Corvus (22 page)

It was last year when Chicken began her clattering, tugging nesting. I watched this new behaviour with interest and a little alarm, not knowing what impelled her to begin nesting in her later years. I wondered if it might be an intimation of mortality, a thought I have to accept but do not welcome. I looked around for information that might explain this delayed onset of proper corvid reproductive behaviour but couldn’t find anything that mentioned the subject.

It began last year as it did this, with dish-clattering and then within a few days the sounds of newspaper-tearing, followed by the clicking of nails on floors as Chicken ran between study and kitchen, assembling nest-building materials. Her nest was constructed from newspaper from her floor, old receipts, magazine covers and anything else she could find or steal. I didn’t pay sufficient attention to the process. It seemed odd but a better alternative to chasing her up and down stairs. The inconvenience of having a rook heaping torn newspaper under the dining table was limited. I did notice that her voice became louder. Talking to Bec or Han on the phone, I’d say in explanation, ‘Oh it’s just Chicken in spring mode.’ I watched her as she pottered about her nest, but her interest in it seemed intermittent and she continued to spend most of her time in the study with me.

Last year’s nest was a haphazard affair, but the best possible one given the available materials. Even in the wild, rooks are known to have a relaxed attitude towards the construction of nests, preferring loose, un-engineered structures, which sometimes fall apart and have to be reconstructed, the results it seems of their coming into the world equipped with more instinct than expertise, a situation improved apparently, as it may be for us all, by experience and age. (Other birds are different and seem to carry with them blueprints and scale drawings and a knowledge of architecture, the weavers and bower birds and house martins, consummate builders all.)

a nest constructed from newspaper

On the morning last spring when I went into the kitchen to see on the floor a small splash of yolk and a scatter of pale greeny-blue spotted shell, I peered dimly at it, failing to recognise immediately what it was or where it had come from. When I did at last realise, I was as astonished as Chicken was uninterested. She paid no attention as I removed the pieces of shell and cleaned up the egg. Before I had time to begin to phone the news around, I had found another egg, this time on the carpet, but nowhere near the nest. This one was intact, cold and equally ignored. I picked it up to keep.

As a proud new parent might, I phoned, sent photos of the egg to friends and family. Those long acquainted with Chicken were as amazed as I was. Congratulations were received, questions asked, mostly ones to which I had no answer: ‘What took her so long?’, ‘Is that common?’ For the people I told who didn’t know Chicken, it seemed, reasonably enough, unremarkable –
Hey, guess what? Bird lays
egg!
– but for us, apart from the shock, it was the first confirmation that we’d ever had that our original, chance decision to designate her female was correct.

This year, both Chicken and I are better prepared. We both know, more or less, what to expect. She has an air of authority as she goes about the business of construction. The nest grows as the locus of her existence and activity alters. This spring, she has moved from the favela house to the same place as last year, under the dining table, within the square bounded by the legs of a dining chair, a space that may seem to her secure, a dark suitable place to nest amid the items she’s collecting up: one grey angora sock, a couple of floor cloths, the small, heart-shaped cover of a hand-warmer I bought last winter, a loose circle of torn newspaper. This year, her posture and behaviour changes even more markedly than last year. She squirms on the carpet, flattens herself, wriggles, lies still. I have never seen her do this before, legs tucked underneath her body, flat on the ground. She rests her head on the strut of the chair.

Her voice too has changed. Even louder than last year, it plays on a feral, manic note and now she sounds like an outdoor rook, one of the shouting, rasping confraternity of frantic nest builders, the wild rearers of young who even now have begun to haze the tree-tops with activity and noise. The timbre of her voice is rough-edged, ragged. I speak to her but she has an air of distraction. She is too busy for me. She runs with her urgent, hopping, rookish run between study and kitchen, with a combined air of busyness and necessity. She has no time for pleasantries. I sit down on the floor beside her. She comes close to me and shouts and snaps her beak towards me but she appears to have no time for me. When I try to tidy the edges of her newspaper circle, she runs at the broom – that object of fear and hatred – with
which now, emboldened by some hormone storm, she is fearlessly willing to engage in combat.

In a letter to a friend, Gilbert White wrote: ‘Rooks in the breeding season, attempt sometimes, in the gaiety of their hearts, to sing but with no great success,’ and while I regret Gilbert White’s lack of appreciation of rooks’ voices, in Chicken I observe neither gaiety nor song. Fervid concentration seems to preclude both. For brief moments only she slips from spring mode, as if she has forgotten. Once or twice she jumps onto the armchair near my desk as I work, to stand beside me, climbing onto a cushion to be nearer still, but the familiar aspect passes and all too soon she returns to running, shouting and lying under the table, wholly engaged in the distant, mysterious activities in which I can play no part. This time, it is like living with a stranger.

The nest this year is larger than the last one. It is, as far as I can tell, occupied by Chicken alone, twigs and feathers and mud and all the other materials used by the outdoor rook being found only rarely inside houses. In this at least, I’m glad. The examination of a rook’s nest described by Franklin Coombs in his book
Crows
lists, almost incredibly, among pails-full of dry sticks, grass roots, damp leaves, pieces of eggshell, potatoes and seeds, an astonishing population of creatures:

I don’t know who I feel more sorry for, the rooks or the flea.

When the nest is a rough circle of eighteen inches or so, Chicken begins to spend more time sitting in the middle of it. She begins to caw and beg, loud and needy, as she would do if she were dependent on a male to bring her food. Female corvids are fed by their mates and even by ‘helpers’ during the entire period of preparation for, and eventual laying of, eggs. I begin to hand-feed her.

Just into March, on a Monday, towards lunchtime, she lays her first egg of this season. (One study of the egg-laying timing of rooks puts the mean date of the laying of eggs between 9 and 23 March. She’s correct. Again, I wonder how she knows.) The egg is broken when I find it. She has been examining it but has already lost interest so that, when I pick up the two pieces, she doesn’t give any indication of either minding or objecting. The egg is small, four centimetres long, of a pale, delicate turquoise, a spray of pointillist chocolatecoloured speckles concentrated towards the pointed end. The contents are soaking into the rug. I clean them up but she doesn’t pay any attention. I sit down cross-legged on the floor beside her and she jumps onto my knee. She has developed a ‘brood patch’, the bare patch on her belly which in wild birds is in constant, warm contact with the eggs. She gazes at me distractedly, then shouts. Her way of
communication has changed, her beak open wider, at a different angle, in the shouting.

I begin to think about her diet, that probably she needs more calcium, more vitamins to deal with the physical demands of the season. I consider what more I can give her. Her diet is as fine, as varied, as considered as any rook’s in Scotland. Every morning I sprinkle vitamin drops onto her breakfast of cereal and milk. Is that enough? I take out an egg for her from the fridge. By comparison with her egg, the hen’s is huge and pale. I break it and feed her some yolk and when I hold the spoon slightly above her head, she does what we have always called ‘baby rook’, simulating infant behaviour, crouching, opening her beak, flapping her wings with the gargling sound made by infant rooks as I spoon the yolk into her beak. I crush some shell into powder and give her that too. She settles again in her spot under the table. She is quiet again. When I come home, there is no voice to welcome me.

For many days, the behaviour continues. This time, I’m moved by the steadfastness she displays, saddened by knowing that she is dedicated to a task that can have no positive conclusion.

In mid-March there are days of bitter cold, although the forecast snow holds itself back, keeps itself inside the thin layer of dull grey cloud which is there and then is gone, melted into deceptive sunlight. I have to drive to Edinburgh through brilliant, cold sunshine and intermittent sleet. Coming back, the road north is closed after Dundee because three gigantic lorries have collided, killing one of the drivers. The police stand by the road to direct us all away, back the way we came. I travel north by way of the coast road, through Arbroath,
Montrose. It’s familiar country, Montrose the nearest town to the village where David’s grandmother lived until her death not quite two years ago, the town where we would come to shop, her anticipation of the pleasures of being among people and streets, in busy, lighted shops, undiminished in spite of her increasing frailty. Driving here makes me remember.

On this day, Montrose looks like the image of a Christmas town, etched and aquatinted, coloured by flinty, silvered light, dusted by frost, the country beyond opening into broad light, the sea glinting at my right. The bay, Montrose Basin, a bird sanctuary, is filled up with cold grey waves. Beyond the town, I drive over the river Esk, across the bridge where for years there was a slogan, now removed, scrawled by a patriot more daring than literate:
SCOTLAND, FREE OR A DESSERT
. This is the first time I have passed Gran’s house since it was sold after her death. In the line of tall trees opposite what was her sitting-room window, the rooks are busy as ever they were each spring, the rooks she watched through the sights of an old Bofors gun, of provenance unknown, an endeavour that gave purpose and pleasure to her life, her morning and evening counting, her watching, listening, telling. Her house, when I pass, seems opened, builder’s clutter in the garden, the windows wide and white.

Beyond, the road to Inverbervie is high above the sea, lined by tall trees, bent by the sea-winds towards the land. Fields stretch to the cliff-edges, small tractors balance dangerously on the edge of the world. Rooks fly overhead in black scatters, burdened with twigs, obeying the law that regulates their lives. A drift of them passes like
dark smoke above the road as I pass the turning to Johnshaven. I know this road in every season. I have passed by at planting and growing and harvest, in every whim of the light, the sea’s pewter glance or dazzling blind with sun, dulled over by fog and rain. I’ve driven here a hundred times as it has lost itself into darkness, the lights coming on in the villages one by one as I passed, the turnings to Gourdon, Fettercairn, Arbuthnott, Stonehaven, Muchalls.

When I get back, Chicken doesn’t run towards the door when she hears me, calling, as usually she would. She is still lying flat under the table, surrounded by newspaper and dishes and the crumbs and scraps of every meal. Still sitting, she shouts at me. I hand-feed her as her mate would, as I did when she was a fledgling, putting mashed avocado and egg onto my little finger before thrusting it into her beak.

I worry about her, although I know that this mood, this need, will pass, as it does every year. Spring will shade into another season, one in which Chicken will resume her life, while outside the business of hatching and fledging is gathering momentum and with it the unimaginable dangers, the vulnerability and predation, when slow death or raw murder is everywhere, some of it brought about by the unthinking carelessness of man or the sport of felines, some of it part of the natural cycle of survival and death which may be difficult to witness and to understand but about which there is nothing we can do.

For the duration of the nesting, I abjure my usual cleaning, the vacuuming and carpet scrubbing necessary to ameliorate the tide of bird-related mess. I wash the floors but avoid Chicken’s spring territory.

On Tuesday, I come back in mid-afternoon. There is another egg, perfect this time, unbroken, outside the ring of newspaper. She is not sitting on it and when I reach down to lift it, Chicken’s irritated by the disturbance but not by the taking of her egg. She shows no inclination to sit on it. By Wednesday evening there is another. (Rooks lay eggs every twenty-four hours until the clutch is complete, beginning incubation almost immediately.) I don’t know what to do, leave it for her in case she realises that she should be sitting on it, knowing that it will never hatch, or remove it before she stands on it. She’s sitting, but not on it, so I take it away. It’s cold in my hand, like porcelain. I put it onto a white plate.