Free Corvus by Esther Woolfson Page B

armchairs in revelatory recognition at a piece of corvid (or other avian) behaviour they read about in one of these astonishingly detailed accounts. Bernd Heinrich describes climbing high trees, precariously, dangerously, in storms in order to reach araven’s nest; he writes too of those who have sustained injuries while carrying out research, of Thomas Grunkorn who fell out of a tree and broke his back, of Gustav Kramer who was killed falling from a cliff while studying wild pigeons.
    In their book In the Company of Crows and Ravens , researchers John Marzluff and Tony Angell describe being picked out from among forty thousand others on the campus of the University of Washington by crows who, while happily walking among other people, fly away from them. Kevin McGowan of Cornell University was routinely identified among crowds, followed and shouted at by crows he had studied (and some he had not). Bernd Heinrich, attempting to discover what it is that allows ravens to identify each other, describes experiments with his own ravens, who happily accept him but no one else. Using a variety of techniques – swapping clothes with other people before approaching the ravens, changing his outfits or elements of his outfits, wearing masks, wigs, sunglasses, making grotesque faces, limping, hopping, carrying a broom – he proves that if it’s him they’re not fooled for long by any subterfuge, that, just as the visual clues the birds use in recognition of humans are diverse, so probably are those they use in identification of other birds. (Included in the account is the unforgettable sentence ‘After my thirteenth approach in the kimono, they again allowed me to get next to them.’)
    Interestingly, the broom was the one thing the ravens never accepted, as Chicken will not. Even after years of close, daily acquaintance, Chicken still runs away at the sight, hides under the table until it’s put away. Corvids must know something I don’t about brooms.
    Gradually I began to realise how much more there was to know, that what I had learnt, what I had observed from Chicken, was just a beginning. I read in the introduction to Kenton C. Lint’s feeding instruction for corvids that crows and ravens can live for twenty to twenty-five years in well-planted aviaries. While this isn’t a well-planted aviary, I wondered if it might do instead. It seemed that with good fortune, or whatever else it might take to look after this bird properly, we could well have some time to spend together. I hoped it would be so.

5
The Hole in the Kitchen Wall
    D uring the years of sharing this house with birds, the kitchen and rat room have always been communal space, inhabited democratically, equally, by both human and bird. The study, on the other hand, is the salon privé , a place where no flying is allowed, no high-level depredation, no intrusion by the unwarrantedly curious or wilfully destructive.
    It’s a long time now since Chicken moved into this room, and although we work in it together, our status in it is different. For Chicken, the room is home, where her house is, while I am a mere sojourner, spending time in it during working hours and sometimes in the evening, when I prevail upon her generosity to share with me a room that, although clearly not mine, is known erroneously as my study. It’s a room with large windows and a French door which opens on to the garden, on to bushes and stones and bird feeders, a stretchof grass beyond, the dove-house, a small and overgrown pond. Outside the window, the garden birds and doves are perpetually busy, doing what they have to do, while inside Chicken and I occupy our time as we do on most days, me writing, she pottering earnestly with deep, driven intent, hiding things, perching on her branch in contemplation, eating, bathing; throughout the year, carrying out the many demanding imperatives of each season – in spring, preparing for nesting, in summer, dealing with the uncomfortable time of