Corvus (5 page)

The American lady phoned. We discussed the starling, Max, when would be the best time to bring him, what he ate and what he liked. Towards the end of the conversation, the lady hesitated.

‘There’s just one thing I want you to know,’ she said. Her voice was low, confiding. This was clearly a woman-to-woman thing. ‘I thought you should know,’ she said, ‘he says the F-word.’

Not Greek and Latin? Had I had a moment’s hesitation in agreeing to take him, that would have resolved me in his favour. I told David and the girls. We all waited breathlessly for the arrival of the swearing starling.
Sturnus vulgaris
. Suitable.

Max was brought, a glossy, gilded, bright-eyed bird. His house, though, had been grievously neglected. It smelt, a smell which I can still summon, sickening, sweetish with an undertone of mild putrefaction, emanating from the substance Superglued, if not for all time then for most of it, to the bars, the perches, the floor, the food dishes. We carried the house, and Max, to the bathroom, took the top, wire portion off the plastic base and let Max free. He darted enthusiastically round the bathroom, flapping his lovely angel’s wings, alternately perching and flying while we immersed the noxious object in the bath to dissolve some of the noisome patina of staling shit.

The cleaned, respectable house, with its inhabitant, was placed next to Icarus on the sideboard, behind the dining table, in a row, Bardie next to the window, then Icarus, then Max. It was not unknown for the person sitting in front of his house to be the target of the well-directed projectile defecation at which starlings are proficient. Since it was Bec’s habitual seat, and she was a well-known bird liberal, the useful notion of accepting the consequences of one’s ideals was invoked.

Max was a bird of sparky charm, of enthusiasms and delights, his small, pointed green and gold feathers looking as if they’d been knitted by a craftsman’s hand into a glistening, shining outfit of plain and purl. The prospect of cucumber enlivened Max’s day, engaged his heart and, who knows, perhaps even his expansive starling’s soul. He would hop, flap, beg and scream when a cucumber was produced
from the fridge to be prepared, in a state of febrile anxiety until his portion was presented to him and jammed between the bars of his house, when he would set about it with meticulous care, spending a long time scooping out the centre, leaving a perfect tube, a translucent, jade-green tunnel of seedless flesh.

Max, it turned out, said lots of things, most of them unintelligible, but since one was listening for it, there it was. The F-word. It suited him, small, short-tempered, sassy Scottish street boy that he was. At dusk he would sing the complex, multi-layered, sweet evening song of the starling, bringing to me my Glasgow childhood of dark afternoons, twilight in a Scottish city, when phone wires were strung between poles, each, like a necklace, richly decorated with bead-like rows of glittering starlings. That was before the hand of sanitising bureaucracy skimmed the birds from wires, roofs, steeples, windowsills, removing the element of danger, the glorious, giggling frisson that enlived the progress of schoolgirls down Sauchiehall Street, a test of nimbleness as, in some complicated, recondite Highland reel, you skipped and side-stepped and pas-de-based round lampposts, through gutters, into doorways to dodge the steady but unpredictable precipitation from the massed starlings above. (Even now, I wonder how many Scottish city-centre buildings are held together by little more than an indestructible layer of starling excrement.)

Max lived with us for seven years, adjusting his song to the seasons, flying and shouting, and was old when he did what birds do, sank into himself, spirit shrinking, eyes clouding as he crouched in his small domain.

When his starling died, Mozart provided an elaborate funeral for him (compounding the widespread belief in his eccentricity, although the death of his father the same week may have inclined him towards greater attention to funerals). When Max died, we buried him quietly, with only the smallest ceremony, in the garden.

I think of him often, on the late-winter afternoons when I pass a derelict building in Langstane Place, a squarish granite building with boarded windows. From the darkness within the voices of starlings, probably hundreds, sound, their dusk song seeping, leaking joyously from every unseen aperture, a few last birds darting towards their home; and on the darkening afternoons when I watch starlings fly in a dusk cloud over the busiest part of town, while below people shop, oblivious. How starlings navigate during these astonishing evening displays is still not entirely understood, but they may take their markers from their immediate neighbours, each one in a crowd of thousands observing, turning and closing, moving with a fifteen-millisecond reaction, widening and spreading, drawing together in breathtaking, iron-filing flight. I used to watch from my vantage point at the window at work, overlooking the city-centre viaduct under which they roost, a starling city, an alternative world. Starlings organise themselves for the night in their social groupings, with adult males flying in to roost first, occupying the best places in the centre, whilst the young females, those last scatterings of flecks in the sky, sucked into the curve of the tunnels, have to make do with what’s left.

‘Just like life,’ I used to say, probably tediously, to colleagues, watching. And so it is, just like life. (Although in the morning, the reverse
is true – the old boys leave the roost first, to grab, no doubt, the best of breakfast, while the little girls wait their turn.)

In a recent cartoon feature in the
New Yorker
entitled ‘A Guide to City Birds’, Matthew Diffee provides the delightfully drawn profiles of five birds: a portrait and short curriculum vitae of snow goose, rock dove, sparrow, hawk and starling. The starling is Frank Scarpelli: ‘Likes: Pizza. Dislikes: I hate freakin’ cats and tourists and I’ve never been a big fan of birdbaths. I don’t get the point, really. About me: I grew up in the Bronx. Friends call me Scraps. I work hard. Play hard. You gotta be tough in this city …’

T
he years of keeping doves and other birds laid a foundation, encouraged a kind of enquiring acceptance of whatever, or whoever, might transpire or arrive, and so I was prepared. We all were. The evening the doorbell rang, we were ready, Chicken too, it seemed, smiling from her box, as infant rooks do, with their tragi-comic look, their corvid gravitas wholly at odds with the wide, frilled, amiable look of all small birds. This one, the offspring of the rooks that have lived for a long time in the woods near Crathes Castle, flying through and over its beautiful gardens, its yew hedges and its rose borders, peered from her box, her blue eyes interested, observing us as we were observing her. At once I was fascinated by her black, banded feet and legs, the fineness of her toenails, her pink skin erupting with dark feathers. The inside of her beak was bright, attention-grasping red, opening readily for food. Naturally, I took the advice of Kenton C. Lint. On
the subject of feeding members of the crow family, his dietary recommendations were both reassuring and daunting: on the one hand, corvids would eat, it appeared, anything; on the other, part of their daily diet should include

Rodents: 40g

Chicks: 51g

Choice of insects: 14g grasshopper, locusts, crickets, beetles, grubs, moths or mealworms.

In feeding Chicken, I avoided the freshly killed or caught and gave her minced meat and eggs and chopped-up nuts instead. I had had no dealings with an infant corvid but from her learnt that healthy corvid chicks are vigorous, greedy, their beaks sturdy enough for a little finger, food-laden, to be thrust down the waiting throat to the accompaniment of the sounds of strangled gargling. She fed and slept and watched and I carried her around with me everywhere in her box. She sat beside my desk in daytime, on the kitchen floor as I cooked, beside the fire in the evenings. When I greeted her, she greeted me. I was entranced. After some weeks, she began to leap on to the side of her box to stand, clearly anticipating flight. Then, one day, she flew. I picked her up from the table where she had landed and put her back in her box. I realised that this could be only a temporary measure. We looked at one another, this small corvid and myself.
Well
, we seemed to say, at this moment of mutual, inter-species questioning,
what now?
What indeed.

By now it seems at best disingenuous to say that I didn’t know enough of birds to consider reintroducing her to the wild. I wouldn’t
have known how to. Even now I’m not sure that I would know. Her home was fifteen miles away and there were no rooks nearby. The matter seemed simple. She had been brought to us and was, therefore, our responsibility.

We constructed a house for Chicken from wood and wire, forerunner of her present abode, and placed it in the rat room, where the rats’ houses once stood. Left alone for the brief periods she was, she began the first of her building projects, excavating the wall beside her house, picking determinedly at the plaster until she had removed the top layer. I didn’t know then why she did it but there seemed to be no good reason to stop her. Holes can always be filled in.

I can’t remember how much attention she got – less, certainly than she does now although she was always with us, always around us, playing with the toys we gave her, the rubber mice she liked to carry in her beak or to punish by shaking, pecking, bashing against the floor, for crimes unknown. She hid under tables, chairs, explored and began to take her place easily in the household. She was small, fluffy-feathered, and ever underfoot. We had to be careful not to stand on her as she pulled at the hems of our jeans or played with our bootlaces. She would fly on to the tops of cupboards and not know how to find her way down. We had to climb up to rescue her. She began to respond to each of us in an individual way, with a different voice, different mannerisms, seeming to know from each of us what she might expect: a certain, limited degree of parental discipline from David and me, teasing fraternal playfulness from Bec and Han. Wisely enough, from the beginning, she understood that I was the one who
fed her and although now I like to think that it was a bond of a different sort, I accept reluctantly that this might have provided the basis for our future relationship.

We progressed together, rook and human, and the knowledge, for the humans at least, was revelatory, mind-expanding, world-expanding. Chicken was clearly different from the other birds. I tried to examine the ways in which she was, to analyse what made her so. She seemed more inquisitive, more considered, as if her expectations of the world were broader. The doves’ expectations and desires seemed confined – entirely reasonably – to the single-minded pursuit of the affairs of doves. Whilst the parrots too were intelligent and responsive to humans, they seemed simply to have a different world-view, one that extended less far than Chicken’s. Chicken had an insatiable desire to find out. She wanted to know about the qualities of the small stones glittering with mica that she’d pick up in the garden, the purpose of the passing butterfly, what paper sounded like when it was torn. She wanted too to communicate, to be spoken to, to be heard.

Everywhere there were corvids and now I began to notice them, to appreciate them suddenly in another way. Driving, I’d see rooks as I had before, but with a new eye, a new acuity, the endless desultory pairs feeding, perhaps in the company of assorted crows, a few starlings, a handful of sparrows, in the grass of roadside verges, scattered as black flickers around every stand or thicket of trees, dusting,
drifting, picking over the tilled surfaces of fields. They were all, as Chicken would grow in time to be, of sober mien, elegant of dress in well-tended black (except in summer when moulting renders them grey-edged and unkempt) with neat polished feet like tight, shining boots, somewhere between eighteenth-century Scottish minister (Henry Raeburn’s ‘Skating Minister’ perhaps) and wealthy, black-clad, fashionable 1930s Parisian lady of distinguished years. I watched their walk, their gestures, what seemed to pass between them, in an infinity of behaviour I still had to learn.

There was more to know than I could have imagined; there was place and history and time. We knew corvids only in their wary, distant presence, in the sound of their voices. Corvids of one sort or another are found in many places in the north, as they are in most of Britain, among other birds, the lapwings and curlews whose calls are part of the sound of Scotland, the oystercatchers, gulls, herons, eagles, buzzards, hawks. Recently, I saw a map of rook distribution, which looked like a red scarf flung across the northern world. In urban settings, crows and jackdaws seem ubiquitous, pottering a few steps away, cautiously aware of us as we walk through the park, through the town gardens, black shapes in stark branches above us, silhouetted against pale clouds and sky. They’re there on every stretch of roadway, every supermarket car park. Over farmland rooks fly, nest, feed and roost. One of the constants of many northern European cities is the presence of corvids; the crows I pass in a Warsaw park, the rooks on the spires and in the trees of Vilnius. In some cities, because of changes in farming practices and the greater availability of food in towns, their
presence is fairly recent. Most corvid populations are settled, although rooks migrate from Russia, Sweden and the southern Baltic south to Britain and other north European countries for winter. Worldwide, too, they’re found in most places except Antarctica; in South America there are no crows, only jays and magpies. Populations differ in number and vulnerability, a few highly adapted species declining now to the point where they face extinction, the Flores, the Hawaiian and the Mariana crows among them, the latter two tree foragers, their habitats reduced by logging, as others’ are by farming, industrial development or any of the other dangers humans introduce when their interests coincide with, and ultimately overwhelm, those of native bird populations.

Of the corvids found in Britain the ravens,
Corvus corax
, are the largest of all, with their neck ruffs of feathers and big, strong beaks. Rooks,
Corvus frugilegus
, have grey faces, long slender beaks and full leg feathers, whilst carrion crows,
Corvus corone
, are all black, neat-feathered, with shorter beaks than rooks. Hooded crows,
Corvus corone
cornix
, look like crows wearing shaggy grey body-warmers. The jackdaws,
Corvus monedula
, have unmistakable silver eyes, short, pointed beaks and flattened panels of feathers at the sides of their heads. The other British corvids are not black: the magpie,
Pica pica
, is unmistakably, dazzlingly black and white; the chough,
Pyrrhocorax pyrrhocorax
, the rarest of the corvids, is red-legged and red-beaked. Jays,
Garrulus
gladarius
, are colourful, light brown and blue and black and white.

Colonial nesters, rooks group in tight-knit, extended families, in rookeries of many nests, some containing many hundreds or thousands of birds. Some rookeries have been established for centuries, like
ancestral homes with history behind them as rich and as long as any nobility. No coat of arms, no heraldry resonates as loudly, as profoundly as the sight and sound of rooks in their historic territory. In the vast rookery at Hatton Castle, a few miles to the north of here, there are thousands of nests where, every February, the rooks return to rebuild and repair their former homes. They choose to build nests in tall trees, in high, open situations, protected from predation by other birds probably by the proximity of other corvids and from the malign attention of humans by height. Rooks have occasionally adopted the dubious, unrookish and probably insecure practice of nesting on buildings as other birds do. E. M. Nicholson writes in
Birds and Men
that after the Napoleonic Wars, London rooks were seen to nest on the weathervanes on the turrets of the White Tower in the Tower of London and on the wings of the dragon on the vane of Bow Church. They can’t have enjoyed the sophisticated life of inner-city London, even at these well-chosen sites, because the experiment was never seen to be repeated.

As with us all, human or bird, history has formed what corvids are, their behaviour the product of their long evolution, of lives often lived in close proximity to humans, subject to the demands made on us all to learn, adapt, survive. Their social organisation is complex, highly developed and whilst there are differences in the social lives of different corvid species, most are broadly similar. Ravens seem to live in the least social way, rooks and jackdaws the most.

The basis for most corvid existence is the monogamous pair. Many live in flocks, move in flocks, roost in flocks, separating to mate, nest
and rear young. Most corvids live in ‘nuclear’ families, parents and offspring, for the length of the breeding season, the raising and growing season at least, until the offspring are fledged. Some young will leave their parents, some will remain, sometimes for as long as a year, ‘helping’ to rear the next generation. Among the ones who leave, it has been shown that the females often travel further, putting more distance between themselves and their homes than males.

Certain niceties of interaction smooth the ways of crowded roosts, allowing corvids to live together without conflict in the numbers they do. There are necessary foundations to their relationships: mutual recognition, the ability to learn quickly, the skills of negotiation. To us they all look the same. Chicken (individual though she is to us) is in appearance as all rooks appear to be. I see many every day and whilst I’ve tried to see differences, apart from size or feather condition, a slight difference in the face, I can’t. They do not, however, encounter such problems. Corvids’ recognition of one another is a prerequisite for the kind of organised, highly social existence they lead, for recognising family members, accepting and reintroducing ones who have gone away and returned. They may even be rather better at both mutual and inter-species recognition than we are. Not only do they recognise one another, corvids can recognise individual humans, and there are countless stories of people involved in crow research of one sort or another being singled out from among large, busy crowds to be personally, individually subjected to harassment, a kind of revenge, no doubt, for what crows appear to regard as unwarranted scientific attention. (Chicken certainly recognises many people, apart from the
members of her immediate family. Some she greets with particular enthusiasm and what may or may not be expressions of welcome and pleasure.)