Corvus by Esther Woolfson Read Free Book Online Page A

and clipboard will be seen sitting on the granite gatepost, counting. Neighbours, Louisianans and Texans, arrive and leave, our relationships ones that rarely develop beyond the rudimentary, the glancing, often briefly affectionate, mutually sympathetic, time-limited friendships between the nomadicand the settled. During these processes, lives are changed, those of children parting from schoolfriends; those of the rabbits and mice someone was persuaded to buy in an effort to establish more firmly the existence of the itinerant; the tank of stick insects – the bonds of love torn asunder. The dogs and cats, I assume, take wing and go too. The rest do not. (This morning early, I heard the last sounds from my neighbours’ dogs, the ones I believe kept cats firmly away from the dove-house. For the past week they’ve howled in the garden in the wind and rain as removers have packed my neighbours’ house in preparation for their return to North America. I was woken at four by a volley of muffled barks as they were being put into the car to be taken to the airport to be crated and, as my neighbour informed me yesterday evening as we said goodbye, herbally sedated for the flights taking them to their new life in Colorado.)
    Max was an oil orphan, for who would take back to a country whose own, introduced, starling population has become a serious threat to indigenous birds, a single starling? The starlings of North America have unusual origins, springing, all 200 million of them, from the importation of a hundred birds from Europe in 1890 by one Eugene Schieffelin, an immigrant from Germany whose self-appointed task was to introduce to the United States every bird mentioned in the works of Shakespeare. The sole reference to starlings, the one that brought about this environmental tempest, is in a few not very interesting lines in Henry IV, spoken by Hotspur:
    Nay, I’ll have a starling shall be taught to speak
    Nothing but ‘Mortimer,’ and give it him
    To keep his anger still in motion.
    The birds were shipped from Europe in two batches, one of sixty and one of forty, and released in Central Park. Not all survived. The ones that did were all too clearly successful. Their habit of stealing the nest sites of indigenous, crevice-nesting birds, wrens, swallows and flycatchers, led to the introduction of laws prohibiting any further importation of potential menaces. Writing of starlings in his poem ‘The Great Scarf of Birds’, John Updike hints at the scale of their success:
    As if out of the Bible or science fiction,
    a cloud appeared …
    It was the lady in the pet shop where I bought bird seed, the one who gave us Icarus, who asked one day if she might pass on our name to an American customer who was leaving Scotland but couldn’t take the starling her children had found and reared. (I can imagine the United States’ response to the arrival of one to add to the 200 million, even if he had survived the journey, crated and herbally sedated.) A starling. What did I know of starlings? Nothing. It didn’t stop me from saying that, certainly, she could.
    Pliny almost reassured me: ‘the young Britannicus and Nero had a starling and also nightingales that had been taught to speak Greek and Latin, and, moreover, practised assiduously and spoke new wordsevery day in ever longer phrases …’ Mozart too, I knew, once owned a starling, although his was bought for 34 kreuzer, from a shop in Vienna in 1784. By coincidence or chance, the starling was heard to sing bars of Mozart’s piano concerto in G major, K453. Since he’d only recently completed it, it’s not quite clear how the starling had learnt it, but it has been suggested that he had heard Mozart whistling it on a previous visit to the pet shop (such being the imitative powers of starlings). On transcribing the starling’s song, Mozart wrote after it, ‘ Das war schön! ’ The starling did, however, transpose one note, changing a G to G#, improving (or not) upon the