“Corvus : A Life with Birds ” by Esther Woolfson : 4th July 2011
This book has been sitting on the bookshelf for a while. I actually bought it as a gift for Anne but I borrowed it to read on our holiday to Montacute and then the New Forest. The title gives the story away. It is the personal recollection of the author’s life with a series of Corvids which she obtained largely as birds dropped from the nest or abandoned and “rescued” by other people. There is a certain affinity with Gerald Durrell in that it is an often humorous account of the interaction between a human and a “wild” animal more or less domesticated. Woolfson mainly deals with the corvids that she raised including a Rook and a Magpie.
Whilst making sure not to lapse into anthropomorphism, she gives an entertaining account of the behaviour of “her” birds – part wild and part domesticated. Although she considers some arguments relating to bird intelligence, song inheritance and a range of other ethological topics, hers is principally a poetic and existential treatment of bird life and none the worse for it. Her observations are, in fact, useful scientific data in themselves in that they tease out some of the possibilities of human and animal interaction. Whether she is right or wrong is a matter for the individual reader to determine but anyone who has spent any amount of time observing individual birds at close range will recognise her account of bird behaviour and will find plenty to amuse in between.
“Corvus : A Life with Birds ” by Esther Woolfson , Granta Books (1 Jun 2009), Paperback: 352 pages. ISBN-10: 9781847080806. ISBN-13: 978-1847080806. ASIN: 1847080804