There is something of the corvid about Woolfson herself. Morsels of food - goats' cheese is a particularly noisome favourite - are hidden under rugs or in the turn-ups of jeans, while papers are regularly deposited in the almighty hole Chicken has excavated in the kitchen wall.
The perils of sharing one's house with birds that are only irregularly caged are all too palpable aside from the inevitable droppings, there is the corvids' compulsive habit of caching to contend with. Like all the best accounts of a life shared with animals (Gerald Durrell comes inevitably to mind), Corvus offers much in the way of domestic comedy.
Corvids are among the most intelligent of birds, sociable, curious and possessed of what appears to be a sense of humour. Byron had among his extensive travelling menagerie a crow, while Truman Capote adopted a raven named Lola, who would steal his car keys and bully his dogs. She's not the first writer to fall for the charms of the corvids. 'With each has been established an enduring sense of connection, one that extends far, towards a world, a life, a society, of which I once knew nothing at all.' The birds are a source of intense joy and each tenuous, fragile cross-species bond brings with it the sense of expansion that is the gift of any unlikely friendship. If the price paid is a slightly less than pristine kitchen, then the benefits for Woolfson and her family are multiple. But their lives extend far longer than those of wild birds and they reside in a house impressively geared to the needs of its feathered inhabitants. The birds don't fly freely, nor do they live in the sociable groupings that they would naturally gravitate towards. Though they live domesticated lives, these are wild birds, 'resolute as iron', and the ethics of their transfer into a human realm is a preoccupation to which Woolfson repeatedly returns. Chicken, the courtly, timid rook that she adopted as a nestling, is more a familiar than a pet, while the raucous magpie Spike was practically a surrogate son, albeit one hellbent on wrecking the parental home. Woolfson's relationship with her birds bears little resemblance to that of the average avian enthusiast. But in the past year, corvids have found two champions in naturalist Mark Cocker, whose Crow Country was nominated for the Samuel Johnson Prize, and Esther Woolfson, a Scottish novelist who has produced a beguiling account of her life with a menagerie of corvids, not to mention a foul-mouthed starling named Max. In his 2006 memoir, Running for the Hills, the otherwise acutely environmentally minded Horatio Clare described the crows on his mother's hill farm as 'ministers of the devil'. C orvus designates a genus of birds - rooks, crows and ravens - that possesses a vexed reputation in these islands, held in superstitious fear by farmers and city folk alike.
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