Corvus Read Online Free PDF Page B

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, tryingto 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:
    Preface
    Note on Availability of Foods
    Sphenisciformes
    Penguins
    Struthioniformes
    Ostrich
    Casuariiformes
    Cassowaries, Emu …
    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