baith cornes and wildfoulis, sik as pertrickes, plovers, and others … And as to ruikes and craws biggan in orchares … and the nest be founden in the trees at Beltane the tree shal be faulted to the King.
(Beltane is the right time, if one is intent on such purposes, one of the old Celtic divisions of the year, more than just seasons, they are intervals of meaning between light and darkness, warmth and cold. Falling on 1 May, Beltane or Bealtuinn is the optimum breeding time, not only for rooks but for most other birds.)
Last spring, while I was buying an old book about crows in a shop in Deeside, the lady selling me the book looked at the cover: ‘They’re meant to be intelligent birds,’ she said.
I agreed.
‘Pity they’re regarded as vermin.’
The word reminded me of the history, took me away from my own small view of corvids – of corvids in ones, individuals – far in concept from the idea of ‘vermin’ with its manifold suggestions of low-life commonality, disease-carrying or wilful harm, its overtone of disgust, its hints of justifiable destruction.
The killing of corvids, and indeed most other bird and mammal species regarded as being in one way or another detrimental to human interests, has been permitted by law in Britain for centuries, and for longer in Scotland, to its discredit, than in England.
‘Vermin’ is a word that still sanctions all, explains and allows every inventive, malign, brutal method of destruction, every way in which birds and animals were and are trapped and netted and shot, wayselaborated and refined through time (as humans, this seems to be one of our greater areas of expertise) and illuminating only the boundlessness of our own savagery, our feral cunning, our knowing less about our prey than about the methods of its destruction. With crossbows, arrows, in traps and snares of every elaborate and fiendish sort, with bird lime, a sticky substance smeared on branches to trap the unwary, with poisons – arsenic, mercury, strychnine – with modern pesticides – alphachloralase, cymag, aldicarb, carbofuran – by gassing, shooting, methods often involving something more purposefully cruel than mere disregard for pain, with our own knowledge growing in sophistication, we have damaged, often irrevocably, our native species.
In North America, it was, John Marzluff and Tony Angell suggest in their book In the Company of Crows and Ravens , the arrival of Europeans, bringing with them their old hatreds and superstitions, that introduced the idea of the undesirability of corvids, an idea that was to override and destroy (among the many other things in that territory that were erased, extirpated for ever) the protection extended by the traditional respect and mutuality of the indigenous inhabitants of the continent towards the birds and animals with which they shared the land, cultures in which corvids were, and still are, treated with greater degrees of respect than in Europe. Native American culture venerates ravens, admires crows. Magpies are honoured in Lakota dances because the black and white of their feathers represents both living and dead.
By the twentieth century, with true American enthusiasm for the task in hand, corvid colonies were being destroyed by dynamite. Thatthis literal overkill, the use of bombing against birds, doesn’t appear to have made any difference to corvid numbers can only be a comfort to those who might question, in general, the results of disproportionate balances of power.
It’s easy now to judge and to wonder, at a point so distant in time, but more difficult to enter into the small area of the mind, territory, vision and hopes of many of those who lived in times both brutal and precarious. It may be unreasonable to expect people to treat animals with greater benevolence than they do other humans, especially in the face of the unbridled terrors of life in past centuries, plague and war and famine, with no resources to ameliorate the
(Beltane is the right time, if one is intent on such purposes, one of the old Celtic divisions of the year, more than just seasons, they are intervals of meaning between light and darkness, warmth and cold. Falling on 1 May, Beltane or Bealtuinn is the optimum breeding time, not only for rooks but for most other birds.)
Last spring, while I was buying an old book about crows in a shop in Deeside, the lady selling me the book looked at the cover: ‘They’re meant to be intelligent birds,’ she said.
I agreed.
‘Pity they’re regarded as vermin.’
The word reminded me of the history, took me away from my own small view of corvids – of corvids in ones, individuals – far in concept from the idea of ‘vermin’ with its manifold suggestions of low-life commonality, disease-carrying or wilful harm, its overtone of disgust, its hints of justifiable destruction.
The killing of corvids, and indeed most other bird and mammal species regarded as being in one way or another detrimental to human interests, has been permitted by law in Britain for centuries, and for longer in Scotland, to its discredit, than in England.
‘Vermin’ is a word that still sanctions all, explains and allows every inventive, malign, brutal method of destruction, every way in which birds and animals were and are trapped and netted and shot, wayselaborated and refined through time (as humans, this seems to be one of our greater areas of expertise) and illuminating only the boundlessness of our own savagery, our feral cunning, our knowing less about our prey than about the methods of its destruction. With crossbows, arrows, in traps and snares of every elaborate and fiendish sort, with bird lime, a sticky substance smeared on branches to trap the unwary, with poisons – arsenic, mercury, strychnine – with modern pesticides – alphachloralase, cymag, aldicarb, carbofuran – by gassing, shooting, methods often involving something more purposefully cruel than mere disregard for pain, with our own knowledge growing in sophistication, we have damaged, often irrevocably, our native species.
In North America, it was, John Marzluff and Tony Angell suggest in their book In the Company of Crows and Ravens , the arrival of Europeans, bringing with them their old hatreds and superstitions, that introduced the idea of the undesirability of corvids, an idea that was to override and destroy (among the many other things in that territory that were erased, extirpated for ever) the protection extended by the traditional respect and mutuality of the indigenous inhabitants of the continent towards the birds and animals with which they shared the land, cultures in which corvids were, and still are, treated with greater degrees of respect than in Europe. Native American culture venerates ravens, admires crows. Magpies are honoured in Lakota dances because the black and white of their feathers represents both living and dead.
By the twentieth century, with true American enthusiasm for the task in hand, corvid colonies were being destroyed by dynamite. Thatthis literal overkill, the use of bombing against birds, doesn’t appear to have made any difference to corvid numbers can only be a comfort to those who might question, in general, the results of disproportionate balances of power.
It’s easy now to judge and to wonder, at a point so distant in time, but more difficult to enter into the small area of the mind, territory, vision and hopes of many of those who lived in times both brutal and precarious. It may be unreasonable to expect people to treat animals with greater benevolence than they do other humans, especially in the face of the unbridled terrors of life in past centuries, plague and war and famine, with no resources to ameliorate the
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