Corvus by Esther Woolfson Page B

off by one leg before sending them skimming, with the sound of lens scraping wood, across the floor. The fog lifts only if I have time to replace my scratched, semi-opaque glasses when, for a short while, I’m astonished anew by the fine-etched clarity of the world.
    Almost equal to her dislike of my specs is her dislike of cleaning or electrical equipment, usually because of a dangerous combination of the sight and sound. She is scared of vacuum cleaners. In common with many people, she hates computers, their blue-white stares, their sudden vulgar, explosive bursts into colour, their tendency at certain moments to talk. She has accustomed herself only reluctantly to mine, grunting with mistrust and displeasure at the sight of the screensaver (sentimental images of the natural world, forests in mist, ladybirds, dew-laden plants, chosen with her in mind, since she disliked even more the alternating planets on my previous screen). She dislikes too printers, cameras, laptops, music-making machines of every sort, the television (which is not kept in the same room as her and is, in any case, never watched): their winking, malevolent green eyes, their watchfulness, the inscrutable nature of their intentions. She was distressed, it was clear (as I was), by the single terrible scream, the loud and dangerous whirring and gusting, as the logic board of my quite new computer succumbed one Saturday evening in March to the equivalent of a ruptured brain aneurysm, and died. Perhaps she knows, as the rest of us suspect, that of all of this no good can come.

    simply for pleasure
    Chicken does not like to be ignored. She’ll pull insistently at the legs of my jeans as I cook or iron. She’ll try to knock the book from my hand if I don’t pay her attention, pecking at my sleeve or elbow to invite me to talk. Often she’ll burst, like the alien in Alien , through my newspaper, leaping on to my knee as I sit trying peaceably to read.

    It has been suggested that there are differences in the way the various species experience time, and that, for those having faster time-scales by virtue of their shorter life-spans, the perception of time will be slower, that one minute of their lives will be as several minutes of our own. I don’t know how Chicken experiences time; if we pass a day, an hour together, we do so at the same pace.
    I know little of her sense of smell, although in most birds it’s generally regarded as poorly developed (an exception being pigeons, in whom it may play a significant part in direction-finding, and some other species for which extra olfactory sensitivity is required for navigation or safety). I don’t know if it’s smell or sound that draws her instantaneously to the kitchen when butter, her favourite food, is removed from the fridge. I’ve tried to test her, removing it as silently as I can, but my silence may not be hers.
    About her sense of taste, I can judge only from observation. Although birds have fewer taste buds than humans do, they havedistinct preferences. Chicken can differentiate between foods of vaguely similar texture, a banana or an avocado, rejecting the former, accepting – with delight – the latter. The fat content of foods appears to be of importance, although by now she is able to distinguish between different types of cheese, between Bel Paese and aged Gouda, which she does like, and Camembert, which she does not. Recently I offered her a piece of a good Mull cheddar which, with the air of the dedicated oenophile contemplating a bottle of fine wine, she examined for a moment, appearing to sniff it. After consideration, she picked it with her beak from my hand and hurled it to the floor. This was the final judgement. It was not even worth hiding under the carpet. As most birds appear to do, she loves egg yolk in any form. Unlike Jakob, the pet raven about whom Bernd Heinrich writes, she rarely has the opportunity to sample Chinese food but would, I’m sure, try with great eagerness the