Free Corvus by Esther Woolfson

be that the bold pattern of black and white looks too much like the pattern of a snake’s skin for relaxation in its presence but he may just dislike the game of chess.)
    I don’t know what she thought of ours, but we began to discover the grace of Chicken’s demeanour. She made, and makes, me think of the fastidious conventions of courtly love, the way in which, with such refinement, she initiates and responds: each movement is careful. Not only rooks but even birds with reprobate reputations like magpies could shame humanity by their exquisite attention to manners, effusive displays of gratitude. Nothing, we discovered, is gracious like a corvid. Nothing displays such old-world, mannerly attention to others, such elaborate politesse , such greetings and such partings. Never, before meeting Chicken, could I have imagined the rituals, worthy of Japanese life at its most effulgently ritualistic, of coming in and going out, of waking in the morning and retiring at night, in acceptance and rejection, in speech and gesture, in meeting and making acquaintance, in the presentation of gifts; the bowings and callings, circlings and head-bendings, the solemn placing, as a morning gesture, of one cool black foot on the bare skin of my own.
    At the beginning it had seemed simple, a question of responsibility. Then it started to seem less so, as I began to think of what it meant tokeep a wild bird, one whose life in its natural setting would be so apparently alien, so dissimilar from our own. Dogs and cats are different. They have been bred for centuries for the lives they are to lead, for the small circuit, the delineated future. They live as they do, in a close relationship with humans, for the most part dependent on them because in the universe they have nowhere else to go. Birds, except for those bred in captivity, have plenty of other places to go. I am always aware that rooks are sociable, and that Chicken is without other rooks. But she isn’t, as a member of the family, on her own. She’s always with one or other of us, always within the sound of other birds, and if they’re not the ones she might have expected, I hope it’s consolation of a sort.
    For years now, I’ve reflected on the facts of our coming by the wild birds we have, considered their prospects and their alternatives, what would have been their fate had they been anywhere but here. For each, Chicken and later Spike the magpie, the alternatives, I believe, would have been limited. Both birds were small when they first came here, too unfeathered for flight. Why they fell or were dislodged from their nests is impossible to know. Larger nestlings dislodge smaller ones while spreading their wings, practising for flight. Or, active creatures, they fall of their own accord. The trees from which they came are far too high for them to be restored to their nests by any practicable means. Reintroducing them to the wild might have been possible, but at best, in amateur hands, with individual birds, success is limited (everything I’ve read confirms it). Where would I have done it? How? Around us are urban gardens, busy streets, traffic.
    Scattered by every roadside, the black corpses of corvids lie, feathers ruffled slowly by the wind. I don’t regard their lives as cheap; the opposite, only infinitely fragile. The birds who have lived and live here have done so for much longer than they would have lived in the wild, although I am always aware of the ways in which they haven’t lived, what they have been denied, either by my actions or by what might loosely be described as fate.
    People have, I tell myself, for as far back as one knows, kept birds but there is no consolation in the telling because, for as far back as one knows people have similarly done things that are wrong. If I believe, or hope, that what I did was the best I could and can for them, I have to be ready always to answer to my sternest critic.

    As we began to look at all corvids with new interest, we