Corvus (24 page)

The word ‘songbird’ itself is contentious. On morning radio a few years ago, I heard a woman in Glasgow talking about how she catches magpies
seriatim
in Larsen traps (which imprison the birds but do not kill them as gin traps would). She then takes the magpies out and kills them herself by smashing their heads against a wall. She recounted this with a degree of good cheer. Her actions caused her no
distress. Her justification was that magpies attack songbirds in her garden. Her view is current, a continuing preoccupation, the belief that songbird populations are reduced by corvid – particularly magpie – depredation.

‘Songbirds’. It’s a word with form, a word that stands as an encomium to decency, to safety, familiarity,
niceness
, the word that springs forth from websites devoted to opinions on corvids or government consultations on wildlife control.
Songbirds
. Not to throw oneself behind campaigns to defend songbirds is to ally oneself with dark forces, to be, no doubt, in support of dangerous foreign powers, possibly subversive, to be un-British, wrong; the implied innate innocence, the assumed morality of songbirds, being set against the rampaging immorality of other sorts of bird, magpies with their flashy, vulgar black and white beauty, unable by sight or action to hide their evil desires, sensual, naughty, too raucous in their modus operandi, in their taking of eggs and young to pass by unnoticed as others do, the stealthy, the feline, the silent. Facts have never stood in the path of sentiment or ignorance. Magpies (or crows or jackdaws) do kill young birds but do not reduce ‘songbird’ numbers (cats, on the other hand, do). They are of course songbirds too, being oscines, of the sub-order passeri. They just aren’t, it appears, the
right
sort of songbird.

Professor Tim Birkhead, among others who have studied magpies, demonstrates that the belief is wrong, that in fact populations of songbirds increase where there are also populations of magpies. Kevin McGowan of Cornell University suggests that, according to a
concept he calls ‘compensatory mortality’ (using the inimitable metaphor of disabled spaces in supermarket car parks – if everyone could use them, someone else would get them first), if one predator doesn’t get the young of garden birds, another will, that they’ll be lost in one way or another, the balance of numbers being affected only when the natural levels of mortality are exceeded, the lives of young songbirds being brief, most dying within their first year of life. Reduction in garden-bird numbers happens where it does because of loss of habitats, through alterations in climate, pesticide use (including garden pesticides), the relentless building in cities, especially on what were once gardens, the increased numbers of cats, but not because of magpies. Every bird struggles to survive, to eat, to breed.

There is, I acknowledge, no pleasure in waiting for a pair of patient, watching jackdaws to take the young of the unfortunate dove who chooses, one year, to nest in the doorway of the doo’cot, but knowing that jackdaws’ needs, as wild birds, supersede those of domesticated birds because their breeding is precarious, their prospects dangerous, their lifespan brief (doves can breed all year round, and often do, prodigiously; jackdaws do not), makes me accept nature as it is. Watching, as Bec did this spring from her window in Edinburgh, a magpie taking not only a clutch of blackbird’s eggs, one by one, but the entire nest, to disappear high over the rooftops, might be a lesson in either regret or triumph but what it’s not is a demonstration of evil. When the sparrow-hawk visits for plunder, I am philosophical. Sparrow-hawks must feed their young and they are, after all, part of a larger eco-system, which my doves, for all their qualities, are not.

 
a volley of aaarkhs

I like songbirds. I nurture all the birds within my power to nurture, my own birds, the collared doves who visit the garden, the wrens, sparrows, thrushes, blue-tits, coal-tits, the blackbirds in the ivy. On cold summer mornings, early, I watch the blackbirds’ two warm-brown-feathered young, looking strangely larger than their parents, in the first golden-syrup light before the city has woken, trying flight. The garden, overgrown, lush and green, organic, chemical-free, hanging with bird feeders, vibrates, hops, flutters, sings, alive with birds. The ivy wall sings. The shrubs sing. The roofs and chimneys caw and coo. The dawn choruses. Voices of blackbirds extend into the late, light northern city evening. From the darkness of their perches, the doves mutter and chant. I too wish for a pre-lapsarian world. I wish for the return of the Garden of Eden, perfection, innocence, for the abolition of death.

In the wild, Chicken’s life would have been noisier than it is. Even the daily clamour of domestic life, the city assemblage of voices, music, doorbells, car engines, is dimmed by comparison with the sound of rooks in their natural habitat. Rooks, of all creatures, all birds, are accustomed to noise, both to making and to hearing it; social and socialised, they’re used to crowds of hundreds or thousands, to jostling and shifting, squabbling for place, establishing rights,
sleeping close, feather by feather, wing by wing. Their nights are spent among, between many others, the individuals who make up the vast clouds of drifting, settling, crepuscular flight, often a vibrant, raucous corvid mix, jackdaws, magpies, carrion crows, all huddling, cuddling together in high, swaying roosts, moving branches under their feet. They’re used to numbers, to danger and the warnings of danger. They’re used not only to noise but to surround-sound, high-volume, high-wire, high-amplification shouting and cawing, ultra-decibel noise, a hundred, a thousand orchestras, choirs, concerts of demanding, self-expressive noise.

Although to us they may not be easily differentiated, corvids have many songs and many sounds. They can recognise one another by voice, an advantage when males and females look the same. The question of whether or not their means of communication may be called ‘language’ depends on what ‘language’ is, but they appear to have what may be called ‘syntax’, the particular arrangement of sounds to form distinctive meaning. Some are able to differentiate between not only their own young and those of other birds, but individuals among their offspring. Repetitions, alterations in frequency and pitch, allow them a range of expression and communication, conveying meanings at which we can only guess. Corvid calls vary according to geographical area and may be specific to particular neighbourhoods as calls are developed, learned and exchanged within a group. They develop discernible regional dialects and accents. For all that, there appears to be mutual international understanding, for corvids in one part of the world, played the call of
ones from another, will respond. If I play recordings of corvid voices from other places, Chicken will listen, bow and call, whilst the sounds of other birds (in particular the great northern divers, whose song I listen to frequently for the joy of hearing the pure, chill tones of northern melancholy) elicit mild interest but no vocal response.

Annie Dillard writes in
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
: ‘Their February squawks and naked chirps are fully fledged now, and long lyrics fly in the air … Today I watched and heard a wren, a sparrow, and the mockingbird singing. My brain started to trill why why why, what is the meaning meaning meaning?’ We are in the midst of their sound, surrounded – as in a cosmopolitan city – by words of many languages we cannot understand.

It is not chance that made poets write of birds as participants in political or philosophical discourse; Chaucer and Henryson wrote of parliaments of birds, the Sufi poet Farid ud-Din Attar of a conference; for birds, particularly corvids, may have a disputatious, interested air. Crows together sound argumentative and vehement; rooks less angry, as if they’re engaged in discussion and debate. Ravens’ voices are rich and deep and almost human and seem to have a greater range of tone and expression than rooks’ or crows’. Many corvids, particularly jays and magpies, are able mimics, both of other birds and of humans.

Attuned now to the changes in Chicken’s voice, the range of her calls and expressions, I’m reminded of working, as I did in my youth, in the nursery of the kibbutz where I lived before I went to university, when I was a very junior assistant to the doyenne of all baby experts,
a woman of profound and frightening knowledge who taught me, among other things, to distinguish between the cries of the many babies I was helping to look after. A woman of perfectionist rigour, she used to hold small, intensely serious seminars where I and anyone else in need of tutelage were gathered together. Frowning earnestly, we’d listen before opining solemnly on whether the cries we heard were of hunger or discomfort, distress or boredom. I did the best I could, given that, at the time, I knew even less of babies than I did then and later of birds. (Having worked all her adult life with babies, my mentor moved on in later years to manage what, under her care, became a prize-winning dairy herd, proving that knowledge may have unexpected applications.) I don’t know if her influence prevailed but I knew when Chicken was hungry by the nature of her call. I began to recognise the obvious cries: hunger, impatience, alarm, great alarm, fear, mild annoyance, frustration, anger, the desire for company. Now, certain calls will make me run downstairs, make me run from my desk, the it’s-a-cat! warning call, the sparrow-hawk alert (which will drive me into the garden with my plastic trident), the oh-God-it’s-a-man-with-a-ladder call that signals the arrival of the window cleaner, a rather quieter occasion now than in the days when we had more birds, when the house would reverberate with assorted catamenial screams, rattlings, shriekings and flappings, as Mr Gordon and his assistant set up their ladders and began the terrifying business of wielding cloth against glass.

Chicken’s sounds are diverse and subtle. There are the loud
aaaaarkh!
sounds of greeting, the
waaaa
, on a rising tone, like the
Chinese second tone, with which she expresses displeasure. There are subtleties of voice, murmurings and whisperings, the ones delightfully described by German biologist Eberhard Gwinner as ‘tender whisperings’, the ones in which the shadow, the echo of a word is there, ‘hello’ perhaps, inside the formation of a caw. People speak and write of the unpleasantness of corvids’ voices but I don’t agree. Chicken’s voice is lovely. Infinitely, subtly changeable in both tone and volume, by season, mellifluous or strident, hushed or clamorously loud, it has the capacity to cheer or to rebuke. She speaks, I assume, the dialect of north-east Scotland, something like Lallans or Doric, except in this case north-east, or perhaps more precisely Deeside Rook. In
Wildwood
Roger Deakin writes: ‘Rooks speak in the strongest of country burrs. They are rasping, leathery, parched, raucous, hoarse … and like all yokels, incomprehensible.’ Yokel? Chicken? We cannot be thinking of the same bird.

Some years ago there was a cold afternoon, one of those days when northern light dwindles fast into early darkness, when even with the heating on the study takes all day to become warm. I was huddled in sweaters and shawls, sitting confined within the small glow of the light from my desk lamp, the cold blue stare from the screen of my computer. Behind me, from the semi-darkness, gradually, I became aware of a hint of sound, which grew, became the unmistakable sound of snoring. It was a murmur at first but grew slowly, becoming sonorous, loud, humanoid. There were only two of us in the study. I sat for a moment, transfixed. There were many things I didn’t know about birds. One was that they can snore.