Corvus (28 page)

Marley the sun conure annually shed his feathers of citrine and saffron, of pure scarlet and orange, scattered fragments of brilliance cast on the floor of his house. I have two of his wing feathers in front of me on my desk. They’re grey on the broader side of the rachis, pure leaf green on the other, shading towards the tip to a point of indigo and violet.

At this time of year, Chicken’s left eye waters. It is an event that causes me anxiety every year. I bathe the eye but it continues to water. She sits on her perch quietly grumpy, waiting for the colder weather, sulking her way towards autumn when, magically, majestically, her feathers will grow back. After weeks, the day arrives when, stroking her head, I feel pin-feathers pushing up insistently from under her skin, through her remaining feathers. They begin the breakthrough, a slow, meticulous unfurling in this stunning progression that is the annual cycle of avian life. She is a busy bird, concentrating, removing feather sheaths, running her wings through the brisk pincers of her beak with a rush, preening and bathing. Then, autumn, and Chicken is beautiful again,
restored, thickly, glossily slick, new, fresh, black glowing with a purplenavy-almost-golden glaze. Her neck is rich and full and warm. Her feathers smell sweet and new. Everything in her behaviour tells me that she feels restored. She walks with pride and, I think, with relief. She is no longer hingy. I buy a smart new black coat. Winter can arrive and together Chicken and I will be prepared. The other birds too will grow their feathers back and be ready again to taunt humanity, to remind us that, if we desire flight, we will never be free from the encumbrance of someone else’s wings, that, until we find a way to evolve, by running to catch insects with our hands perhaps, leaping from tree to tree for a spare few million years, we will achieve nothing; whilst they will be there, always, to remind us that the creatures some so airily call ‘flying vermin’, the scruffiest street pigeon, the modest sparrow, can do the one thing that we cannot.

A
utumn now, the days of the autumnal equinox just past, a change in the air, the sky. It turns in a night from chill and raining summer to chill and raining autumn. There have been a few, rare days of autumn sunlight in between the rain. The city changes, green to bronze, copper, fire against the grey. Leaves have begun to drift like tawny rain. The skies will become migrants’ skies. One morning we’ll hear or see the geese returning. Some of us will be caching, as we do at this time of year, preparing, storing up for winter. Those of us with brain components that increase in autumn, whose hippocampuses expand to meet the challenge of the days, will be busy hiding, checking, remembering. Soon, the clocks will change. An hour will be regained at the price of early darkness.

This autumn we have a new crow. He has been here for some weeks now. He doesn’t come from lovely, rural Deeside or from the heights
of a monkey-puzzle tree in a quiet, well-kept garden. This bird comes from a ‘backie’, an urban back yard of scruffy grass, a few trees, near a busy roundabout and major roads of traffic and fumes and noise.

I’m in the pet shop when I learn of him. I’m there to buy a sack of dove food. ‘Oh,’ the assistant says on seeing me, ‘there was a lady in about a crow.’ She searches in a notebook and brings out a piece of paper. Handwritten, just an address and a name, and at the top, those two most enticing of words,
baby crow
. ‘We told her you’ve got birds,’ the assistant says. (It’s the sacks of dove food, the moulting-sticks and grit, the bird vitamins, the feeding dishes, the cage toys, the wild-bird food, the egg biscuits, the doves I bought from them, that give me away.) I take the note. What am I to do? I should, at the very least, phone.

I do, and then I go to visit. I am, although uncertain about it all, more or less prepared. I have in the back of the car a box, half a dozen eggs, a packet of mince. (
Feeding Cage Birds
has been consulted again, the loose pages realigned, page 139, ‘Crows, Jays and Magpies’, relocated where it should be, between page 138, ‘Broadbills and Apostlebirds’, and page 141.) I hesitate because this bird may not be a crow. It may not be young, or it may be ill with an unknown avian malady that could infect the other birds.

I find the house and am ushered into the presence of the bird. He is a crow, and a young one, but he’s not so much of a baby any more. He’s feathered, sort of: scrappy black, unkempt, with scruffy, torn wing feathers. His face is extraordinarily beautiful, his eyes the largest, most searching I have seen among many beautiful, searching corvid
eyes. His age, if I had to guess, would be three months. He has had a difficult life to date. I know no more than what I’m told by the lady who rescued him, an incomplete tale. He was being attacked, she said, by dogs, seagulls, by – and she said this with shock – ‘his own kind’. One night, she gave a tenner to a drunk man to catch him.

For all that, he’s attentive, bright and watching. When I visit, he runs from behind the sofa to look at me. I squat by the side and call him. I’m careful in the way I address him. He appears, watches me, runs away again. He comes back, interested, maintains distance between us. It’s clear that his rescuer finds the situation difficult. (It is her first encounter with a corvid. She’s amazed by how clever he is.) She has nurtured him, kept him alive since his rescue six weeks ago. She’s tearful. She is parting with him only because she has to. I can’t take him away so abruptly, put him in a box and leave. I say that I’ll have to talk to my family, although I know what they’ll say.

As soon as I get home, I begin to think, to assess the implications. Where will he go if I don’t take him? Would his future be better anywhere else? I think of his name. He has been named already: ‘Beaky’. For many reasons, this will not do. For one, Bec is known by Bardie as ‘Beek’, shouted, sung, shrieked, ‘Beek, Beek, Beek’, a refrain we do not hesitate to purloin, and so the possibilities for confusion are too great. I think, read, study and come up with the shortened form of the name Yehezkiel, Ezekiel. It is Ziki, close enough to be familiar, but different too. My feeling that the bird is a male is, as ever, beyond immediate substantiation, but he seems to me to be large for his age. He just seems, don’t ask me why, male. The statistics seem to work. If
every other bird is deemed male, then occasionally we may be right.

During the days when I’m planning, considering, I think of the bird and of the circumstances that cast him from the life he might have known, of the events in the lives of us all, bird, beast or human, that may seem like chance but aren’t, the upheavals and cataclysms of politics or nature that dispossess or destroy, taking us all to other lives or other destinies, of the interdependence, the solace of others, on which we all may or may not depend. I think of how, after I first met Chicken, the feeling began to develop that, more than simply taking a new interest in corvids, I had opened myself to a new society. It was as it might have been to find oneself included in the ranks of a powerful secret organisation, a corvid Cosa Nostra perhaps, to have married foreign royalty, formed an important dynastic alliance. With it came the deeply reassuring thought that anywhere, more or less, where one might find oneself upon the earth there would be at least one familiar figure to offer greetings, familiarity, a sense of home.

And so it was. Travelling in Lithuania, once in a warm and muggy early summer, once in a freezing, snowing spring, I understood the power of the alliance. That summer, I spent time in some of the sad and terrible places of death that are the last war’s legacy to Europe. In one of those places, in the woods at Panerai, only the sound of bird-song, some of a kind I had never heard before, connected me to a living world. In the flat in Vilnius I had rented, I’d open the windows in the early evening to hear the only sounds that could make me feel less alone, the sounds from the trees, of gargling, choking, squawking from between the bright leaves as young rooks were fed.

On the spring visit the cold was exceptional in its ferocity. Intermittent falls of April snow, a wet, discouraging snow, coated the medieval streets of Vilnius and fell into the Easter baskets of children walking to church. That time, I was not alone; Han was with me in retracing my steps of a few years before. On a dark Saturday afternoon we were the only people at Panerai, the only living people. On the margins of the thin forest, a railway track and falling snow.

Later, standing on the station platform, waiting for a train back to Vilnius, we froze and hopped and danced to try to keep warm and fed chocolate to the rooks who gathered around us, just a few of them, larger rooks than Chicken, but of the same familiar face, walk, stance. We supposed that sometime a train would come. The trains were high, with the look of a former age, a
Dr Zhivago
air. As we stood there I thought of Stalin’s designation of Jews as ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ and it seemed, contrarily, a pleasing enough designation, one that might have done for either of us, human or bird, and by extension for many of us, sojourners on this soon-to-be-ruined planet, because all our lives are fissile, brittle, subject to contention and to storm. The rooks surrounded us companionably until the train came, eating chocolate, their black feet making the lightest indentations in the snow.

Three days after my visit, I am driving home with a large wire house taking up most of the back of the car, a cat-carrying box turned temporarily to crow-carrying box (with attendant crow), the sack of dove food I hastily bought on the way to collect him, a couple of bags of wild-bird food, some extra bird-feeding dishes. (The parting was anguished. I felt like a birdnapper.) There is no room to operate the gears. I lurch and grind past the High Street, up St Machar Drive, across Rosemount, negotiating roundabouts with the eccentric speed variations of tortoise and hare. It is one of the only warm days so far this summer, and will be one of the last. Summer, by now, is ending. Ziki and I steer eccentrically down the road in sunshine and are home. I carry in bird and bird-related items.

 
a crow, and a young one

I set up the commodious house in the rat room. It puts the favela dwelling to shame. I cut some apple branches from the garden and secure them at different levels through the wire and position the cat carrier at the open door of his house. Ziki cowers in the cat carrier, coming out for meals when I leave him alone to eat. He eats interestedly, avidly – egg yolk, mince, brown bread which he drops into his water-dish to soften.

After two days, when Bec is visiting, together we remove the cat carrier. He plays peek-a-boo with Bec. She calls ‘Hello’ and ‘Goodbye’ from the door of the rat room and his small black head peers round to see her. He seems a bright, enquiring bird. His head is oddly decorated with dried-on food scraps, which make him look as if he has particularly matted, blond dreadlocks. It’s difficult to avoid: small corvids are messy eaters. I still have the face cloth with which I used to try to clean Chicken. Their skin is delicate and cannot be rubbed with too much vigour.

One afternoon, we decide we must clean him. Bec reaches in and
gently catches him. He, in return, snatches a pinch of the flesh of her arm in his beak. He closes his eyes and, rapt, he holds on. I have, carefully, to reach in to prise his beak open sufficiently to release Bec’s arm. Freed, Bec wraps Ziki in a towel. We take him out of his house and I dab his head with warm water to prise the dried muck from his feathers. As I do, he becomes a crow again, not a small, corvine hippie. When we’ve finished, carefully we unroll the towel on the floor of his house. He lies quite still, eyes closed, unmoving. Has his heart stopped from fear? Has he stopped breathing? We look at one another as our hearts and breath stop too but slowly he opens his eyes. He looks round, stands up, shakes, then leaps onto his perch.

‘God,’ Bec says, ‘they’re such drama queens.’

The experience doesn’t damage his appetite. He eats a large supper, raw mince, smoked trout from last night’s dinner, cheese. He bathes and hops to and fro on his new apple-wood perches. I talk to him.

Ziki’s house is on the floor on one side of the long, narrow rat room. By opening the door of his house and wedging it against the washing machine I can create a small enclosure for him at the far end, with a view through the glass door to the garden. He has space in which to roam and play and bathe. He doesn’t play. I give him toys: a ball, some old toys of Spike’s, a few small boxes, and – knowing Chicken’s response to them – some bells. I thread some small, brightly coloured ones, red, purple, gold and green, on to string and hang them from his roof but he shows no interest in them. It is too early. I give him a large shallow dish of water. He bathes several times a day.

Chicken, who has watched him with increasing interest, can see
him but cannot reach him. She has taken to standing on the strut of the dining chair from where she has the best view of Ziki and his house. She is watchful, bossy, aware, it might seem, of her status. I wonder how she sees him. She approaches his house sometimes with an aggressive posture, feathers fluffed, head down, and tries to snap at his tail. He looks at her with equanimity. I’m sure it won’t be long before he asserts himself and responds to her aggression. I don’t know what he will do.