Feathers in our nest: Esther Woolfson on her collection of birds
Our first ever birds were four white doves, offered to us by someone whose dove house was overstocked. The idea seemed delightful. In spite of the fact that none of us knew the first thing about birds, we took them enthusiastically and installed them in a coal shed, hastily converted for the purpose.
It seemed like a propitious moment. For years we had moved from city to city as my husband, David, pursued his career as a doctor. The move to Aberdeen was permanent and for the first time we looked forward to being settled, cultivating the neglected garden of the house we had bought and owning pets. Our daughters, Rebecca and Hannah, were about 10 and eight at the time. They were thrilled by the doves, carrying them around, going out to shut them in at night.
The dove experiment seemed successful, probably because doves are a hardy lot who quickly set about doing what doves do - roosting, flying, eating, pottering in the garden. They began, too, to breed.
Encouraged, we agreed to Bec's request for a bird of her own for her 12th birthday. The bird was a young cockatiel she named - for a reason none of us can remember - Bardie. A swiftly trained, bright, loud, intelligent creature whose ability to imitate the ringing of a phone, and eventually to speak clearly, charmed and amazed us.
Knowing the doves and Bardie made us receptive to requests that seemed, almost mystically, to follow. In what now seems like a short time, but was in fact some years, we found ourselves with an eastern rosella (a small Australian parrot) who, because of a feather ailment, couldn't fly, given to us by a woman in a pet shop; a starling raised by an American family who couldn't take him back home; a fledgling rook picked up by friends of Bec's at Guides camp in the probably mistaken belief that it was abandoned; a small, unfeathered magpie who had fallen from its nest; a sun conure (a small South American parrot) whose voice was too raucous for the friends who bought him; two elderly canaries given to us by someone who was reducing his own birdhouse numbers; and a young, injured, silent crow.
The rosella, a beautiful red, blue and gold bird, we named Icarus. The rook we named after a New York drag artist I had recently read about in the New Yorker, Madame Chickeboumskaya - shortened to Chicken. The magpie was Spike; the starling, already named, Max; the conure, Marley. The canaries were Joe and Rosie, and the crow, Ziki.
We housed newcomers where we could - in a line along the sideboard for cockatiel, rosella and starling - Chicken in a house we built for her in the study, the magpie, and eventually the crow, in the utility room, the sun conure in the sitting room. We did, of course, question the ethics of keeping birds, but for most the alternative to being with us would have been abandonment or death.
We began to discover differences in personality; the unsuspected intellectual and emotional ranges of each bird. The parrots seemed one-person birds. They liked attention but didn't ever form the kind of close relationship that Bardie did with Bec. From the first, Bardie was an attachment of courtly love, where he played the role of devoted troubadour. He would sit on Bec's shoulder singing while she sewed or drew or read. When she called him from her room at the top of the house, he would fly up the stairs in an instant; and on the one alarming occasion when he flew out of a window, love won over freedom and at the sound of Bec's voice he flew straight back in.
The downside of this relationship meant that Bardie disliked virtually everyone else except Han. He didn't like David and he hated me, flying at me with what appeared to be intent to kill. He would be put in his house in the evening, and in the morning Bec would take him out to keep her company as she prepared for school. Every morning, as she rushed out of the door, I would yell, "Is Bardie in his house?" and she would yell back "Yes!" Only sometimes was it the case. When it wasn't, my entire day would be spent dodging attack, trying to lure him by subterfuge into his house.
Chicken and Spike, members of the corvid - crow - family, were different. Their relationships seemed familial. Both seemed easily to adopt places in the family, recognising David and me as parents, the girls as siblings.
Han's relationship with Spike was loud and combative. Often, while Han was doing her homework, Spike would steal her pen or her notes, dancing on the pages of the book she was trying to read (by then we had discovered his amazing ability to speak) and the kitchen would be filled with the sound of voices, human and magpie, shrieking at each other, "Bugger off!"
With the arrival of Bardie, Bec began to develop theories of bird-rearing that involved providing maximum freedom and maximum intellectual stimulation. As a result, the birds flew, walked or waddled as freely as was feasible.
At the time, we didn't have a television and so we sat round the dinner table talking and playing with the birds - Bardie wandering among the dishes or sitting on someone's head, singing; Chicken perching on any available knee, grey face peering eagerly over the edge of the table, having her head scratched. Miffy, the wild rabbit we had rescued from a lay-by, would join us from the garden.
The dove numbers expanded. When friends in the country asked if they could have some, we hastily packed a few young ones into boxes and drove them off. We gave instructions that they had to be confined for three weeks to allow them to acclimatise - instructions our friends thought cruel. They let them out straight away and we arrived home just in time to see the deportees flying one by one, triumphantly, into the dove house.
Our friends were interested and charmed by the birds, particularly by Chicken who grew in social grace, greeting visitors with displays of head-bending, cawing welcome. The girls' friends, too, were interested in them, but as they grew older we watched with fascination the birds' reactions to male friends and boyfriends. Bardie loathed them all, regardless. Chicken, on the other hand, courted each new arrival with enthusiasm, launching herself on to the knee of some young and terrified swain.
The house often seemed like an odd orphanage, full of noise and colour and disparate characters, all requiring to be fed, cleaned and nurtured. There were times when none of us thought anything of passing a rabbit on the stairs, or being overtaken at speed by a hurrying magpie or shouting cockatiel. We weren't the first to live with birds. I would think of other people who had lived closely with birds - of Konrad Lorenz with the geese he studied and his boyhood jackdaws; Charles Dickens and his famous raven, Grip; Lord Byron with his menagerie, his falcons and his crow - and reflect on the long history of the relationship: since the moment in evolution when different species were able to coexist, since a bond was formed between a human and a bird reared for eating perhaps, when trade routes gave humans access to gorgeous birds that would be captured and exchanged, offered as trophies or gifts.
Sometimes we were given birds for respite - or terminal - care. An ailing ptarmigan in its winter plumage of white, found during a walk in the high Cairngorms, injudiciously brought back for us to tend. It died dramatically one evening lying on Bec's lap and we regretted that it hadn't done so on the winter mountain where it belonged.
Alerted once by the unusual calling of crows from the rooftops, we searched for the cause - a dying crow crouching, shivering in the back garden. We put it in a box in the bathroom where it died quietly and we were glad that its last moments hadn't been in the jaws of the neighbour's cat.
We planted an ivy for the crow, a white potentilla for the ptarmigan. The garden blossomed. One by one our resident birds died. Each was marked by the planting of another shrub.
In time, the girls left home. Bardie and Spike stayed here and no doubt the missing was mutual.
There are still birds here, although the house is quieter now. Spike died while Han was at university, but Chicken the rook, a venerable 18 or so, is my constant companion. There are 20 or so doves. Ziki the crow is still silent having, I think, missed the optimum time for learning song. Bardie, elderly but still vocal, greets Bec on visits home with shrieking delight. He still hates me, despite my efforts at appeasement and love.
Memories of the girls growing up are inseparable from those of noise and flight and birdsong. But now it's Bec's nine-year-old daughter, Leah, who, on visits to Venice, spends all her pocket-money on pigeon food, standing happily under a cloud of flapping birds, who carries a dove around in her hands, who helps shut them in at night.
· Corvus: A Life with Birds, by Esther Woolfson, is published by Granta, £16.99. To order a copy for £15.99 with free UK p&p go to theguardian.com/bookshop or call 0870 836 0875