Corvus (4 page)

Adopting a parrot beyond infancy is always like adopting a child beyond first babyhood, one with an unknown but possibly unfortunate life to date. One adopts its past, the stamp of every owner – their voices, sounds, indications of mode of life – accompanying it. Its history is marked upon its personality, its view of the world, its optimism or otherwise, its capacity for happiness. As with an infant before it can speak, it can communicate its past only by gesture. There may
be sundry wincings, flinchings, the parrot body language that hints at things unthinkable, the reluctance to allow the approach of humans, the abject terror at the sight of hands.

With the parrots we kept, there were never – like old lovers – names mentioned, those of former owners or persecutors, but there were the revealing sounds indicating time spent in unsuitable homes, the sounds of smoke alarms suggesting chips being cooked, things on fire, excessive smoking, or the incongruous wolf whistles uttered by the sweet-faced, staid, elderly Icarus. In a long-lasting example of cross-cultural transfer, of the sound dialogue that existed between them, Bardie learnt the wolf-whistle from Icarus and will still, years after Icarus’s death, sound out with Icarus’s voice, ‘
WHEE-WHYOO
,’ repeated loud and often: ‘
WHEE-WHYOO
!
’

In addition to other aspects of its mysterious past, a parrot may be of indeterminate age. The pet shop will not know, as the previous owner will not know. The bird may, for one reason or another, have been handed on from owner to owner over the course of a long and possibly distressing life. One day last summer, on a Sunday afternoon, Marley was in the rat room as usual, shouting, muttering, squawking as I passed to and fro chatting to him, cleaning, putting things into the washing machine. I was away from him for ten or fifteen minutes and when I went back there he was, as birds are in death, small, shrunken and closed-eyed, lying on the floor of his house, a few minutes dead. I don’t know why he died. Nothing in his environment or food was different from usual. He was probably simply older than we had imagined. By then, he had lived here for seven or eight years.

Unaware of the convention by which one does not extend a hand towards a bird, the man who delivers coal, a small man of immense and day-enhancing cheer, invariably wiggled his blackened fingers towards Marley as he passed, poking them dangerously into Marley’s house, shouting, ‘Hello, my friend!’, a gesture to which Marley, in violent and uncontrolled fury, responded by screaming loudly and hurling himself towards the fingers with intent to kill. Since Marley’s astonishingly sudden death, the coalman says pensively on every visit, ‘I miss my friend,’ a sentiment which I appreciate deeply but, recalling Marley’s voice, only partly share.

Birds had an interesting effect on us all. At some point after the purchase of Bardie (‘purchase’! How the word demeans! How can one imagine, nineteen years on, that the vile medium of money could have been involved in this enduring, indissoluble, familial relationship?), Bec began to develop her theories of bird-rearing, the fundamentals being a sort of fusion between the ideals of Kropotkin, Montessori and a Code Napoléon for our time. Among its more notable clauses, a prohibition on the word ‘cage’ (the word ‘house’ being substituted), a de facto granting of full civil rights to all birds, which in practice meant never stopping them from doing anything that did not endanger their own well-being (ours being incidental), and enshrining in law the benefits of universal education, the necessity for perpetual intellectual stimulation and the freedom to avail themselves of anyone else’s possessions.

When, years later, after she had left home, leaving me to try to maintain a certain mild discipline among the ranks (when a few birds would occasionally, for limited periods, be confined), Bec would arrive back and all would change.
Voilà! Le jour de gloire est arrivé!
As at the Bastille, closed bird-house doors were opened, all were set free. Everyone took part. Those who could fly, did. Those who could only wander along the sideboard, swearing loud, psittacine swears, did that. Anyone who was able and felt the need or desire flew to perch (uncatchably) on top of the pelmet board, twelve feet up, whence they’d shout remorselessly for hours. There was a tremendous, triumphant avian joy to the endeavours. I saw it. They had felt the air of freedom rushing through their wings.

We may have been the only people to reverse the usual beliefs regarding birds and cages. There were times, many times, when various birds, being expected to socialise more than they would have chosen, made a dash for home, settling with quiet relief onto their unassailable perches.

For years, under Bec’s system Bardie ruled, or more accurately was allowed to rule. He flew shrieking up the stairs in Bec’s wake, wandered freely (as he still does, more slowly, with greater trepidation) across the dinner table (as did Churchill’s budgerigar, who would remove the silver implements from the salt urns before attacking his owner’s cigar). He wandered freely over the books in the study, nibbling where he chose. The pages of many books in the house have, in addition to later damage inflicted by a magpie, neatly frilled edges, punched evenly along their length by a cockatiel.

a sun conure, small, brilliantly coloured, yellow, orange and green

Bardie would, while upstairs in Bec’s room, on hearing the ringing of one of the set of Victorian bells outside the kitchen door with which I summoned everyone to meals, turn to Bec and say ‘Come on!’ peremptorily, flying to the top of her bedroom door before escorting her down the stairs for dinner.

In those far-off days of children, rats and assorted birds, we also had two canaries, given to us by an elderly man who came to the house to look at the rowing boat David had bought but never used, in response to an ad in the local paper. To reach the garden I had to lead him through the house, past bird-houses and birds, past calling and flying. He was, it seemed, not only a bird man but was cutting down on his own bird-house numbers. Did I want two canaries? I didn’t but couldn’t refuse. He did, I remember, spend a long time telling me about the more abstruse and complex intricacies of canary genetics. The boat remained unbought.

The canaries arrived a couple of days later and took up residence on a table in my study (on the grounds that it was the only remaining unoccupied space) in their solid, dull, pale-green-wood cage, a green that had the old look of arsenical paint but can’t have been. All day they bounced ferociously on their balsawood perches, driving me to fury. They had qualities, but not ones I recognised easily. Perhaps if they’d been on their own, if I’d devoted more time and attention to them, been happy to settle for their song in another room, regarded them with more love and less irritation, they might have responded to Bec’s theory of bird-rearing and proved to be more than the small singing pests that they were. I looked in the canary book we had
hastily bought for indications of their possible lifespan. Females, it suggested, wearied by breeding, live five or six years. Males though, untrammelled by such demands, can live sixteen or more years. Both must have been elderly because in the course of time, not too much time, they went the way of all small singing pests.

The rats too, a constant presence for so long, thrived, became adults, aged, and one by one died. When the last one did, we took their well-used homes from the now-empty rat room to the skip at the recycling centre.

At some moment during the residency of the canaries we acquired Max, a starling. Aberdeen, since the discovery of oil, has become not only Oil City but Touchdown City, Move-on City; a migration stop, a place where oilmen from other places, from France, Holland, America, land, feed for the requisite length of time required for satiation before passing on to higher, or perhaps in the case of such subterranean activity, lower things, to the other places where oil is, or may be, to Houston, Baku, Luanda. Any day of any week, outside any house in this neighbourhood, a favourite of oilmen, pantechnicons may be seen. Large, square packages, taped and labelled for shipping, issue in the arms of burly house movers from the front door in a solemn procession to the van of the international moving company. Often, a laconic lady with baseball hat and clipboard will be seen sitting on the granite gatepost, counting. Neighbours, Louisianans and Texans, arrive and leave, our relationships ones that rarely develop beyond the rudimentary, the glancing, often briefly affectionate, mutually sympathetic, time-limited friendships between the nomadic
and the settled. During these processes, lives are changed, those of children parting from schoolfriends; those of the rabbits and mice someone was persuaded to buy in an effort to establish more firmly the existence of the itinerant; the tank of stick insects – the bonds of love torn asunder. The dogs and cats, I assume, take wing and go too. The rest do not. (This morning early, I heard the last sounds from my neighbours’ dogs, the ones I believe kept cats firmly away from the dove-house. For the past week they’ve howled in the garden in the wind and rain as removers have packed my neighbours’ house in preparation for their return to North America. I was woken at four by a volley of muffled barks as they were being put into the car to be taken to the airport to be crated and, as my neighbour informed me yesterday evening as we said goodbye, herbally sedated for the flights taking them to their new life in Colorado.)

Max was an oil orphan, for who would take back to a country whose own, introduced, starling population has become a serious threat to indigenous birds, a single starling? The starlings of North America have unusual origins, springing, all 200 million of them, from the importation of a hundred birds from Europe in 1890 by one Eugene Schieffelin, an immigrant from Germany whose self-appointed task was to introduce to the United States every bird mentioned in the works of Shakespeare. The sole reference to starlings, the one that brought about this environmental tempest, is in a few not very interesting lines in Henry IV, spoken by Hotspur:

The birds were shipped from Europe in two batches, one of sixty and one of forty, and released in Central Park. Not all survived. The ones that did were all too clearly successful. Their habit of stealing the nest sites of indigenous, crevice-nesting birds, wrens, swallows and flycatchers, led to the introduction of laws prohibiting any further importation of potential menaces. Writing of starlings in his poem ‘The Great Scarf of Birds’, John Updike hints at the scale of their success:

It was the lady in the pet shop where I bought bird seed, the one who gave us Icarus, who asked one day if she might pass on our name to an American customer who was leaving Scotland but couldn’t take the starling her children had found and reared. (I can imagine the United States’ response to the arrival of one to add to the 200 million, even if he had survived the journey, crated and herbally sedated.) A starling. What did I know of starlings? Nothing. It didn’t stop me from saying that, certainly, she could.

Pliny almost reassured me: ‘the young Britannicus and Nero had a starling and also nightingales that had been taught to speak Greek and Latin, and, moreover, practised assiduously and spoke new words
every day in ever longer phrases …’ Mozart too, I knew, once owned a starling, although his was bought for 34 kreuzer, from a shop in Vienna in 1784. By coincidence or chance, the starling was heard to sing bars of Mozart’s piano concerto in G major, K453. Since he’d only recently completed it, it’s not quite clear how the starling had learnt it, but it has been suggested that he had heard Mozart whistling it on a previous visit to the pet shop (such being the imitative powers of starlings). On transcribing the starling’s song, Mozart wrote after it, ‘
Das
war schön!
’ The starling did, however, transpose one note, changing a G to G#, improving (or not) upon the great man’s work. (A theory developed at length by animal behaviourists who have studied the amazing intricacies of the starling’s ability to both mimic and sing, is that Mozart’s later piece, K522, ‘A Musical Joke’, was based on the starling’s song, an enduring tribute perhaps to the musical genius of one small bird.)