grubs, moths or mealworms.
In feeding Chicken, I avoided the freshly killed or caught and gave her minced meat and eggs and chopped-up nuts instead. I had had no dealings with an infant corvid but from her learnt that healthy corvid chicks are vigorous, greedy, their beaks sturdy enough for a little finger, food-laden, to be thrust down the waiting throat to the accompaniment of the sounds of strangled gargling. She fed and slept and watched and I carried her around with me everywhere in her box. She sat beside my desk in daytime, on the kitchen floor as I cooked, beside the fire in the evenings. When I greeted her, she greeted me. I was entranced. After some weeks, she began to leap on to the side of her box to stand, clearly anticipating flight. Then, one day, she flew. I picked her up from the table where she had landed and put her back in her box. I realised that this could be only a temporary measure. We looked at one another, this small corvid and myself. Well , we seemed to say, at this moment of mutual, inter-species questioning, what now? What indeed.
By now it seems at best disingenuous to say that I didn’t know enough of birds to consider reintroducing her to the wild. I wouldn’thave known how to. Even now I’m not sure that I would know. Her home was fifteen miles away and there were no rooks nearby. The matter seemed simple. She had been brought to us and was, therefore, our responsibility.
We constructed a house for Chicken from wood and wire, forerunner of her present abode, and placed it in the rat room, where the rats’ houses once stood. Left alone for the brief periods she was, she began the first of her building projects, excavating the wall beside her house, picking determinedly at the plaster until she had removed the top layer. I didn’t know then why she did it but there seemed to be no good reason to stop her. Holes can always be filled in.
I can’t remember how much attention she got – less, certainly than she does now although she was always with us, always around us, playing with the toys we gave her, the rubber mice she liked to carry in her beak or to punish by shaking, pecking, bashing against the floor, for crimes unknown. She hid under tables, chairs, explored and began to take her place easily in the household. She was small, fluffy-feathered, and ever underfoot. We had to be careful not to stand on her as she pulled at the hems of our jeans or played with our bootlaces. She would fly on to the tops of cupboards and not know how to find her way down. We had to climb up to rescue her. She began to respond to each of us in an individual way, with a different voice, different mannerisms, seeming to know from each of us what she might expect: a certain, limited degree of parental discipline from David and me, teasing fraternal playfulness from Bec and Han. Wisely enough, from the beginning, she understood that I was the one whofed her and although now I like to think that it was a bond of a different sort, I accept reluctantly that this might have provided the basis for our future relationship.
We progressed together, rook and human, and the knowledge, for the humans at least, was revelatory, mind-expanding, world-expanding. Chicken was clearly different from the other birds. I tried to examine the ways in which she was, to analyse what made her so. She seemed more inquisitive, more considered, as if her expectations of the world were broader. The doves’ expectations and desires seemed confined – entirely reasonably – to the single-minded pursuit of the affairs of doves. Whilst the parrots too were intelligent and responsive to humans, they seemed simply to have a different world-view, one that extended less far than Chicken’s. Chicken had an insatiable desire to find out. She wanted to know about the qualities of the small stones glittering with mica that she’d pick up in the garden, the purpose of the passing butterfly, what paper sounded like when it was torn. She
In feeding Chicken, I avoided the freshly killed or caught and gave her minced meat and eggs and chopped-up nuts instead. I had had no dealings with an infant corvid but from her learnt that healthy corvid chicks are vigorous, greedy, their beaks sturdy enough for a little finger, food-laden, to be thrust down the waiting throat to the accompaniment of the sounds of strangled gargling. She fed and slept and watched and I carried her around with me everywhere in her box. She sat beside my desk in daytime, on the kitchen floor as I cooked, beside the fire in the evenings. When I greeted her, she greeted me. I was entranced. After some weeks, she began to leap on to the side of her box to stand, clearly anticipating flight. Then, one day, she flew. I picked her up from the table where she had landed and put her back in her box. I realised that this could be only a temporary measure. We looked at one another, this small corvid and myself. Well , we seemed to say, at this moment of mutual, inter-species questioning, what now? What indeed.
By now it seems at best disingenuous to say that I didn’t know enough of birds to consider reintroducing her to the wild. I wouldn’thave known how to. Even now I’m not sure that I would know. Her home was fifteen miles away and there were no rooks nearby. The matter seemed simple. She had been brought to us and was, therefore, our responsibility.
We constructed a house for Chicken from wood and wire, forerunner of her present abode, and placed it in the rat room, where the rats’ houses once stood. Left alone for the brief periods she was, she began the first of her building projects, excavating the wall beside her house, picking determinedly at the plaster until she had removed the top layer. I didn’t know then why she did it but there seemed to be no good reason to stop her. Holes can always be filled in.
I can’t remember how much attention she got – less, certainly than she does now although she was always with us, always around us, playing with the toys we gave her, the rubber mice she liked to carry in her beak or to punish by shaking, pecking, bashing against the floor, for crimes unknown. She hid under tables, chairs, explored and began to take her place easily in the household. She was small, fluffy-feathered, and ever underfoot. We had to be careful not to stand on her as she pulled at the hems of our jeans or played with our bootlaces. She would fly on to the tops of cupboards and not know how to find her way down. We had to climb up to rescue her. She began to respond to each of us in an individual way, with a different voice, different mannerisms, seeming to know from each of us what she might expect: a certain, limited degree of parental discipline from David and me, teasing fraternal playfulness from Bec and Han. Wisely enough, from the beginning, she understood that I was the one whofed her and although now I like to think that it was a bond of a different sort, I accept reluctantly that this might have provided the basis for our future relationship.
We progressed together, rook and human, and the knowledge, for the humans at least, was revelatory, mind-expanding, world-expanding. Chicken was clearly different from the other birds. I tried to examine the ways in which she was, to analyse what made her so. She seemed more inquisitive, more considered, as if her expectations of the world were broader. The doves’ expectations and desires seemed confined – entirely reasonably – to the single-minded pursuit of the affairs of doves. Whilst the parrots too were intelligent and responsive to humans, they seemed simply to have a different world-view, one that extended less far than Chicken’s. Chicken had an insatiable desire to find out. She wanted to know about the qualities of the small stones glittering with mica that she’d pick up in the garden, the purpose of the passing butterfly, what paper sounded like when it was torn. She
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