Corvus (3 page)

Anything I’d read about aggression in dove behaviour seemed academic, or else I’d simply forgotten, until I found a small chick, still in its nest, being viciously pecked by an adult from another family, its head reduced to bloodied bone. The experience felt like the flight from Eden, a lesson, if any were ever necessary, in the folly of anthropomorphism, or of relying on the veracity of depiction or scope of the knowledge of natural history, of assorted Levantine scribblers and Renaissance painters.

From that day, my view of the religious art of Europe changed. There, in most portrayals of the Annunciation at least, is a depiction of the Holy Spirit in avian form, in every possible pose, guise and attitude, descending, ascending, flying, hovering, doves large and small, doves who don’t look very much like doves, doves who appear to stand upon the halo or the head of Mary, doves who appear to be attempting to dive at speed towards the unfortunate woman’s head (miscreant behaviour, surely, for the embodiment of the Holy Spirit). There are a few Annunciations in which the key player is notably absent. In a painting by the fifteenth-century Dutch painter Jan de Beer there is no dove, perhaps because even the Holy Spirit might be deterred by the presence of a cat sitting on the floor. (Cats, being amoral pagans, might not have the necessary inhibition to lay off the Lord’s messenger.) The dove that appears in Van Eyck’s Ghent altarpiece is a particularly pretty one, with rays of light expanding from and surrounding his neat white head. There they are, in so many Annunciations, foreshortened, in rays, in beams of light, emerging from marvellous faded frescoes, soaring over cloud-borne banks of naked, levitating infants – but as far as I’m concerned they’re all there under false pretences.

 
like the antlers of rutting stags

I learnt not only of murder, but of domestic violence, witnessing squabbles of a wilfully aggressive nature. One day I came into the house to a sound I had never heard before, a scratching accompanied by a dull thudding. Tentatively, I crept in, peered round the study door. Outside, on the ledge of the small, high, recessed window, two doves were beating the hell out of one another. They appeared to be attempting to blind one another while simultaneously endeavouring to twist off the other’s head. Their perfect white wings were locked like the antlers of rutting stags as they wrestled in the small, three-sided space. Swaying, thrashing, biting, their interlaced wings struck again and again against the window. In a moment of temporary triumph, one nudged the other towards the edge of the sill until, still entwined, both plunged into the air beyond. Dipping into flight, they circled for a moment of mid-air recovery before they were back, ready for another round. Scratch, shuffle, thud.
The eyes, the eyes! Go for the eyes! The
wing! Give it more wing! Whack! Twist the head! Twist the head!

This particular dispute was territorial: both wanted to occupy the ledge above the study window. Wrestling continued for three or four minutes until the moment when, for no reason I could see, one of them flew off, defeated. The victor settled itself on the sill, until the next time. Having made its territorial gain, it tried to peck its way into the study, tapping its beak incessantly against the window.

The sound (which I’m used to now) was as ghosts might sound transporting their earthly chattels through empty rooms, creatures entombed within medieval walls, trying to get out; the inexplicably eerie beat of feather over glass, the frantic scratch and click of toenails on wood, and above it the voices of the aggrieved parties, muted by the glass, muttering bitter outrage and complaint.

They’d fight too on the low roof of the doo’cot, compelling me to rush out with a broom to try to separate the combatants, who would fly immediately away to stand patiently on the edge of the gutter, waiting until I’d gone before flying back to begin again. I used to look at the card pinned beside my desk with its depiction of Picasso’s ‘La Colombe sur fond noir’, and think of his manifesto of peace: ‘I stand for life against death; I stand for peace against war’, and, with resignation, began slowly to accept that the symbol of the dove of peace convinces most when one has had minimal contact with the real thing. Sometimes I would think about the doves’ egregious behaviour but the visions would collide, elide as I’d see one flying in sunlight, its wings wide, its feet curled neatly under it, its face one of sweet and beatific calm. I would forget. I accepted then that I am shallow, seduced by beauty. I knew that, when it comes to doves, this, regrettably, is the way they are.

In time, my awareness of light changed, my reaction to sound, to sudden noise and panic outside, a change in shadow or brightness, the
falling-silent of the small birds at the bird feeder, the numb, heavy thud against the window. Until then, I had never been aware of the sparrow-hawks who patrol the skies above us but I learnt that even the sight of one, too high to be easily identifiable for me, would cause terror among the birds. Alerted one day by the sight of the doves flying wildly towards their house, and the sound of one colliding in panic with the window, I looked out and saw a dart-shaped brown bird rush and wrestle something on to the stones of the path. I ran out immediately to engage in brave combat with whatever it might be, armed only with a remnant from a long-ago Hallowe’en, a red-plastic trident with a wobbly pole. Devil-like, I stormed down the path brandishing the weapon towards the crouching bird who, by spreading his beautiful wings of grey-blue and soft brown, was attempting to conceal the bright white of his victim’s feathers, as if by so doing, I might not notice. The dove, I could see, was alive and appeared undamaged. I jabbed the trident towards the sparrow-hawk, who turned to stare at me with a look of great, entirely deserved hatred before he rose slowly from his lost dinner and equally slowly flew away. In flight, he was exquisite. He was too, very frightening. Were I a bird, I would share their terror at the quick silhouette passing overhead like a faraway cloud. The rescued dove, unharmed, flew instantly back to its house where it sat with its friends and family, complaining for the rest of the day in a loud and outraged voice, no doubt about the need for raptor control or the unfortunate tendency of life to be unpredictable.

Always, after a dove has flown against the window in mortal fear, there remains a pattern on the glass, a faint and powdered image, a
ghost imprint of outstretched wings, a small body, two smudged arcs of feathers.

I was even more anxious after that, watching for the sparrow-hawk’s inevitable return. It was the final, emphatic affirmation that dove-keeping wasn’t likely to make me more serene or bestow upon me a previously undiscovered ability to regard the world with equanimity. It was, I know now, the level of self-delusion that leads people to buy houses in countries they have seen only in summer, or to move from city to country believing that the essentials of life will be different there. Any sense of calm derived from the presence of the doves was transient, a series of brief interludes interspersing days of fear and panic.

The sparrow-hawk, either the one who had visited before or another, did visit again. I looked out of the window one morning. Snow in April? The flowerbed was hidden under a drift of white. In the middle, with an air of calm intent, was the hawk, plucking and tearing. The process was prolonged, the remains slight, only a pair of feet, a light scattering of feathers.

When, after we’d been here for a few years, new neighbours moved into the house next door, the first alarming sign I noticed in their garden was a large, well-kept black and white cat. The second, shortly after, was finding a dove, dead, eviscerated in a mess of blood on the dove-house floor.

The cat was well-fed, pampered and almost preternaturally feral in its instincts. For all the time it lived next door, the cat and I waged a one-sided war. All the advantages were on its side, for it was a cat, possessor of every useful, artful feline attribute, every precision implement in the armamentarium of silence and stealth. My weaponry was a water-pistol. The cat evaded and avoided every attempt at deterrence, every blast of water, my putting up elaborate barricades, installing a sonic anti-cat device, to protect my doves from harm. When I asked the neighbours if they could restrain its activities, they said in a mildly irritated way that it was only doing what cats do. For the maintenance of neighbourly harmony, I refrained from saying that I didn’t care what they do; I just didn’t want them doing it to my doves.

That late summer after the first murder, the doves stayed outside for days, too scared to return to their house, perching on nearby rooftops, their voices loud in warning, descending every now and again, cautiously, to feed. The weather was warm and I was happy enough to allow them to stay outside. Only when the nearby roofs began to display the consequences of their occupancy did I begin to worry about complaints. When the weather became suddenly autumnal, I stood for hours by their house, shutting them in one by one as they went in for breakfast, until they were all inside. I kept them in for a few days until the rain, for which I had waited with the anxiety of an Ethiopian farmer, washed away the consequences of summer.

The murders continued, reducing the number of doves to single figures again, and stopped only when the neighbours, and cat, moved
away. The next ones brought with them several noisy, energetic children, as useful an anti-cat measure as any.

During the time of the cat depredations, of finding and removing bodies, the period of my long and futile war, I wondered if it was worth continuing to keep the doves; but I thought about what we’d all miss if we didn’t have them: our pleasure in the way they looked, their presence in the garden as they lined up to bathe, wandered across the grass on damp mornings, pottered by the pond, the fanatic, obvious delight they took in flight, their luminous, stellar beauty. Their sounds had become part of our lives, their voices echoing down the sound-chambers of the chimneys, the way the movement of their wings outside altered the colours in the rooms. I considered my relationship with them too. It was, I decided, a rather one-sided matter but while the consternation, worry and appreciation were all mine, I didn’t expect or hope for it to be otherwise. The doves accepted my presence. They required nothing from me but food. What I required of them was what they did, lighting winter’s darkest days as flashes of white and silver against a slate or dun-coloured sky, on summer evenings, creeping up from gutter to slate to the apexes of the dormer windows on the roof as the sun lowered in the sky before heading for home, their lovely wings slap-slapping against the wind and the sky.

N
ot long after we got the first doves, Rupert, the rat we had brought from London, died. We found somewhere to obtain two more. They were females, Japanese hooded rats of lissom white and charcoal beauty. We bought them not knowing that one was already pregnant, a circumstance that ensured that, for the next thousand days or so, the girls were rarely without a rat somewhere about their person, sitting on a shoulder, moving bumpily up the inside of a sleeve. We installed the offspring in strictly segregated quarters in what in other houses would be called the utility room but in ours is still called ‘the rat room’ in tribute to those rats, remembered still for their beauty, intelligence and charm, for their classical pantheon of names, Mars, Apollo, Venus, Aphrodite.

For her twelfth birthday not long after, Bec asked for a bird of her own, one that would live in the house. The request seemed reasonable.
What kind of bird? None of us knew. I went round pet shops, peered into cages, consulted all available works on pet birds. Finches were too small, too specialised, too unresponsive for the required purpose. Macaws and African greys were too large, too daunting, too expensive. I examined the credentials of the small grey bird with apricot cheeks I had seen in pet shops, a cockatiel,
Nymphicus hollandicus
, in spite of his name a bird of Australian origin, member of the cacatuidae, the cockatoo branch of the parrot family. The day before the birthday, the bird was bought. He was eleven weeks old. By comparison with the doves, he was tiny. If I’d been frightened of the doves, I was even more frightened of him, of his apparent fragility, of what I didn’t know about how to look after him. I became suddenly aware of the dangers of open windows, the possible consequences of shutting in, of shutting out, of standing on, sitting on, of wrapping inadvertently among the laundry; a neurotic’s invariable catalogue of the fears and anxieties of keeping anything, children too for that matter, although children, after a certain age, will speak, express their requirements, look for food themselves when necessary, complain.

Handing the bird to Bec on birthday morning was a relief. I already suspected that hers would be more capable hands than mine, and so they were. She took him in his cage upstairs to her room and, in a process both secret and effective, emerged with a confident, speaking, one-woman bird, a bird whose devotion to her has not flagged, a process that had the additional, unforeseen effect of engendering in him a dislike of me, a position that, with heroic adherence to his own loyalties, he maintains to this day, hissing, swearing, trying
to bite me as I carry out the daily feeding, cleaning, chatting and bathing which has been my obligation, and indeed pleasure, in the years since Bec left home. (Proof of bird memory, and perhaps even intuition, if anything is, he responds with a glorious and unalloyed joy at her return, appearing, in a way I cannot explain, to know when she is en route, reverting to the song patterns, speech and cockatiel-mantra-shrieking that characterised the years when they both lived here together.)

The cockatiel, named Bardie, was a good choice, a fine, if salutary introduction to the intelligence of parrots. I did not know that any bird could imitate, with an astonishing degree of perfection, the sound of telephones, that they could both speak and use words purposefully. I did not know the ear-shattering power of their voices. Nor could I have imagined, before becoming acquainted with Bardie, that the anger and passion displayed by doves was not only common behaviour in birds but could be surpassed and extended by a capacity for irritation allied to frank displays of uncontrolled rage.

The process that had begun seems almost enshrined in a natural law that lays down that one bird, entirely aside from any biological consideration, swiftly begets more. As people began to know that we kept birds, the pace gathered momentum. Friends, schoolfriends, the parents of friends, neighbours, someone a neighbour had met in a shop, brought them to us, believing, it seemed, that we knew about birds because having even one bird appears to render one shamanic, apparently possessed of mystical knowledge, which attracts every waif and orphan, every ill, injured or dying bird, every unwanted unfortunate,
every happened-upon, abandoned infant, every possibly runty faller-out-of-trees.

They arrived, and since there was nowhere else for them to go, they stayed. Most were very small: unfeathered blackbirds, tiny thrushes that, in spite of our efforts, died. They’d open their small beaks wide, form them into deep, pink pouches to receive a minute quantity of food from an eye dropper or the end of a salt spoon. I’d wipe the residue of mush from their faces and then, one day, their eyes would turn dull and they would die. I’d try to believe that it was not my fault.

I began to buy books on raising infant birds, on feeding them. I bought boxes of insect food, everything to prepare myself – for what or whom, I didn’t know. So that I might do better the next time. For the next time the doorbell would ring. One of the books I bought, picked up from a bookshop sale-box, serendipitous among the out-of-date computer books, hotel guides and sundry oddities people had ordered but forgotten to collect, is called
Feeding Cage Birds: A
Manual of Diets for Aviculture
by Kenton C. and Alice Marie Lint. (Kenton Lint, curator emeritus at San Diego Zoo, avatar of bird nutrition, oh fortunate man!) My copy is falling apart now, the pages threateningly adrift, so irresistible are its contents, relentless practicality matched with a soothing litany of arcana. The contents page itself is a delight:

Thus it continues, through heron and ibis, vulture and frogmouth, every bird that might or might not plummet from its nest, be blown in by a freak wind, happen by circumstance unknown to land at one’s door in a box. There’s a certain comfort in knowing that, mentally at least, you’re properly prepared, whether for malabar pied hornbill, fairy bluebird or golden-fronted leaf-bird, that a decent attempt at feeding may be undertaken.

For years, the natural law, the one that said all stray birds must come to us, continued to have its way; birds appeared by one means or another and, from choice, necessity or general weakness of spirit, were included in the household. The enquiring phone call, the ring at the doorbell, the happening upon the miserable stray on the pavement were joined by a new danger, the pet shop.

Even now I have to be vigilant in pet shops, or at least in the ones that keep creatures in cages: small mammals, mice or hamsters or rats, a few cramped rabbits, possibly reptiles too, tanks of lizards, the odd small snake; the ones where, in a corner towards the back of the shop, there is a single large cage inhabited by one lone parrot, a sad-eyed African grey, a depressed-looking macaw. For me, the danger lies in the
temptation to rescue. (Recently, I succumbed. I bought two white doves I did not need, since I have plenty of white doves of my own. On the third occasion that I was in the shop and they were still there, confined, unbought, I bought them.) Reason wrestles with inclination as I dart past beseeching eyes, past silent songs of siren bunnies, past the winsome, head-tilted, smiling charms of the lonely parrot who is there, I know, only because his previous owner bought him without having heard the astonishing, clangourous power of his voice.

The pet shop was how we came by Icarus. Bardie at the time was still young and Chicken had not yet arrived. Icarus was an eastern rosella,
Platycercus eximius
, like Bardie of Australian origin although of the Psittacidae, the ‘true parrots’, the other branch of the family, a small, compact-bodied bird of radiant beauty, red and blue and gold, of sweet and innocent face. He was unable to fly, which is why we were given him by the pet-shop lady, who no longer wanted the burden of continuing to look after a flightless bird nobody would buy. The feathers of his lower wings were tattered, some missing, lost to a psittacine ailment called ‘French moult’. The name itself sounded oddly euphemistic. In those far-off, almost forgotten days before the Internet could provide all information, I searched in libraries, in bird books in the pet shops, but where I found mention of French moult, I found no reassurance. About French moult, it seemed, nothing could be done. About the causes, sources were vague. Only now I discover the probable nature of the affliction, which is viral. (I discover too the controversies, the problems of nomenclature, not unlike those of German measles and various social diseases, conditions and
inclinations whose attributions are designed as insults to an entire nation. The British called the disease French moult, the French, British moult. Nearer to the truth, it seems, would have been the term ‘Australian moult’, for it appears to originate from there.) Whatever the case, the name ‘French’ stuck. It is the smallest comfort that, had I known all this, had I had, at that time, access to every piece of information revealed by the resources of the crowded ether, there would still have been nothing I could have done to restore Icarus’s lost powers.

Because of his infirmity, we could give him no other name but that of the mythological unfortunate whose wings melted when he flew too close to the sun.

Icarus, the eternal terrestrial, was conveyed from place to place perched on the edge of a small, rectangular basket kept for the purpose, onto which he stepped with the airy nonchalance of the London businessman hailing a passing taxi. He was, we realised, already elderly when we got him, set into the patterns and routines of his bad-tempered ways. We put his house next to Bardie’s. Bardie, still in verdant (or possibly more correctly argent) youth, was a source of continual annoyance to Icarus, who could be seen regularly standing on top of his house biting his feet in paroxysms of rage. For recreation, Icarus chewed his way through the very silly ‘bird playground’ (a structure with a tray, swings and ladders made – entirely unsuitably for parrots – from flimsy wood) that we had bought for Bardie, turning it in a very short time to matchsticks.

Icarus appeared to live pleasantly enough, to be busy and interested, or so we hoped, probably given more attention than he wanted, the
sole threat to his safety being when, from time to time, in the process of waddling along the sideboard, he over-reached himself and fell from the edge, landing with the solid, unmistakable sound of parrot hitting ground.

It was many years later that we were given Marley, a South American sun conure. He had been bought in Palmers pet shop in London by friends in one of those impetuous moments of foolish, irresistible desire, the kind that override all caution. Looking at him, it was easy to understand why. He was beautiful, a small, brilliantly coloured parrot of yellow, green and orange. Before buying him, my friends hadn’t heard his voice. They soon realised their mistake. On being asked if I would take him, I looked up a book: ‘Sun conures,’ it said with careful understatement, ‘tend to be especially noisy members of the parrot family.’ Marley’s voice, like his beak, could have bisected wood and stone. It turned the air blue and shaky with waves of volume, the penetrating shrieks that were background to my life for a long time, his voice reaching me as I turned the corner towards the house, following me, inexorably, as I walked away. It may or may not have deterred anyone intent upon burglary.

Marley, when freed from his house, could work his way through the tops of the pine doors (as he attempted to do), through picture frames, mirror frames, tree trunks, beams, possibly girders. Only granite, perhaps, might have provided him with a moment’s pause. When I was out, I worried from time to time that I might inadvertently have left his door open when I put him back after his bath, that I’d come home to find the house powdered: staircase, stairs, doors, lintels, furniture,
everything systematically, enthusiastically destroyed by one determined, glorious yellow and orange bird.

I put Marley into the rat room, from where he could look out of the window at the garden, moving him to the sitting room, from where it was more difficult to hear him, when the noise became too much.

As with Icarus, we had no idea of his former life, although we suspected maltreatment, initiated perhaps as a response to the inescapable volume of his voice. His lack of trust, his wary confusions meant that he never became the easy, relaxed bird who forms a close, mutual relationship with a human. He was beautiful but not clever, stocky, square, with round black eyes rimmed with white. I showered him a couple of times a week, spraying him with a plant spray, being rewarded always by the look of unsurpassed bliss on what I liked to imagine was his smiling yellow face. He closed his eyes in ecstasy, dreaming of rainforests perhaps, of
florestas de varzéa
, the faraway world from which he sprang.