When I bought this beautifully-produced book, Corvus, A Life With Birds, I hadn’t fully realised that it would be more about living with birds than watching them. However, I soon realised that Esther Woolfson has long experience of nurturing and co-habiting with lost and abandoned birds, most of which would have been destined to an early death had it not been for her intervention.
The story begins simply enough with a set (flock? batch? colony?) of doves, which were kept in a converted coal shed. But it does not take long before birds are in the house, when Esther’s daughter Bec is given a cockatiel, named Bardie, for her 12th birthday. On the principle that “one bird swiftly begets more”, a stream of injured, dying, abandoned, runty fledglings arrives in the house, leading Esther to find out how to raise infant birds. More birds follow, but it is when an infant rook arrives in a box with the unlikely name Chicken that the story really gets under-way.
Esther learns that a rook should be fed on a mixture of rodents, chicks and insects, but replaces this diet with minced-beef, eggs and chopped-up nuts on which she soon thrived. Within weeks she was testing her wings and then flew onto the kitchen table. A house was constructed for her (never “cage” - and she was only put in it at night), but Chicken seemed to have a strong building instinct and began to pick at the plaster on the wall beside her house, leaving large holes. She was with the family constantly, playing with rubber mice, picking at the hems of jeans, flying on to the tops of cupboards and generally possessed of an insatiable curiosity.
Continue reading Review: Corvus, A Life With Birds – Esther Woolfson
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It is when reading books like Field Work that you find yourself giving thanks for the large number of independent publishers such as Black Dog Books (and booksellers who stock such titles such as my local Much Ado Books of Alfriston.
I usually enjoy books of essays and this collection, Field Work, from Ronald Blythe was a treat for me. Quite apart from the content (which is excellent) the presentation is of very high quality with a fine painting by John Nash on the cover and a collection of Nash’s black and white illustrations scattered about the book itself. I am someone who usually likes the latest technology, but a book like this only makes me shudder at the thought of devices like the new Sony Reader which was launched this week. I would not want to lose the sheer tactile pleasure of having this volume in my hands.
The topic of most of these essays could be described as “literary rural England”, and anyone who enjoys reading about literary connections will be in their element here.
As a keen walker myself, I enjoyed reading the essay, John Clare and Footpath Walking. Blythe provides many quotations from John Clare about walking but also sets them in the context of the rural life in the 17th century when a walk in the countryside was by no means a solitary affair. Blythe writes that he recently went for a six mile walk and never met a single person – an experience I can relate to from a recent walk across the South Downs on a Monday morning. In Clare’s day however, “there was always somebody up a tree, or under a bush, or just riffling about with a scythe, or hiding away with a sweetheart or a book, or usually just routinely travelling to the workplace”. Blythe calls Clare, “the genius of the footpath” and it was fascinating to read of the routes he followed, either idly wandering about, or systematically aiming for a destination.
Continue reading Review: Field Work – Ronald Blythe
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