Esther Woolfson

A fascinating insight into corvids - crows, rooks, ravens and magpies - by an amazing woman who rescued a rook named Chicken and a magpie called Spike to add to her many feathered Aberdeen household of a parrot, a starling and a 'doo'cot' of doves in the back garden.

'If men had wings and black feathers, few of them would be clever enough to be crows.'
Henry Ward Beecher

Esther Woolfson's book is a wonderful introductory blend of biography, nature study, literary observations, and of course a history and biological study of corvids and other birds. I found the facts and trivia interesting - not knowing that magpies can mimic human speech like parrots, for instance - but absolutely applauded the author's rubbishing of human superstitions and fears regarding corvids. Crows feeding on the dead after the Great Fire of London and on battlefields 'damaged corvids' prospects for centuries', just as birds were blamed for killing sheep when they were only feeding on the corpses. 'We are casual in our waste of the lives of other humans but reverential in the treatment of their remains,' Woolfson observes. 'Corvids seem to absorb and reflect our guilt.'

I love that the birds in the Woolfson household become part of the family too - Spike the lively magpie calling 'HELLO!' made me smile, and his personality was so endearing that I was heartbroken when the inevitable happened. I find corvids fascinating to watch but I'm not sure I could adopt one, however - the descriptions of 'caching' food under carpets and disgorging 'pellets' - 'seed cases, grits, bits and pieces of unidentifiable detritus, glued together into a compact, slimy bullet' - from their beaks made me gag, not to mention all the target practice from the other end!

I already love watching the crows that hop around the city centre car park next to where I work, but I have developed a new-found admiration for these intelligent birds who have been given a bad name just for dressing in black and cleaning up our mess!… (meer)

A memoir, of sorts, with threads of hard science, poetry, mythology and philosophy interwoven through tales of the corvids (and a couple of parrot-family birds) that have shared the author's life and home.

The book was both hard to put down; engrossing, and at times a tiny bit tedious as Woolfson would sometimes go eyeball deep into exposition or poetic descriptions. The anecdotes about Chicken (a rook), Spike (a European magpie) and at the end, Ziki (a crow) are the best parts of the book; her love, care and concern for these birds is front and center and I found myself in total sympathy with her angst about her birds' welfare. I understand and share her concerns about whether her birds lives are unfulfilled, if healthier, and I also know my choices would ultimate be the same choices she's made, for better or worse.

A few questions came immediately to my mind as I started reading, and she addresses them about mid-way through the book. They all center around hygiene and the threatened lack of it when allowing birds, especially birds the size of corvids, to roam free. Here she gains even more admiration from me, because no way could I do it. The cleaning she does ... i can't stand the idea of birds in cages, but neither am I a domestic goddess, so all in all, it's best that I have restricted my avian feather-family to chickens, who are by all appearances happy and healthy in their outdoor (but secure) taj ma-chook.

Even so, corvids fascinate me; I wouldn't be at all averse to making friends with the ones that come through my garden now and again.

A great book for bird lovers and really, anyone who can appreciate that emotive intelligence is not restricted to just primates.… (meer)

I already knew this whole family of birds (crows, rooks, ravens and so on) to be intelligent, even self-aware some claim, but reading Corvus I still found there's a lot more to them than I'd realised.
   Woolfson's is the sort of home I reckon every kid should grow up in: ordinary suburban house on the outside, inside it's another world because she takes in stray birds. There's Bardie the cockatiel, Icarus the (non-flying) parrot, Marley the sun conure, Max the starling... What really changed her life though was the arrival of a rescued rook chick, immediately named Chicken; rooks are brainy, yes, as smart as apes perhaps, but it's also emotions, empathy, playfulness: personality. In fact, with Chicken there's even a touch of eccentricity as she eventually settles into a daily routine, becomes almost old-ladyish in some of her ways. Chicken snores, Chicken prefers J S Bach to Benjamin Britten, and here's how you start a typical day in the Woolfson household: "On meeting in the hall of a morning, we bow. She caws and I greet her. We bow again. She caws. I bow. She bows. I ask after her health. She caws. Eventually, we reach the kitchen."
   And then there's Spike. Sure, I knew crows and rooks are intelligent, but magpies? - I just had no idea at all. Spike the magpie chick sort of explodes across the pages like a box of black-and-white fireworks all going off at once, and grows rapidly into an exuberant and playful rascal who Woolfson herself reckons was the brightest of all the birds who lived with her. He's as good a mimic as any parrot; he booby-traps a cupboard door and then cackles with glee as a human gets drenched. And is he conscious? Of course he's conscious (to even ask seems ridiculous now). Singlehandedly, Spike transformed for ever the way I'll look at his entire species.
   This book is as full of wisdom, colour and life as the birds themselves (with some lovely illustrations too by Helen Macdonald) and if at times it's just a tad anthropomorphic, well maybe it is - although with animals so like ourselves as these, how much of it actually is anthropomorphism? In fact for me, as for Woolfson, that's what is most striking: "It's the points of similarity between us that delight me still. I admire the birds' anger and their rage, for I too (perhaps about different things) feel anger and rage. I like seeing their apparently purposeless play, for it indicates to me that they have minds free enough from concern to do it. I am astonished, always, by the way they'll appear to know without knowing, to understand, anticipate, react, for it makes me feel as if I live in an indivisible world, that my belief that we're nearer in every respect than I could have imagined is correct, that we are, whatever we are, something of the same."… (meer)