starling excrement.)
Max lived with us for seven years, adjusting his song to the seasons, flying and shouting, and was old when he did what birds do, sank into himself, spirit shrinking, eyes clouding as he crouched in his small domain.
When his starling died, Mozart provided an elaborate funeral for him (compounding the widespread belief in his eccentricity, although the death of his father the same week may have inclined him towards greater attention to funerals). When Max died, we buried him quietly, with only the smallest ceremony, in the garden.
I think of him often, on the late-winter afternoons when I pass a derelict building in Langstane Place, a squarish granite building with boarded windows. From the darkness within the voices of starlings, probably hundreds, sound, their dusk song seeping, leaking joyously from every unseen aperture, a few last birds darting towards their home; and on the darkening afternoons when I watch starlings fly in a dusk cloud over the busiest part of town, while below people shop, oblivious. How starlings navigate during these astonishing evening displays is still not entirely understood, but they may take their markers from their immediate neighbours, each one in a crowd of thousands observing, turning and closing, moving with a fifteen-millisecond reaction, widening and spreading, drawing together in breathtaking, iron-filing flight. I used to watch from my vantage point at the window at work, overlooking the city-centre viaduct under which they roost, a starling city, an alternative world. Starlings organise themselves for the night in their social groupings, with adult males flying in to roost first, occupying the best places in the centre, whilst the young females, those last scatterings of flecks in the sky, sucked into the curve of the tunnels, have to make do with what’s left.
‘Just like life,’ I used to say, probably tediously, to colleagues, watching. And so it is, just like life. (Although in the morning, the reverseis true – the old boys leave the roost first, to grab, no doubt, the best of breakfast, while the little girls wait their turn.)
In a recent cartoon feature in the New Yorker entitled ‘A Guide to City Birds’, Matthew Diffee provides the delightfully drawn profiles of five birds: a portrait and short curriculum vitae of snow goose, rock dove, sparrow, hawk and starling. The starling is Frank Scarpelli: ‘Likes: Pizza. Dislikes: I hate freakin’ cats and tourists and I’ve never been a big fan of birdbaths. I don’t get the point, really. About me: I grew up in the Bronx. Friends call me Scraps. I work hard. Play hard. You gotta be tough in this city …’
4
Madame Chickeboumskaya
T he years of keeping doves and other birds laid a foundation, encouraged a kind of enquiring acceptance of whatever, or whoever, might transpire or arrive, and so I was prepared. We all were. The evening the doorbell rang, we were ready, Chicken too, it seemed, smiling from her box, as infant rooks do, with their tragi-comic look, their corvid gravitas wholly at odds with the wide, frilled, amiable look of all small birds. This one, the offspring of the rooks that have lived for a long time in the woods near Crathes Castle, flying through and over its beautiful gardens, its yew hedges and its rose borders, peered from her box, her blue eyes interested, observing us as we were observing her. At once I was fascinated by her black, banded feet and legs, the fineness of her toenails, her pink skin erupting with dark feathers. The inside of her beak was bright, attention-grasping red, opening readily for food. Naturally, I took the advice of Kenton C. Lint. Onthe subject of feeding members of the crow family, his dietary recommendations were both reassuring and daunting: on the one hand, corvids would eat, it appeared, anything; on the other, part of their daily diet should include
Rodents: 40g
Chicks: 51g
Choice of insects: 14g grasshopper, locusts, crickets, beetles,
Max lived with us for seven years, adjusting his song to the seasons, flying and shouting, and was old when he did what birds do, sank into himself, spirit shrinking, eyes clouding as he crouched in his small domain.
When his starling died, Mozart provided an elaborate funeral for him (compounding the widespread belief in his eccentricity, although the death of his father the same week may have inclined him towards greater attention to funerals). When Max died, we buried him quietly, with only the smallest ceremony, in the garden.
I think of him often, on the late-winter afternoons when I pass a derelict building in Langstane Place, a squarish granite building with boarded windows. From the darkness within the voices of starlings, probably hundreds, sound, their dusk song seeping, leaking joyously from every unseen aperture, a few last birds darting towards their home; and on the darkening afternoons when I watch starlings fly in a dusk cloud over the busiest part of town, while below people shop, oblivious. How starlings navigate during these astonishing evening displays is still not entirely understood, but they may take their markers from their immediate neighbours, each one in a crowd of thousands observing, turning and closing, moving with a fifteen-millisecond reaction, widening and spreading, drawing together in breathtaking, iron-filing flight. I used to watch from my vantage point at the window at work, overlooking the city-centre viaduct under which they roost, a starling city, an alternative world. Starlings organise themselves for the night in their social groupings, with adult males flying in to roost first, occupying the best places in the centre, whilst the young females, those last scatterings of flecks in the sky, sucked into the curve of the tunnels, have to make do with what’s left.
‘Just like life,’ I used to say, probably tediously, to colleagues, watching. And so it is, just like life. (Although in the morning, the reverseis true – the old boys leave the roost first, to grab, no doubt, the best of breakfast, while the little girls wait their turn.)
In a recent cartoon feature in the New Yorker entitled ‘A Guide to City Birds’, Matthew Diffee provides the delightfully drawn profiles of five birds: a portrait and short curriculum vitae of snow goose, rock dove, sparrow, hawk and starling. The starling is Frank Scarpelli: ‘Likes: Pizza. Dislikes: I hate freakin’ cats and tourists and I’ve never been a big fan of birdbaths. I don’t get the point, really. About me: I grew up in the Bronx. Friends call me Scraps. I work hard. Play hard. You gotta be tough in this city …’
4
Madame Chickeboumskaya
T he years of keeping doves and other birds laid a foundation, encouraged a kind of enquiring acceptance of whatever, or whoever, might transpire or arrive, and so I was prepared. We all were. The evening the doorbell rang, we were ready, Chicken too, it seemed, smiling from her box, as infant rooks do, with their tragi-comic look, their corvid gravitas wholly at odds with the wide, frilled, amiable look of all small birds. This one, the offspring of the rooks that have lived for a long time in the woods near Crathes Castle, flying through and over its beautiful gardens, its yew hedges and its rose borders, peered from her box, her blue eyes interested, observing us as we were observing her. At once I was fascinated by her black, banded feet and legs, the fineness of her toenails, her pink skin erupting with dark feathers. The inside of her beak was bright, attention-grasping red, opening readily for food. Naturally, I took the advice of Kenton C. Lint. Onthe subject of feeding members of the crow family, his dietary recommendations were both reassuring and daunting: on the one hand, corvids would eat, it appeared, anything; on the other, part of their daily diet should include
Rodents: 40g
Chicks: 51g
Choice of insects: 14g grasshopper, locusts, crickets, beetles,
Similar Books
