinging on the clematis. I have studied him closely in the year since his hatching. He feeds with the others in the doo’cot but is last to observe the falling of dusk. In the increasingly chilly nights of autumn, with the change of the clocks, he stood alone on the roof at twilight, as if deciding between domains. If he has chosen to sleep in the ivy, in the morning he’ll be standing on the windowsill above the study, waiting for me to open the doo’cot door for breakfast. As it grew colder, towards November, he began to file into the doo’cot with the others, but still was first to burst out when I opened the house in the morning. Unfailingly, he spends more time than any of the others near to his former nest, sitting often on one of the convoluted web of stems of the old clematis which hang like liana vines outside the study window, a Fragonard maiden on a swing. He seems to be always around the kitchen window, standing on the windowsill, looking in. This is his corner. Five yards away, his parents’ home, a different place, not his. I watch as he struggles, as he pushes himself with some effort, trying to insinuate his adult dove body into the space where his nest was, trying perhaps to regain his nursery, to return to the state of the sublime perfection of babyhood to which we may all wish to return.

I wonder if Chicken is precipitate in her nesting, but she’s not. Wherever there are rooks there is noise and industry. In the tall trees in Union Street Gardens, beside the city’s main thoroughfare, the
rooks’ nests which stand all winter stark and black, exposed in the leafless trees, are now as frantic with avian activity as the streets and shops below are with the human sort. Every spring since I came to live in this city, I’ve watched and waited for the first rooks to fly back and forth over the lines of traffic, their beaks crammed with building materials, too busy to be bothered with drivers and shoppers and idle rook watchers like me.

The oddest thing about it all is that Chicken only began nest-building last year, changing the pattern of her spring behaviour from all the other years she’s lived here. She has, in her own way, always acknowledged spring. I had become used to it, anticipating her running upstairs (usually in the early morning before anyone was around to stop her) to the first and then to the second floor, where she would stand for hours at a time, looking down through the banisters, a certain indication of spring. I never really understood why she did it. Was it a desire for height, a simulation of the experience of looking from a tree? I was torn between her needs and preservation of the stair carpet from the consequences of defecation. I tried compromise. I put down newspaper, which she ripped and scattered, and since I couldn’t think of anything else that would prevent the inevitable consequences of her walking up and down the stairs, eventually, after many years of guilt and combat, of running upstairs after her, chasing and catching her before carrying her downstairs several times a day, I arranged a barrier of supreme inelegance, consisting of two large plastic boxes flanking an old lampshade, on the lowest tread of the stair. I did this only when psychological methods failed. I had first placed
an item of which I knew her to be afraid – my embroidery frame on its stand, an object of enduring terror-inducement – on the wide fourth tread at the turn of the staircase, but spring determination overcame her fear.