Chapter 6

The jackdaw’s echo wakes me at sunrise. How can this be? I think, groggily, as I feel something hard and sharp probing the meat of my face. How did Heathcote put it? “A bony road-drill picking at your teeth.” I open my eyes to see my tormentor standing imperiously on my sternum, just above my heart, examining me critically through a single milky-blue eye. The bird has learned to escape its box and leap up onto our bed and now seems to be impatient for its breakfast, or possibly thinks I am its breakfast. I try not to flinch as the bird tugs on my lower lip like a piece of elastic. These acts are not, I decide, meant badly. If the bird really wanted to dig into my flesh then it probably could: evidence of the damage its beak can do when used as a pickax is all around me.

I believe in Heathcote’s jackdaw now. His poem is too carefully observed for it to have been a figment, and I’ve found photographic evidence online. The photo is small, grainy, not quite in focus, like a foggy memory. It shows a man seated in front of a large circular table in a cavernous room with his back to the camera. He has a great mane of dark, shaggy hair. It’s unmistakably Heathcote. Both shoulders of his dark suit jacket are splashed white, and on the back of a chair to his left a steely-gray jackdaw perches, returning his gaze.

I reach under my pillow for my phone and take a picture of the bird standing so haughtily on my chest. Perhaps I will send an email to Heathcote after all.

In the two weeks it’s been with us, the magpie has grown into quite a handsome fellow. There’s something princely in the way he struts about the bed in his cape of black silk and snowy ermine fur, his nascent flight feathers flashing like jewels. Both Yana and I have started to think of the magpie as a male. We have nothing of real substance to base this on; magpies, like most members of the crow family, are impossible to sex on sight, as they possess no outwardly visible genitalia and do not display any particular difference in size or plumage either. But the bird has to be one or the other, and we’ve got a fifty percent chance of being right.

Beak glinting, the bird makes another lunge for my septum. This time I duck beneath the covers, feeling like a giant as he pads around on the duvet above me, talons pressing down as light as a kitten’s paws.

As I get up to prepare the magpie’s first meal of the day I think again about Heathcote and his bird. Moments like this morning—moments that seem like echoes transmitted across generations—are a little unsettling. Anything that makes it seem as if I’m following in Heathcote’s footsteps sets alarm bells ringing. The last time I went chasing after his shadow, it led me to a breakdown of my own, and these days I have a terror of repetition. Sanity sometimes seems like a very thin membrane, through which it would be all too easy to fall again. I have to remind myself that there’s nothing to fear here. A harmless, if wildly improbable, coincidence. Before I can change my mind, I write a quick email to Heathcote, attaching the photo of the magpie standing proudly on my chest—exactly as Jack Daw did to him thirty years ago.

Yana returned from her job in Paris a few days ago to find the magpie and me fully enmeshed. I seem to be his tree now and he takes any opportunity he can to cling to my arm, or scurry onto one of my shoulders, or up into the nest of my hair. And even though he shits on me, and pecks at my extremities, and screams right in my ear hole, I get the sense that he’s looking up to me, watching and waiting for me to show him how to be.

I’m not sure what sort of life lessons he’s been learning on his journeys with me around the house. Not, I suspect, useful ones about foraging—unless my rummaging around in the fridge counts. Most of the time, he’s just been perched on the edge of my desk, watching everything I do: cocking his head to one side as I sharpen a pencil and tracking the rough ribbons of wood as they fall into the wastepaper basket. Following my fingers as they drum on the keyboard and pecking at the keys too. Often, as often as he can, he steps on my wrist, or shuffles up onto the back of my hand and sinks in for a nap, a warm ball of fluff that sways and squeaks a soft reprimand if I continue attempting to type.

The parasite in his throat seems to have simply faded away and, although he celebrated Yana’s return with another of his seizures, his general trajectory seems to be upward. This bird is bucking the trend.

Between feedings I’ve been reading around the subject as much as I can. As well as Heathcote’s poem, I have been hungrily absorbing books written by people who have had encounters with this family of birds and by biologists who have studied them. The things I’ve discovered are astounding. Magpies are one of the few animals, other than humans, who have been shown to recognize themselves in mirrors, implying that they are self-aware. They play. Practice deception. Are masters of imitation. I read more, learning about the tiny miracle of the corvine mind; how crows and their ilk have one of the highest brain-to-body ratios in the animal kingdom; how these brains are folded densely in on themselves like Japanese steel, which allows them to punch way above their cerebral weight. Birdbrain, it seems, isn’t such an insult after all.

I read that magpies are roughly as clever as toddlers, and that other members of the corvid family are even smarter. The New Caledonian crow, for instance, has been shown to possess reasoning powers equal to that of a seven-year-old. Striking though it is, the comparison with human intelligence seems wrong. This roving, pecking creature is not a semi-developed human stuck in a bird’s body. It is an entity all its own, a totally different intelligence that is developing in front of us.

I start to get quite excited. Perhaps, I say to Yana, this will be the start of something huge: a meeting of avian and human minds, first contact. Maybe, when we release him back into the world, he’ll tell the other birds about how we looked after him. I imagine being able to stretch my arms out under a tree and them hanging heavy with the weight of the wild magpies and crows who come down to greet me. Yana raises an eyebrow at this but, nevertheless, we start to interact with the bird in new ways. Does he like the things we like? Respond to the same things we respond to?

We’re no longer looking at this as a simple rescue mission. We’re starting to bond. Yana takes the bird on her wrist and shows him the magpie in the mirror. He stares at himself, a blue-eyed, black-beaked beauty, and emits a rolling cheep, a birdlike purr. I pick late-spring flowers from the patch out front and offer them to the creature as he rests in the folds of a towel on top of our ironing board. He takes them in his beak one after the other, tiny forget-me-nots, poppy petals twice the size of his head, and squeaks in apparent appreciation. I come home from a run to the shops to find Yana and the magpie sitting together—Yana cross-legged on the bed, the bird fluffed up on her bare shoulder, his legs invisible beneath his frilly black-and-white skirt of feathers—both listening to a piece of classical music, a haunting organ melody. Yana whistles along and the bird chirrups and peeps erratically along with her.

As the bird quests and pokes around the room, interrogating the things he comes across—my laptop charger, a cactus, a pair of sunglasses—with his increasingly powerful beak, I wonder how it is that I’ve come this far in life without having noticed the personhood, for want of a better word, of these animals. I realize that, if I’ve thought about them at all in the past, it’s been as mere decorations, flashes of black and white that occasionally shoot prettily across the sky. The mental transformation feels almost magical, like walking out into your garden and finding the flowers deep in conversation with one another.

He’s still unable to feed himself, or quench his own thirst, and spends great stretches sleeping, but between naps and feedings the magpie has begun to sculpt himself into shape. Having first roughly chiseled himself out of the smooth marble of his egg, he is now working on the finer details, refining the form. Where bare skin was, hard, waxy sheaths have begun to emerge; so-called pin feathers. The bird scratches and scrapes and pecks and wears them down until they crack and flake and brand-new feathers are revealed. Wherever he sits he leaves behind piles of dandruff from these feather delivery tubes. He unfurls his wings for the first time—not to flap, but to whittle away at more of these pins, the feathers coiled up tight within like scrolls. The color of these feathers, the wing feathers, is, like the bird’s eyes, utterly unexpected. In the sun they shine electric blue, like the flash of the fin of an exotic aquarium fish, like no color I have ever noticed before on a native British bird.