Rook and human,
all through the dark days
and nights of winter.

Bird and woman.
Fight to stay; trees bend
in the wind and rain.

Bird unsteady on the branch.
Human resents new house.
How to make a home?

As always
Spring arrives.

Bird is busy
Twigs in beak to chosen spot
To-ing fro-ing, placing here and there.

Inspection. Satisfaction.
Soon a nest awaits new life.

Much to do in human house.
As with bird, renewing, replacing.
Hither, thither.

Green plants to this nest gathered.
Inspection. Satisfaction.

Human watches Rook across the road.
Here at last.
New life.

Editor’s note by Tanya Shadrick, founder of The Selkie Press: In the very last pages of my memoir The Cure for Sleep, the Late-Waking Life of the subtitle becomes my mother’s as well as mine. Like so many women of her time and place, she has never been encouraged to share her experience through art or writing. A year now into her new life, I invited her to risk her words for Birds of Firle – this decade-long and collective exercise in writing of grief and hope as the things with feathers. This poem is her beautiful contribution.

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Birds of Firle is a single edition book by Tanya Shadrick being posted sequentially to 100 collaborators around the world, inviting responses to the idea of Grief and Hope as the things with feathers. Each recipient spends a few days with the book, before returning it with a hand-written letter and other small artefacts.

No heartbeat. Eight weeks into hope after so many missed opportunities, but now hope takes off and leaves on silent wings, leaving me gasping and empty. The short distance through the gauntlet of women with healthy pregnancies is an unfathomable traverse. Home awaits my weeping.

The pain starts not long after, grips me in bands of shock and sorrow. I welcome the physical pain; without it, the emptiness would have left me baffled and confused. Instead it becomes so visceral as I double over, groaning and crying and letting go. Pacing the house, letting my body take over, giving birth to death, and after hours of agony, finally opening up and releasing.

It was not the labor I had anticipated, but it grounded me in the loss I did not want to face.

After my body was emptied and left in peace, I remained immersed in grief, endless days and sleepless nights of hoping this was unreality, that I would doze and wake and find hope on the other side. I did not. Loss remained, and followed me into the world. Just as I thought I was healing, I would be caught off guard by the sight of a swollen belly taut with life and I would sink, knees no longer holding me up, grief sweeping me off my feet like quicksand. 

A friend tells me my grief is too much, that it was only a cluster of cells, not a baby, that she didn’t understand why it was so hard for me when it happened to so many.  How could I show her the joy and hope that had been swept out with the tide, leaving me devastated? How could I help her understand the fathomless depths of absence inside me?

Years later, a virus brings us all to our quiet depths. A year of a world slowed, separated and joined, choruses silenced, friends adrift, embraces withheld, each in our own small bubble. Loss everywhere, of loved ones and strangers but also of moments and hopes and connections.

This past year, for me, in the emptiness left behind by all the things suspended, the birds arrived. Or rather, I arrived among the birds. They were always there, but now I dwell consciously among these neighbours; I carefully listen to them each night as I fall asleep and each morning as I wake.  I know them as individuals: the great horned owl outside my bedroom window and the one who answers from deeper in the woods; the pair of hummingbirds that are my constant companions as I read on my porch; the red-shouldered hawk who makes the rounds of the neighbourhood, greeting all of us down below; the cedar waxwings that fly all about me catching insects over the water as I swim in the river after my run; the wild turkeys on the edge of the field with at least fourteen little ones to keep track of.  And the raven along the high ridgeline who lifts up as I round the curve, silently winging its secrets into mountains upon mountains. 

But it is the swallows most of all that I crave. I pass long stretches of evenings watching them in their dance above the lake.  I cannot get enough. Their myriad shapes, graceful, unlikely, shifting in their acrobatics, linger in my head long after. 

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Birds of Firle is a single edition book by Tanya Shadrick being posted sequentially to 100 collaborators around the world, inviting responses to the idea of Grief and Hope as the things with feathers. Each recipient spends a few days with the book, before returning it with a hand-written letter and other small artefacts. The project gives emerging and unpublished writers the opportunity to see their words archived alongside those of established artists and authors.

‘The carrion crow is hot and has ostentatious ways. It recognizes air and seasons. It scarcely awaits various outcomes; where it knows there will be sadness, it hurries there. Its flesh is not very useful as medicine.’

Hildegard von bingen (1098-1179)

After my daughter was born, I began making regular excursions to the local churchyard to feed the crows. Not just to feed them, but to tame them: to have them come when I called and perch on my outstretched arm. Crows are good students, and this particular murder were soon able to recognise my face, swarming like black bees around a honeypot the instant they spotted me approaching with the pram. Before long, the boldest were sharing our bench, sidling cautiously along the seat to beg for a peanut, or a dog biscuit, or a fragment of my daughter’s rusk.

There is a theory suggesting that crows have already been tamed: that they were once domesticated by our ancient ancestors, made as friendly and loyal as dogs are today. It’s a seductive idea, for which there is at least a little evidence. Archaeologists digging Iron Age sites report that crows are one of the most frequently discovered birds. In the caves at Lascaux, the site of some of mankind’s earliest known daubings, a crow-like figure occupies pole position. And then there’s the evidence presented by the crows themselves: their easy familiarity with humankind, the way they constantly hang around, as if waiting for orders we’ve forgotten how to give.

§

To my daughter the crows were, at first, simply colour and noise. A croaking mobile she stared at from her pram. As her awareness grew, and she came to understand that these shapes were living creatures, I got the sense that she was looking at them as potential friends – equals even. Seeing those crows through her eyes brought back memories of my own early magical thinking: perhaps befriending a crow is as simple as reaching out your hand; perhaps all you have to do to talk to birds is speak.

That crows are listening to the words we say is beyond doubt. Corvids are masterful mimics, and they’ve been eavesdropping on humanity for aeons. Pliny the Elder has much to say on the subject, noting that crows, ravens, and magpies are all good talkers and that such birds are ‘especially fun when given wine’. Macrobius writes of a raven which delighted the Emperor Augustus by croaking ‘Hail Caesar, the victorius commander!’ And Herodotus recounts the story of a ‘black dove’ – likely a crow of some kind – which ‘spoke with human voice’ to the people of Dodona, informing them that God was in the trees.

A crow-black thread weaves through the tapestry of human history, and there are tantalising glimpses of them serving as helpers and companions. In The Epic of Gilgamesh and the story of Noah, ravens are called upon to find dry land. A highly-trained crow supposedly helped one of the Pharoahs manage his kingdom, bearing messages to any destination its master cared to name. And a Sioux myth tells of a Chief who used a tame crow as a spy, teaching the bird to understand the languages of the surrounding tribes and eavesdrop on their battle plans; a story that resonates with that of the Norse god Odin and his two ravens, Hugin and Munin, who surveyed the world on his behalf.

After many months, and much dog kibble, I realised that the only thing my crows – as I came to think of them – were good for was disposing of scraps. That in itself can be a civic virtue. Ever wondered where all the dead pigeons go? Crows pick the city’s teeth clean. But, beyond that, they refused to perform. Eating from my palm was out of the question. Nevermind accompanying me down the highstreet, a mob of feathered bodyguards that might protect the baby and me. They would escort me as far as the nearest bus stop – but no further. I realised that the crows thought of me as one of their humans: an obedient one at that.

To attempt to train a crow is to risk the crow training you. Seeming neither fully wild, nor truly tame, they live alongside us as wily fellow citizens. Black beaks, beady eyes, sharp brains. They call their rough greetings down from the trees and my daughter and I call back.

Charlie Gilmour is the author of the acclaimed memoir Featherhood (Weidenfeld & Nicolson): a story about repetition across generations and birds that run in the blood; about a terror of repeating the sins of the father and a desire to build a nest of one’s own.

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Birds of Firle is a single edition book by Tanya Shadrick being posted sequentially to 100 collaborators around the world, inviting responses to the idea of Grief and Hope as the things with feathers. Each recipient spends a few days with the book, before returning it with a hand-written letter and other small artefacts. The project gives emerging and unpublished writers the opportunity to see their words archived alongside those of established artists and authors.

For thirty years, I shared my home and life with a bird, a rook brought to me as a fledgling. She was called Chicken. During our years together, I had time and opportunity to think about the lives of humans and other species and to wonder what we are and how we should, as humans, act towards those of other species than our own.

It was living with and observing Chicken’s qualities and capabilities which inspired all my thoughts and work on the natural world. In my latest book, Between Light and Storm, I explore some of the questions I’ve been reflecting on for a long time, concerning human exceptionalism and a philosophy of rights, moral status and personhood. What is a person? Should the term be extended to other species? Might a concept by which we regard other species in a radically different way alter the historically damaging treatment which has led to our present crisis of species loss and environmental damage?

After Chicken

Everything is different. Lights which burned continuously for years so that she wouldn’t waken to darkness are extinguished. Doors always open can now be closed. Even when she was very old and no longer as quick to come to find me wherever I was, I left the doors between us open so that we could call out to one another, know exactly where the other was. 

Now, she lies in a flowerbed under a granite wall topped by a handsome trellis painted pale green and laced with jasmine and clematis. Her grave is as perfect, neat and deep as I could dig it, lined with roots, teeming with the disparate creatures who will be her companions now. A grave suitable for an old rook. It’s just outside my study, her study, the room where her house, now dismantled, stood for all the years of her life.  She lies next to Spike the magpie, a choice, given her suspicion of him, she might not have made herself.   We’re still within distance of the other’s calling.

One morning, a raining morning in November not quite a year after she died, I came downstairs and saw my black boots standing at the foot of the stairs and for a moment, thought that they were her.

I’ve accustomed myself to silences where there were none, at times when there would have been her voice, in the early mornings, at that last moment of evening when ceremonially, we’d bid each other goodnight, the soft murmurings, whisperings, clicks and peremptory calls which were the sounds I heard most often for decades. Now, only the sparrows, jackdaws and magpies call to me from the garden as I work. In her later years, she had begun to intone the word, ‘he-llo’, gently in greeting, ‘he-llo!’

§

I was busy preparing a book for publication when she died. While I added notes, checked, corrected, I was already feeling distanced and distracted although I didn’t yet know by what. By the future perhaps, Chicken’s death only days before a sub-microscopic entity began to steal across the world like a miasma, a vapour of death. 

I didn’t know anything about it that early winter, but when the nature of it became evident, it seemed more fulfilment of a threat than an unexpected event. Everything that had occupied my thoughts during the years of writing the book seemed forewarning, not from any percipience on my part but as a consequence of following trails from the topic of one academic paper to another, gathering words – ‘pathogens with zoonotic potential’, ‘land use change’, ‘natural resource over-exploitation’ – as a shadow over everything I was writing about industrial farming, fur farming, the illegal wildlife trade, the pet trade, hunting, a summation of the scale of human disregard for others’ lives. 

She’d been with me all during that long and often difficult process and now, as the first spring without her progressed, completing it was my task alone. The lawyer in Madrid with whom I’d been negotiating the increasingly complicated matter of obtaining permission to quote from Federico Garcia Lorca disappeared into the bitter tragedy of Spain’s early pandemic. I’d been warned against dealing too lightly with the Lorca estate and so I paraphrased the quotations instead. I regretted that I couldn’t use the lines from the poem he wrote in 1929: ‘New York—Office and Denunciation’, an angry exposition of cruelty towards man and beast, a lament for the daily animal slaughter in that city; of ducks, pigs, lambs, the two million chickens ‘smashing the sky’, the sound of terrified cows which  filled the Hudson valley.

The quotations from Lorca weren’t the only ones I altered. I couldn’t do anything else because the moment for haggling, even in the most discreet and literary way, had passed.  Prolonged email conversations ended abruptly, dissolved into panic and flight, threads of delicate pecuniary settlement drifting airborne, discussions of rights holders, word counts and ISBNs scattering the floors of empty offices, blowing invisibly along miles of abandoned corridor.

§

As Chicken aged, she began to develop a few silvery grey feathers. I picked them up when she moulted or when she discarded them after preening. The most beautiful, I photographed and kept. I wrapped them carefully but when recently I took them out of the drawer where they were kept, they’d been eaten by moths. Only bare feather shafts remained, frail structures on which to build a universe of profound and eloquent metaphor.

I wouldn’t have wanted her to live any longer. For years, I hoped every day she’d live on but now, it was time. I had tried to prepare for her death, not anticipating her extraordinary longevity. For years, friends would ask with care, What will you do…?, as if I might never have thought about the prospect of her death. 

In fact, I planned to travel which I hadn’t been able to do for a long time. As she grew older, I became reluctant to leave her, even with her birdsitter who she welcomed every time with apparent joy. Apart from necessary journeys for work, I travelled very little. I went on holiday twice in fifteen years and then only for three nights each time. And now, in a world closed down, I couldn’t travel and no longer wanted to.

In the book, I wrote about the relationship between the creatures we love and time, the rueful knowledge we carry of the asymmetrical lives of man and bird or beast and here it was, that yardstick, now my own. A question I’ve often asked myself is if there is a difference between the death of a human and that of a member of another species. I’ve never been able to answer it.  I could as usefully ask, what is the size of grief? 

I don’t know if she saw herself as different from me. In one way, our lives now seem an unequal sort of contract – I’m sure she didn’t learn anything from me while I learned everything from her.  After a long time together, the boundaries between us, bird or human, seemed to dissolve into an abstraction, one from which she was free from the start. I learned that words of separation may lose their power to separate.

And now, as one does after a death, I evaluate, re-evaluate, question, but one thing only seems important and that is to know that as I am, she was – a person.

Aberdeen (May 2021)

Esther Woolfson is the author of Corvus – a memoir of her life with Chicken and other birds – and Between Light and Storm: How We Live With Other Species. Her acclaimed short stories have appeared in many anthologies and have been read on BBC Radio 4.

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Birds of Firle is a single edition book by Tanya Shadrick being posted sequentially to 100 collaborators around the world, inviting responses to the idea of Grief and Hope as the things with feathers. Each recipient spends a few days with the book, before returning it with a hand-written letter and other small artefacts.