Corvus (8 page)

It has been suggested that there are differences in the way the various species experience time, and that, for those having faster time-scales by virtue of their shorter life-spans, the perception of time will be slower, that one minute of their lives will be as several minutes of our own. I don’t know how Chicken experiences time; if we pass a day, an hour together, we do so at the same pace.

I know little of her sense of smell, although in most birds it’s generally regarded as poorly developed (an exception being pigeons, in whom it may play a significant part in direction-finding, and some other species for which extra olfactory sensitivity is required for navigation or safety). I don’t know if it’s smell or sound that draws her instantaneously to the kitchen when butter, her favourite food, is removed from the fridge. I’ve tried to test her, removing it as silently as I can, but my silence may not be hers.

About her sense of taste, I can judge only from observation. Although birds have fewer taste buds than humans do, they have
distinct preferences. Chicken can differentiate between foods of vaguely similar texture, a banana or an avocado, rejecting the former, accepting – with delight – the latter. The fat content of foods appears to be of importance, although by now she is able to distinguish between different types of cheese, between Bel Paese and aged Gouda, which she does like, and Camembert, which she does not. Recently I offered her a piece of a good Mull cheddar which, with the air of the dedicated oenophile contemplating a bottle of fine wine, she examined for a moment, appearing to sniff it. After consideration, she picked it with her beak from my hand and hurled it to the floor. This was the final judgement. It was not even worth hiding under the carpet. As most birds appear to do, she loves egg yolk in any form. Unlike Jakob, the pet raven about whom Bernd Heinrich writes, she rarely has the opportunity to sample Chinese food but would, I’m sure, try with great eagerness the Hessian cheesecake beloved of Jakob. Unlike him, though, she rejects most fruit except cherries and even then I wonder if it’s the resultant sanguinary mess created by a rook with a red fruit that is the attraction. If food is to her taste, and movable, she’ll hide it. If it’s hard and will be softened by dipping into water, she’ll dip it into water. As a result, in the morning, her water dish floats with portions of breakfast cereal and bread, which I try to fish out before morning bathing begins.

At mealtimes, Chicken likes to participate, either pottering on the floor or, given the chance, standing on someone’s knee. She gazes calmly across the table, as a guest at a feast, and appears to expect at least to be recognised as part of the company. On Friday evenings,
she recognises, as all the other birds who have lived here do and did, the sound of Kiddush, the lighting of candles, the recitation of blessings (my one enduring nod towards the life spiritual), and will, as Bardie does and Spike did, express eager, vocal anticipation of the coming of Shabbat or possibly of the cutting of the
challah
, the home-baked egg loaf that they, naturally, will share. Such
frumers
! Who’d have imagined!

I have only once committed the crime decried by Lord Byron, another corvid owner, of standing on Chicken’s foot. (How it’s happened only once, I don’t know. She likes to follow me, to stand behind me when I’m cooking, to place herself just where my foot will land when I step off a chair if I’ve been putting something away in a high cupboard. She is invisible in the dark.)

Lord Byron, best known of course for other matters entirely, seems to have been a man of catholic tastes in both people and animals. According to a letter written by his friend Shelley during a visit to him in Ravenna, his house was shared by dogs, monkeys, cats, peacocks, guinea hens, an eagle, a falcon, an Egyptian crane and a crow.

In his diary of 5 January 1821, Byron writes of feeding the hawk and the ‘tame (but
not tamed
) crow’. On the 6th, he complains of his crow being lame: ‘some fool trod on his toe I suppose …’

I pass a statue of Byron every day. For a brief time in 1794, he attended Aberdeen Grammar School when he was living here with
his mother. Despite the brevity of his sojourn, his statue stands in bronze-robed solemnity and magnificence in front of the school’s splendid granite façade. As I pass, I salute the man. I am unmoved by Lady Caroline Lamb’s famously damning designation of him, because nothing can alter the fact that it speaks well of a man when he cares about his pet crow’s toe.

In the past few years, Chicken has become reluctant to go outside. Now, in summer, I open the French windows and she potters to the door. I have a small enclosure of wire to allow her to step outside but not to go too far. There are cats next door and no children to rescue a fast and frightened rook. But then I am more frightened too. Perhaps, for both bird and human, fear creeps up, becomes the adjunct of age, when the days of immortality grow dimmed, tarnished over by the knowledge of death, the sight of cats peering in windows, the passing sparrow-hawk in the sky, the adjunct of our own knowledge of all things threatening. On a late-November afternoon, I see a hawk flying against a cold, silvered sky, the half flap, half smooth glide, the silhouette that can reduce a safe, protected indoor bird to shrieking terror.

At nightfall, when it’s particularly cold, if there has been snow perhaps or a thick frost is coating the branches and the grass, I try to close the heavy curtains in the study to keep in the warmth. The result is inevitable. Chicken runs from the room, scared and outraged,
into the kitchen. She refuses to return, although it may be roosting time, until the curtains are open. I have to coax her, or even chase her back into the study so that she can witness the extent of my compliance with her wishes. I think of the warmth, this small representation of the sum total of world’s resources being depleted through the windows and French door of the room but none the less I open the curtains and tie them back. Chicken returns, hops onto her branch, runs the edges of her beak angrily against it, still with a look of suspicion and, I think, the faintest tinge of resentment at the power that my ability to remove, on whim, her peace of mind represents. She adopts a confrontational pose, bows and caws. I look out at the snow-lit garden, at the black branches and weighted, moleskin sky. If I’m honest, I prefer it this way too. I too like to see out, to see the sky, and I understand her need to see it, to see stars if there are any, the moon, the tops of the branches of the
Viburnum carlesi
flowering in midwinter opposite the window, the shut door of the dove-house. Occasionally, with luck and the correct atmospheric conditions, we will see the light of the aurora borealis, even in the middle of an over-lit city, as it throws its luminescent canopy of glowing, shimmering chiffon to fall in green and pink and gold over the city and the garden.

Often, as I sit at my desk, the sounds behind me are of tearing newspaper, of beak and claw as Chicken carries out some elaborate ritual
of domestic rearrangement. It may be early morning, and Chicken still at breakfast, the consummate corvid process of eating and hiding, the sound of her beak closing on fragments of bread and butter alternating with the rustle and rip of the paper that carpets the floor of her house, as she hides things. I don’t know her criteria for choosing what’s to be hidden, whether, as a child might, she’s keeping the best bit until last, or if she’s stowing the dull, butterless portions to be dealt with when the rest is gone, or when the food runs out, an unlikely enough occurrence in this household. Since I am the only person with her, I assume that she is hiding it from me.

I don’t take it personally. All corvids hide, or ‘cache’, things. Caching, the collection and storing of food, is behaviour much studied as an indicator of a range of avian abilities extending far beyond the simple act of storing food for winter. Many birds cache, among them tits, woodpeckers and some raptors, but it is the corvids in which the behaviour seems to be at its most developed and sophisticated. If I hadn’t watched Chicken over years, I wouldn’t have known this. I would have known from reading that corvids cache but I wouldn’t have understood the obsessive, busy nature of caching, an activity that, for Chicken, is natural behaviour elevated to the status of art.

Although some authorities on the subject suggest that birds who have food available to them at all times don’t cache, Chicken does. It seems as much an occupation, a profession, as an insurance against hunger. She chooses her cache site, carries her bread or other food to it and begins the long process of concealment. She has many cache
sites – under rugs, under the newspaper in her house, inside the large velvet floor cushion in the study whose seams for years she has been painstakingly unpicking to allow her access to hide things (I no longer like to think about exactly what). After the initial hiding, she’ll tap down the paper or rug under which her stash is hidden, bending fussily, tidying, smoothing, standing back to make sure it’s fully concealed before turning the paper or rug over, picking it out and beginning again. She hides things not only in her house and under her own rug, but also under the Chinese rug upon which the dining table stands where, inevitably, I or someone else will unknowingly stand on them. Later, I will take the paint scraper – the tool most useful for the person who cleans up after a bird – and remove the flattened, unidentifiable mess.

When it comes to caching, nowhere, or rather no one, is sacred. Chicken is on the floor. I am eating lunch. I give her a flake of poached salmon from my plate. She takes it with alacrity and immediately begins to cache it. Her choice of site, were I a habitual cacher, would not be my own. Thrusting her beak under the hem of my jeans, she wedges the fish between the laces of my boots. I do nothing, for it will not, I know, be there for long. She hovers a moment then retrieves it. She carries it into the hall and, since I haven’t yet noticed the odour of rotting salmon, I have to assume that it was eaten. I search the turn-ups on my jeans regularly to make sure that, if Chicken hasn’t removed an item recently cached, I do. When a food finds special favour she takes particular trouble over the caching, wrapping the item first in whatever paper is to hand then
unwrapping it and wrapping it again. Often, I see one of the long curtains in the kitchen moving, apparently of its own accord, as Chicken stows her treasure and retrieves it again. Her current favourite for caching is goat cheese. One piece can occupy a day as it disappears and reappears, is nibbled and hidden again, and ultimately unearthed (by me), staling under the rug beneath her house.

Perhaps, though, the greatest monument to her art, the most supreme of all caching sites, is at the foot of one of the kitchen walls, an area above the skirting board where both paper and plaster are missing. The excavation – for it is more excavation than mere hole – exposes four horizontal lines of lathe. Just visible in the cobwebbed darkness behind them is a grey hint of plaster, mortar, horsehair, the materials Victorian builders used to fill the space between the solid granite slabs. Five or so inches by about eight, with the gently rounded curve of a graph rising, then falling, the area of the excavation expands minutely but inexorably, day by day, year by year, with the slow, eternal movement of the tectonic plate. Chicken is the architect, the archaeologist of the project. I no longer attempt to fill it in or to prevent its expansion because I have realised that to do so would be to thwart her instincts and, who knows, perhaps her ambitions too. What her ambitions are, I do not know. I accept though that the excavation is, if not her life’s work, then a significant part of it, inseparable from her profound corvid need and desire to hide things and then find them again.