It began when Esther Woolfson settled down in Aberdeen with her family. Despite never having kept birds before, she was asked if she would take on some doves, looking for a good home. Fortunately, there was a coal-shed which the family swiftly repurposed as a dove-cot or doo’cot. Then one of her daughters asked for a pet bird and Bardie the cockatiel came to live with them.
Then word got round.
People started bringing injured wild birds and abandoned nestlings to the Woolfson house. The pet-shop lady gave them a parrot with French moult whom she could not sell. Another parrot and some canaries were given to them by people who could no longer keep them, as was Max, a sweary starling. Woolfson bought a book called Feeding Cage Birds: A Manual of Diet for Aviculture by Kenton C. and Alice Marie Lint, and so began her life with birds.
The two birds who dominate this book are both corvids, of the crow family. One spring the bird-requesting daughter and her friends found a fledgling rook near their Guide camp. The little bird had fallen from her nest, or been pushed out, or had tried to fly and got lost. Of course, they brought her to Woolfson. Unlike previous wild birds, she thrived and received the fantastically inappropriate name of Chicken (short for Madame Chickeboumskaya). Spike, another fledgeling, fell from a nest near Woolfson’s home. He was a magpie, who learnt to talk a little (‘Spike, Spikey. Hello! Spikey? SPIKE!’ and ‘Bugger off!’ being typical remarks). Spike and Chicken became house birds, hopping about, perching on people’s knees and stuffing their food in holes in walls, under carpets and even in trouser turn-ups. The Woolfson home was soon crammed with cages, sprinkled with poo and liable to odd whiffs from food stashed in unexpected places, yet the humans adapted with grace to their fellow residents’ eccentricities and valued them as they should.
(Photograph of Esther Woolfson and Chicken by Simon Chubb; found here)
Feeding Cage Birds only gets Woolfson so far; soon she is reading about avian evolution and physiology, natural history and culture, bird habits and bird reputations, and she shares the fruits of her reading in Corvus, balancing anecdote with information, enthusiasm with consideration. However, it is the quality of her observation of her corvid companions and her thoughtfulness about human and bird relationships which made this book special in my eyes.
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 storing the dull, butterless portions to be dealt with when the rest is gone, or the food runs out [..] Since I am the only person with her, I assume she is hiding it from me. [...]
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 for 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.
Woolfson records her birds’ actions but she wants to understand them too and she instinctively wants to ascribe meaning to them. Is Chicken thinking when she is caching food? What then are her criteria for good hiding places? And how can Woolfson write about this without falling into anthropomorphism?
[...] trying to understand, for humans, is only possible through the sole means we have, the filter of ourselves and our ideas, our prejudices and often irrational beliefs. The lines we draw between sentiment and rigour are fine indeed.
For me, she succeeds in balancing between sentiment and rigour perfectly; her book charms and educates in equal measure. And it reminds us that we should cherish the urban wildlife around us and accommodate ourselves to it, rather than destroying its habitats and decrying its less salubrious behaviours.
Oh, and it has some very nice illustrations by Helen Macdonald, who went on to write H is for Hawk.