Corvus: A Life with Birds
Esther Woolfson
Language: English
Pages: 336
ISBN: 1582434778
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Letting her experience speak for itself, Woolfson likens the fears and foibles of corvids to those of humans, taking into account the science of bird intelligence, evolution, song, and flight. She highlights their big personalities and capacity for affection: Chicken hates computers and machines, while she loves evening neck scratches on Woolfson’s knee. It is through this intimate lens that Woolfson invites us to reconsider the kind of creature capable of being man’s best friend.
Nothing. It didn’t stop me from saying that, certainly, she could. Pliny almost reassured me: ‘the young Britannicus and Nero had a starling and also nightingales that had been taught to speak Greek and Latin, and, moreover, practised assiduously and spoke new words every day in ever longer phrases …’ Mozart too, I knew, once owned a starling, although his was bought for 34 kreuzer, from a shop in Vienna in 1784. By coincidence or chance, the starling was heard to sing bars of Mozart’s piano
appearance, a reaction that bears out the findings of the research into magpies and mirrors quoted in In the Company of Crows and Ravens. Even then, before I knew of the research, I’d wonder what it was that Spike was observing and what it might mean, or indicate about the nature of his consciousness of self. That he had a high degree of consciousness of self was something I never doubted. Consciousness in humans is a concept that defies definition, evades attempts to explain precisely what it
week, there are five more eggs. She sits, flattened to the ground, asking to be hand-fed, snoozing, head under wing. Again, she doesn’t sit on her eggs as she should to warm and incubate them towards hatching. I leave them as they lie, cooling, until after a few days I pick them up. She knows, but she does not know. The behaviour is impelled by something beyond herself. Perhaps she knows they will not hatch. I put the eggs with the other one on the plate, a small, perfect still-life. I would like
as constant companions, spies and bringers of news, whose names, Hugin and Munin, are Old Norse for ‘thought’ and ‘memory’. Ravens have been the inspiration for royal houses, have named constellations, led men to battle under standards bearing their likeness. Regarded as capricious and all-powerful, ravens dominate the spiritual life of many of the cultures of North America, Alaska and the Pacific Northwest. They are respected and admired for their observable qualities as well as their spiritual
designed to ameliorate the torments of moulting, oats and honey and many, many vitamins. (It’s difficult to tell if they work. Every year Bardie recovers, regrows his feathers, remains as hostile to me as he has always been.) Marley the sun conure annually shed his feathers of citrine and saffron, of pure scarlet and orange, scattered fragments of brilliance cast on the floor of his house. I have two of his wing feathers in front of me on my desk. They’re grey on the broader side of the rachis,