it, I realised only when, to my shock (and Chicken’s), startled by something outside, she took off and flew round the high ceiling of the study in two stunned and fearful circuits. Her relief on landing was clear. The possibilities of danger for her, of becoming tangled in lights, colliding with walls, was too great. Again, I wielded the clippers.
wonderfully, eagerly enquiring
For the first years, when there were fewer cats in vicinity, we’d let her peck in the grass, investigate the flowerbeds under the bushes. Most of the time though she’d sit with us, on the back of the garden bench eating the aphids from the overhanging roses, their fine green legs waving helplessly from the sides of her beak, or ‘sunning’ – spreading her wings to the warmth and light (neither particularly abundant entities in north-east Scotland). The first time I saw her do it, I was transfixed by horror and panic – Chicken in sunshine, sitting on the edge of the garden bench, beak hanging open, head to the side, wings held wide and drooping (a posture we now call ‘dying rook’), eyes veiled, apparently in the throes of a trance or coma. I didn’t know what had befallen the unfortunate bird while my back was momentarily turned. A tentative calling of her name appeared to summon her back from this unknown realm, from her innocent pursuit of sunbathing.
No one knows the true purpose of birds’ sunning. They may do it to help regulate their temperature, to increase their exposure to vitamin D, or to reduce feather parasites, but whatever it is, pleasure too appears to be involved. Since first seeing it, I notice birds everywhere spreading their wings in the sun, beaks gaping – blackbirds in the hedges of Union Street gardens, a thrush on the grass, the tiny robin on the garden table – all of them looking to the uninitiated as if they’re in the last, painful throes of some alarming, rapid, fatal avian malady.
Adjusting to life with a rook was gradual, mutual, for us all, a process of interpretation, supposition, trial, learning the gestures of another’s culture, the avoidance of the causes of fear or offence, matters of etiquette, slowly stepping one cautious step over the sacrosanct boundary into an unknown country.
Chicken seemed to enjoy being with us, perching under the table while we ate, hopping speculatively, carefully, on to someone’s foot and, in time, their knee. We learned not to extend our hands too quickly towards her, or indeed towards any bird. Her wariness of hands, maintained until today, is entirely reasonable. One doesn’t know what hands, or their owners, intend to do. But then, if Chicken is wary of fingers, we are equally so of beaks.
Corvid fears seem cultural, innate, rational as well as irrational. The Nobel Prize-winning naturalist Konrad Lorenz, in his book about animal behaviour King Solomon’s Ring , describes his jackdaws’ responses to seeing him holding a black, fluttering object (in his case, what he refers to as his ‘bathing drawers’) and being immediately surrounded by a crowd of angry jackdaws, trying to peck his hand, for they interpreted the object as one of their own, a dead jackdaw; other black objects, such as his camera, were regarded with equanimity. Chicken is used to most black objects by now, obliged to be perhaps by living in a household inhabited by inveterate and unregenerate wearers of black. She will though occasionally still complain loudly at the sight of a black dustbin bag.
The parrots we have kept, by comparison, have always seemed less afraid, more rational, less flighty in their fears, disliking cats andsparrow-hawks but regarding everything else with either calm or a degree of interest. It may be their different experience and history, being reared in aviaries, distant from their places of origin and from the circumstances of life in the wild that allows them a greater ease, but it may just be the way parrots are. (Bardie is afraid of chessboards. It may
wonderfully, eagerly enquiring
For the first years, when there were fewer cats in vicinity, we’d let her peck in the grass, investigate the flowerbeds under the bushes. Most of the time though she’d sit with us, on the back of the garden bench eating the aphids from the overhanging roses, their fine green legs waving helplessly from the sides of her beak, or ‘sunning’ – spreading her wings to the warmth and light (neither particularly abundant entities in north-east Scotland). The first time I saw her do it, I was transfixed by horror and panic – Chicken in sunshine, sitting on the edge of the garden bench, beak hanging open, head to the side, wings held wide and drooping (a posture we now call ‘dying rook’), eyes veiled, apparently in the throes of a trance or coma. I didn’t know what had befallen the unfortunate bird while my back was momentarily turned. A tentative calling of her name appeared to summon her back from this unknown realm, from her innocent pursuit of sunbathing.
No one knows the true purpose of birds’ sunning. They may do it to help regulate their temperature, to increase their exposure to vitamin D, or to reduce feather parasites, but whatever it is, pleasure too appears to be involved. Since first seeing it, I notice birds everywhere spreading their wings in the sun, beaks gaping – blackbirds in the hedges of Union Street gardens, a thrush on the grass, the tiny robin on the garden table – all of them looking to the uninitiated as if they’re in the last, painful throes of some alarming, rapid, fatal avian malady.
Adjusting to life with a rook was gradual, mutual, for us all, a process of interpretation, supposition, trial, learning the gestures of another’s culture, the avoidance of the causes of fear or offence, matters of etiquette, slowly stepping one cautious step over the sacrosanct boundary into an unknown country.
Chicken seemed to enjoy being with us, perching under the table while we ate, hopping speculatively, carefully, on to someone’s foot and, in time, their knee. We learned not to extend our hands too quickly towards her, or indeed towards any bird. Her wariness of hands, maintained until today, is entirely reasonable. One doesn’t know what hands, or their owners, intend to do. But then, if Chicken is wary of fingers, we are equally so of beaks.
Corvid fears seem cultural, innate, rational as well as irrational. The Nobel Prize-winning naturalist Konrad Lorenz, in his book about animal behaviour King Solomon’s Ring , describes his jackdaws’ responses to seeing him holding a black, fluttering object (in his case, what he refers to as his ‘bathing drawers’) and being immediately surrounded by a crowd of angry jackdaws, trying to peck his hand, for they interpreted the object as one of their own, a dead jackdaw; other black objects, such as his camera, were regarded with equanimity. Chicken is used to most black objects by now, obliged to be perhaps by living in a household inhabited by inveterate and unregenerate wearers of black. She will though occasionally still complain loudly at the sight of a black dustbin bag.
The parrots we have kept, by comparison, have always seemed less afraid, more rational, less flighty in their fears, disliking cats andsparrow-hawks but regarding everything else with either calm or a degree of interest. It may be their different experience and history, being reared in aviaries, distant from their places of origin and from the circumstances of life in the wild that allows them a greater ease, but it may just be the way parrots are. (Bardie is afraid of chessboards. It may
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