The Flight of Birds Read online

  It’s a slow day at the office, so I trawl deeper into YouTube, learning more about the ingenuity of crows. In another Attenborough clip, a crow lands on a log in a forest, her feathers splendid in the sunlight like wet tar. She holds a long twig in her beak. She’s listening. The camera, confidingly, provides a close-up of a white grub, nibbling the inside of the log. The crow’s eyes glisten. She threads the twig into a knot in the log. She stabs. The twig is thrust in deeper. The skewer is raised. Harpooned on the end of the stick is a fat witchetty grub. It looks like a jelly bean or a lolly snake. A nice, juicy close-up: a satisfied gleam in the crow’s red-reflective eyes.

  I bookmark several clips and file them carefully away. I can’t help myself: I like collecting; making connections. I don’t really know why. Under the bed at home, I have a shoebox of ‘interesting things’—several shoeboxes, actually. Bits of newspaper, academic essays, snippets of poems. My wife calls me a bowerbird, and sometimes threatens to chuck out the boxes when the next council clean-up swings around.

  I wander on to other online resources. In the journal Science I read further about the New Caledonian crow and what I discover is called their ‘tool-related cognitive capability’. The journal recounts an experiment in which a crow had to use a hook and a bucket in combination to reach a reward. The experiment was run a few times before the hook was taken away. In the next experiment the crow fashioned her own, fixing one end of the wire to gaffer tape to create the bend, and then levering the wire into place. The researchers comment that the crow had never seen wire being bent before, and, to their knowledge, the crow had ‘no opportunity for hook-making to emerge by chance shaping or reinforcement of randomly generated behaviour’. There was no instruction manual lying about the laboratory, no YouTube tutorial to watch. The researchers note that this activity is remarkable in ‘a species so distantly related to humans and lacking symbolic language’. I ruminate on the crows in Japan, slicing through a city overstimulated with symbols, light and noise. I wonder what the crows think of the electronic red man flashing at the pedestrian crossing, and the incessant warning beeps.

  Back in David Attenborough’s forest, a young crow watches her experienced parent stabbing at a witchetty grub. The fledgling squawks inquisitively; the parent, possibly irritated, flaps away. The fledgling picks up her parent’s twig, tries to insert it in the log, but the twig slips into the grass. ‘She hasn’t got all the details exactly right,’ Attenborough comments, wryly. ‘It will be about a year before she masters the skill.’

  My daughter’s question:

  She’s tracing ski tracks in her mashed potato. ‘What will Charlotte eat?’ she asks.

  ‘Birds are very resourceful,’ I say. ‘Finish your peas.’

  The Third Story: Birds of Paradise

  I flick through the weekend magazine, stopping at a feature article about birds of paradise. It is one of those history-of-the-topic-in-one-fell-swoop articles and quotes the nineteenth-century natural historian Alfred Russel Wallace describing the bird of paradise as ‘the most extraordinary and the most beautiful of the feathered inhabitants of the earth’.

  One of the glossy photographs accompanying the story captures a bird of paradise mid-air, leaping for a bug. The bird has a yellow cowl, purply-brown wings and a grandiloquent fanning tail, which is gleaming white and wispy. His tail looks ridiculously long: double the length of the bird’s torso. According to the article, the white plumage was shorn from the birds, to be worn ostentatiously by sophisticated European ladies and also as part of the ceremonial garments of the Yonggom tribe in upper New Guinea. The French miniature painter Jean Baptiste Audebert created a new pigment, with a golden iridescence, to more accurately capture the feathers’ sheen.

  The Latin name for birds of paradise is Paradisaea apoda. Apoda means ‘without feet’. When explorers to the Pacific first encountered birds of paradise and needed to send them to Europe, they stuffed them and cut off their legs for easier transportation. When the ornithologists of the Royal Society examined the specimens they didn’t realise the legs had been removed. They developed an elaborate theory about a species of bird that was always in flight: feeding, sleeping and copulating in an elegant dance above the ocean. In his 1774 work A History of the Earth, and Animated Nature, Oliver Goldsmith writes: ‘the extraordinary splendour of its plumage assisted this deception; and as it had heavenly beauty, so it was asserted to have a heavenly residence.’ When Alfred Russel Wallace explored the Malay Archipelago in 1854, he encountered another mutation of the bird’s body. He observed a local process for preserving the plumage of birds of paradise, writing:

  The native mode of preserving them … is to cut off the wings and feet, and then skin the body up to the beak, taking out the skull. A stout stick is then run up through the specimen coming out at the mouth. Round this some leaves are stuffed, and the whole is wrapped up in a palm spathe and dried in the smoky hut. By this plan the head, which is really large, is shrunk up almost to nothing, the body is much reduced and shortened, and the greatest prominence is given to the flowing plumage … [this produces] a most erroneous idea of the proportions of the living bird.

  The article ends its exotic story-weaving with an account of the illegal bird of paradise skin trade throughout Indonesia. Interestingly, because hunters have always sought out the most outlandish plumage, in many generations only the alpha males are slaughtered, and the surviving lesser males can continue the species. Birds of paradise, the article notes, are polygynous, so one male can impregnate multiple females. The journalist takes as much delight in calling the birds Casanovas as he does in retelling the tales of severed feet and ceremonial dancing. As much delight as I have when I cut out the article and stick it into a box under my bed.

  My daughter’s question:

  We’re out walking the dog, ostensibly looking for Charlotte, even though it’s been a week since her disappearance. There are spits of rain, but my daughter is—wilfully, resolutely—ignoring them. Each tree we pass is a site of possibility. ‘Beautiful,’ my daughter offers to the branches. There’s nothing there. ‘Breakfast,’ she whispers, half-hopefully.

  Our steps fall into a rhythm as the dog lollops ahead, sniffing out clues. We’re quiet for a minute or two. Sadness hovers, so I tentatively return to my refrain about natural resilience: that animals have genetic instincts and will know where to peck in the earth for worms, will know which twigs are best to line a nest. There are plenty of wild birds in the neighbourhood, I tell her. Maybe there’s another budgie out there for her, and she’s settled down with her own family.

  ‘And what if bad men catch her?’ my daughter asks.

  I can’t answer that question. I think of feathered hats and the illegal skin trade and wonder what constitutes a bad man. I think of an open vestibule door.

  The Fourth Story: St Kevin and the Blackbird

  My wife and I go to a wedding. The reading is Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘St Kevin and the Blackbird’. I don’t know the poem, but I’ll find it later in the local library. St Kevin was a hermit, living in a hut, or maybe a cave, or even just under an awning to keep out of the rain. He’s often associated with the natural world: his loneliness, they say, was eased when the bushes and the creepers round the cave used to sing sweet tunes to him.

  St Kevin prays with his arms in crucifix position so he can experience the authentic suffering of faith. A blackbird lands on St Kevin’s outstretched arm. The bird has twigs in her mouth and is making a nest. St Kevin watches. He lets the bird lay her egg and waits for it to hatch. Weeks pass, rain and sunshine pelt down, and St Kevin’s arm remains outstretched. He finds himself, as Heaney puts it, ‘linked / into the network of eternal life’. The poem is about patience and endurance, about selfless or even thankless love. As he waits, Heaney’s St Kevin prays ‘to labour and not to seek reward’. In the end, the bird, the man, the rain and the landscape are all absorbed into one limitless prayer.

  At the reception there’s a lot of bemused chuck
ling about what an odd choice the poem was for a reading, and the best man makes an off-colour joke about honeymoons and smashing eggs for omelettes.

  My daughter’s question:

  She peers out the back window into a bedraggled garden. It’s been raining all week. She turns to look at me. She doesn’t articulate the question, but I can read it in her eyes. Doesn’t she need me any more?

  The Fifth Story: The Siege of Acre

  I watch a documentary on the History Channel about the Crusades and falconry. My daughter has clambered into my lap. Her arms are shoelaced round my neck. It’s latish at night: my wife has an early start and has taken herself off to bed. The last thing she does after brushing her teeth is to remind me to put our daughter to bed at a decent hour. I promise, but the television takes hold, and the girl’s curled body is so warm, and I don’t want to disturb her sleep.

  In the twelfth century, the TV tells me and my snoring daughter, falcons were popular animals both in Europe and in the East. The secrets and skills of bird-training were even offered as diplomatic gestures: the knowledge was a symbol, if not of peace then of chivalry. It’s well known that the leather hawk hood was an invention of the Orient, and some historians claim that the falcon hunt on horseback was introduced to the East by the Christians. Falcons were also used by chroniclers of the Crusades to make sense of the world. Richard the Lionheart’s passion is often described through analogies with birds. The late nineteenth-century historian T.A. Archer recounts an event that took place on Richard’s journey to the Holy Land in September 1190. The king is riding through Salerno in south-west Italy to join the rest of the Crusaders in the port of Messina. Passing through a village he hears the cry of a hawk in one of the cottages. As king, Richard decrees that the bird should fall into his possession. Archer tells the story like this:

  This house he entered and took the bird; but the rustics, who were unwilling to let it go, came running up from every side and attacked him with stones and staves. One of them even drew his knife upon the king. Upon this the king smote him with the side of his sword and broke it.

  In contrast, Saladin is generally represented more favourably. The documentary includes an interview with the historian and writer Helen Macdonald, who has written widely on hawks and falcons. In the later stages of the siege of Acre, she says, when the Crusaders’ water supply became contaminated and the soldiers suffered fever and dysentery, ‘A besieged Richard I sent an envoy to Saladin to request food for his starving falcons; Saladin immediately delivered baskets of his best poultry for the falcons alone.’ Macdonald also relates a more famous moment earlier in the siege when:

  a prized gyrfalcon belonging to King Philip I broke its leash and flew straight to the top of the city walls. Philip was horrified. An envoy requesting that the falcon be returned was refused.

  I imagine a conference taking place under the frayed off-white canvas of a Crusader’s tent. Richard clanks about, sweating in his armour, slashing out a scheme to launch another foolhardy assault. Philip of France, flush-cheeked, the baby of the royal group, pouts and weeps over the loss of his plaything, clutching at the bird’s blanket and her pale leather hood. A preening advisor, rancid with dirt and hunger, having suffered months of royal whims, suggests tentatively that perhaps it might be better if we didn’t show the enemy our passions, that perhaps the best show of strength is the one that dismisses moments of grief as matters of no importance. It’s only a bird, after all.

  His pleas are unheard: Macdonald tells us that a second envoy was dispatched by the Europeans ‘accompanied by trumpets, ensigns and heralds, offering a thousand gold crowns to Saladin in exchange for the errant falcon’. I think of Saladin, strutting atop the city walls, surveying the approaching heraldry. Noble and exotic, he’s played by Omar Sharif, or Laurence Olivier with a fake tan. In his outstretched hand the falcon plumes: his prize, his pawn. The falcon’s claws are curled around the sultan’s finger, or perhaps her talon is chained to the monarch’s elegant wrist. The falcon sniffs the air. Her blank eyes stare at the ocean shimmering in the distance. Saladin sniffs, too. Majestically, triumphantly, he holds the power of the world in his hands.

  I wonder why I am imagining this, with the dog flopped at my feet and my daughter curled around my torso.

  My daughter’s question:

  On Saturday morning, we’re dodging the clanking trolley through the crowds in the shopping centre. My daughter stops and lingers by the window of the pet shop. She’d normally be coveting the kittens, giggling as they roll around on top of each other or snuggle together in the far corner of the glass cabinet. But today she’s looking at the bird cages beyond. I let her go in. The cages are full: brown and striped finches, with flecks of red on their beaks, snap in the air. Tufty-faced cockatiels, their cheeks flushed with orange, flirt with a captivated family. My daughter, of course, has her eye on the budgies. She fancies one in the corner who is squeezing his wings against the cage. The bird is bigger than Charlotte was, puffier around the head, his beak almost buried in the swollen yellow feathers.

  ‘Do you think Charlotte would mind?’ my daughter asks.

  The Sixth Story: The Swan and the Goose

  That night, the cover safely over Charlotte II’s cage in the vestibule, we read Aesop’s fables together. My daughter is reading them aloud to me: a new trick she’s learned. She falters over some words, but, for the most part, the sentences flow.

  She tells me the story of the swan and the goose:

  A farmer goes to market and buys two birds—a swan for her beauty and a goose to eat. When he goes at night to kill the goose, he mistakenly catches the swan. But, just as he is about to kill her, the swan sings a beautiful song and the man realises his mistake. The moral is ‘sweet words deliver us from peril, when harsh words would fail’.

  My daughter stumbles over the word ‘peril’. She doesn’t ask what it means, but I can hear her mind fluttering.

  I’ve read the fable before in other books. Sometimes the moral is different. In one, it’s simply ‘gentle speech does no harm’. There’s a history of the tale being used by scholars—Latin orators, medieval clerics—as a parable about the necessity of eloquent persuasion. I imagine Cicero and Mark Antony, pontificating in the Senate or on the white steps of the Forum. I remember the envoy of Philip I threading together words for the release of the falcon. I conjure up Machiavelli. Or maybe not Machiavelli. I think of the thumbscrews of the Medicis, and wince.

  There’s another version of the fable which adds an extra scene. After the farmer discovers his mistake, he asks the swan why her song was so beautiful when she was in danger of being killed. The swan replies that ‘death is a gift, a release of the misery of life’.

  I’m glad this isn’t the moral included in my daughter’s book.

  There’s also another, more ambiguous moral sung by the swan in a different version. The swan is lying upside-down on the chopping block, her long neck pinned down by the farmer’s gnarled hand. In his other hand, the cleaver is poised. The swan opens her beak to sing and the farmer feels the reverberation through his rough palm. The song glistens in the air. It haunts the evening, drifts out over the man’s shack, the outhouses, the fields, the roads and the creek. The wild birds hear it as they slumber in the reeds. The man, cleaver still in hand, listens: marble-stilled, hushed. The swan sings, ‘Music can delay death.’

  My daughter’s question:

  She’s allowing the word ‘peril’ to shape and re-shape her lips. She moves on to other interesting words. ‘Swan,’ she says. ‘Swan song.’

  She thinks.

  ‘Charlotte can sing,’ she says.

  Then, after a few moments of word-shaping, she asks:

  ‘What happened to the goose?’

  My question:

  I imagine Charlotte, the first Charlotte. I know the stories I’ve spun about animal resilience are just fantasies, stories in the air. They’re cuttings of ideas, severed, like a bird of paradise’s feet.

 
I think of Charlotte’s first night of freedom in the trees in the park. No millet to nibble at, the bark hard and dry. The wind trembles her feathers. In the pet shop next to the gaudy parrots, there’s a sign that says: ‘Regular wing clipping is recommended to prevent flying away or any injuries to the bird.’ I don’t know if a bird who’s lived her life in a cage would be able to survive a night, two nights, in the cold.

  The intelligent crow in Science magazine, the one who spontaneously bent the wire, was born in the wild and only captured once she’d reached maturity. There was another crow kept in the laboratory, who had been raised in a zoo. According to the researchers, he ‘rarely attempted the task [of hooking the food] and never bent the wire. He observed the female bending the wire and stole the food from her in three trials.’ He hadn’t got the details exactly right, as David Attenborough might say. He might learn. The Science writers report that: ‘The birds are tested together because they are highly social and, when separated, are less motivated to participate in experiments.’ But Charlotte is alone. Charlotte tries to shelter from the frigid night under a broken wing. In my mind’s eye, I see the shell of feathers lying rigid in the morning grass. A neighbourhood cat—noble, exotic, Oriental—pounces. Breakfast.