be shredded for bedding or else continue to lie, awaiting the day when the fabric of the house, like the fabric of all things, will founder, fall into desuetude, the day whenarchaeologists, not knowing why paper might have been stored in the foundations of houses, will come inevitably to wrong conclusions. I reflect on the sadness of their loss, that they will be unable to wonder appropriately, to document and laud as they should, the indomitable qualities, the charm, the intelligence of corvids.
6
The Black Airts
I t didn’t take long for us to realise that our love of corvids was not universal. The girls’ friends in particular regarded us as an outpost of the Addams family, intriguing, strange, potentially sinister. The only grounds for their view (as far as I know) was the presence of Chicken.
By now, I’m not even surprised by people’s reactions to sight or mention of her. I try to explain. ‘Like a very small black Labrador,’ I’ve heard myself say, in an infinitely feeble attempt to find a way to make the matter comprehensible to those who assume that the rook I have is one who visits the garden from time to time, touches down, feeds, moves on. ‘She lives in the house,’ I say, trying to find a way to bridge the unbridgeable, the notion of ‘dog’ being the one most useful to invoke, that idea of comforting canine solidity with which most people in this society at least are familiar, yet which seems so at variance with the comparative smallness and fragility of birds, with thealien concept of ‘bird’ for those who cannot imagine even being in close proximity to, or the experience or sensations involved in spending time with, a creature normally seen as wild. It’s not strange to share one’s house with a furred quadruped, but it is to share it with a feathered biped. I recount some of Chicken’s qualities in the face of their disbelieving gaze. Can anyone really accept that a rook might be companionable, intelligent, charming? With difficulty.
I still don’t know what to say of – as I didn’t know at the time what to say to – the person, friend of a friend, who recently, when I talked of crows, said, ‘Crows? Horrible birds!’ I’m still undecided about which shocked me more, her tactlessness or the bleakness of the inner world her words conjured for me. She’s a teacher of English. Don’t the frequent, resonant allusions to corvids in art, poetry, literature impel her to something better?
If others think it, few have said it. If they think it, I tell myself it’s because they don’t know. How can they know? But then I wonder why they don’t. These birds live among us, above us, beside us. How can we know so little, or nothing, of them?
It has been, for the long duration of Chicken’s presence in this house, the commonplace for every person who first sees her to ask (with a certain insulting casualness in the use of the pronoun), ‘What is it?’, the question demonstrating only that many people cannot distinguish between one corvid and another, between the passing carrion crow picking in the urban park, the hooded crow, the sharp-beaked, silver-eyed jackdaw, the baggy-trousered rook. Is there any reason they should know? Once I wouldn’t have known either.
‘Is that a raven?’ they’ll say on seeing Chicken standing on top of her house or perching on her branch. I suspect they don’t really think she’s a raven because they don’t know what a raven looks like either, that it’s a name, a word risen from that part of the ether in which is kept a small list of the names of black birds. (They probably won’t ever have seen ravens, except perhaps during a visit to the Tower of London.) What they want to know is which kind of crow she is. I tell them. I omit to say that, by contrast, she knows very well what they are.
Often, the people who ask are the same ones who, by worthy, rapt and enthusiastic attention to wildlife programmes on television, know the minutest
6
The Black Airts
I t didn’t take long for us to realise that our love of corvids was not universal. The girls’ friends in particular regarded us as an outpost of the Addams family, intriguing, strange, potentially sinister. The only grounds for their view (as far as I know) was the presence of Chicken.
By now, I’m not even surprised by people’s reactions to sight or mention of her. I try to explain. ‘Like a very small black Labrador,’ I’ve heard myself say, in an infinitely feeble attempt to find a way to make the matter comprehensible to those who assume that the rook I have is one who visits the garden from time to time, touches down, feeds, moves on. ‘She lives in the house,’ I say, trying to find a way to bridge the unbridgeable, the notion of ‘dog’ being the one most useful to invoke, that idea of comforting canine solidity with which most people in this society at least are familiar, yet which seems so at variance with the comparative smallness and fragility of birds, with thealien concept of ‘bird’ for those who cannot imagine even being in close proximity to, or the experience or sensations involved in spending time with, a creature normally seen as wild. It’s not strange to share one’s house with a furred quadruped, but it is to share it with a feathered biped. I recount some of Chicken’s qualities in the face of their disbelieving gaze. Can anyone really accept that a rook might be companionable, intelligent, charming? With difficulty.
I still don’t know what to say of – as I didn’t know at the time what to say to – the person, friend of a friend, who recently, when I talked of crows, said, ‘Crows? Horrible birds!’ I’m still undecided about which shocked me more, her tactlessness or the bleakness of the inner world her words conjured for me. She’s a teacher of English. Don’t the frequent, resonant allusions to corvids in art, poetry, literature impel her to something better?
If others think it, few have said it. If they think it, I tell myself it’s because they don’t know. How can they know? But then I wonder why they don’t. These birds live among us, above us, beside us. How can we know so little, or nothing, of them?
It has been, for the long duration of Chicken’s presence in this house, the commonplace for every person who first sees her to ask (with a certain insulting casualness in the use of the pronoun), ‘What is it?’, the question demonstrating only that many people cannot distinguish between one corvid and another, between the passing carrion crow picking in the urban park, the hooded crow, the sharp-beaked, silver-eyed jackdaw, the baggy-trousered rook. Is there any reason they should know? Once I wouldn’t have known either.
‘Is that a raven?’ they’ll say on seeing Chicken standing on top of her house or perching on her branch. I suspect they don’t really think she’s a raven because they don’t know what a raven looks like either, that it’s a name, a word risen from that part of the ether in which is kept a small list of the names of black birds. (They probably won’t ever have seen ravens, except perhaps during a visit to the Tower of London.) What they want to know is which kind of crow she is. I tell them. I omit to say that, by contrast, she knows very well what they are.
Often, the people who ask are the same ones who, by worthy, rapt and enthusiastic attention to wildlife programmes on television, know the minutest
Similar Books
