Last spring, I started boiling two eggs for breakfast every morning—one for me, and one for the crows. A mated pair patrolled the rooftops around my Berlin apartment building; I’d begun luring them to my balcony with peanuts and other snacks. They loved not only eggs but also mealworms, cat food, cashews, chicken hearts, stale bread, cheese, and chunks of lamb fat; they barely touched liver, walnuts, vegetables, and dried fruit. In Germany, we were under a COVID-19 lockdown. But the birds were free. They fascinated me with their distinct personalities and intelligent behaviors. The large male was a glowering bully who tipped my potted plants if I forgot to refill his plate. The smaller female was curious and sweet. She watched me as closely as I watched her, and learned to manipulate me by fluffing up her feathers; I always responded to this adorable display by rummaging in the refrigerator for treats.
“Wherever you go, crows are watching, making note of our habits, our weaknesses, our wasteful tendencies,” Charlie Gilmour writes in his memoir, “Featherhood,” which was published in North America this past January. The book begins as Gilmour’s partner, Yana, brings home an abandoned baby magpie—a beautiful black-and-white member of the corvid family of birds, and a relative to crows, jays, and ravens. Gilmour asks his mother for advice about caring for it. “The person you should really be talking to about this is your father,” she tells him. In the nineteen-eighties and nineties, Gilmour’s father, the writer Heathcote Williams, published several long poems about animals; one describes his adopted bird, another kind of corvid called a jackdaw, which he took in shortly before meeting Gilmour’s mother. In “Featherhood,” therefore, the challenges of parenting a magpie become entangled with Gilmour’s lifelong quest to know his father, an infuriating and unwell man.
The British press heaped praise on “Featherhood” when it was published in the U.K., last year. Many compared it to Helen Macdonald’s memoir, “H Is for Hawk,” and to Ken Loach’s film “Kes,” from 1969, about a young, vulnerable boy who finds solace in caring for a kestrel. The Sunday Times called “Featherhood” a “work of magpie investigation that ranks among the best modern coming-of-age memoirs.” Having spent the year wondering what it would be like to raise a crow myself, I was eager to read it. But I set it down a little disappointed. It’s odd that so many stories about animals turn into tales about babies and parents. Why do encounters with wild lives so often domesticate our own?
Gilmour and his girlfriend name their magpie Benzene, because the black feathers of her long tail and her short, rounded wings reminded them of the sapphire sheen of the oil slicks in the junkyard where she was found. They soon have their hands full. Benzene wakes them up by squawking in their faces at sunrise every morning; she caches bits of food all over the apartment and sometimes in Gilmour’s hair. She falls in love with Gilmour’s stepfather, the Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour, and, to the horror of everyone around her, learns to say “Trump!”
Fans of corvids won’t be surprised by the magpie’s big personality. Crows and their relatives are sometimes called “feathered apes,” because they match chimpanzees on a variety of cognitive tests. They can build and use tools, manage complex social networks, play games, and plan for the future. “This roving, pecking creature is not a semi-developed human stuck in a bird’s body,” Gilmour writes. “It is an entity all its own, a totally different intelligence that is developing in front of us.” (They don’t realize Benzene is female until later, when she starts assembling a nest.)
Gilmour’s choice of words reminded me of a recent article, in the Times, that praised the hit documentary “My Octopus Teacher” for presenting animals “as distinct beings with qualities that have nothing to do with humans.” I thought that assertion was contradicted by the very title of the film. The filmmaker, Craig Foster, starts visiting with an octopus during his daily dives after what he calls “two years of absolute hell.” “My family was suffering,” he says. “I just couldn’t, in that state, be a good father to my son.” By the end of the film, his contact with the octopus has healed him, and he begins bringing his son on his excursions into the kelp beds along the South African coast. “My Octopus Teacher” seemed to me to indulge in one of the oldest tropes in storytelling: the animal who shows a person how to be alive. It also appears in other recent documentary films, among them “Jane,” from 2017, in which the filmmakers presented Jane Goodall’s revolutionary early chimpanzee research as a story about the awakening of a young woman’s maternal instincts.
The wildlife footage in “My Octopus Teacher” and “Jane” was so intimate and breathtaking that I wondered whether the films needed such conventional structures to draw meaning from animal lives. Certainly the experience of caring for an animal can inspire a person to start a family or become a better parent. But these stories ask us to recognize the significance of animal lives mainly through the changes they effect on human behaviors. “Writing demands a vanishing act,” Gilmour writes, about his absent poet father. But often it’s the animal who is made to disappear.
In the later chapters of “Featherhood,” the intensely selfish magpie is displaced by another intensely selfish creature: Heathcote Williams himself. Gilmour’s father was a “squatter, writer, actor, alcoholic, poet, anarchist, magician, revolutionary, and Old Etonian”; he once declared independence for a neighborhood in West London and set himself on fire on the doorstep of the supermodel Jean Shrimpton. (He never explained himself: some say it was a misguided display of devotion, others a magic trick gone awry.) By the time Gilmour reconnects with his father, to talk about birds, Williams has slipped into obscurity. He writes juvenile political verses, saves used condoms, and urinates in saucepans and vases.
Benzene recedes into the background as Williams comes to dominate the book. The magpie appears increasingly as a symbol of Gilmour’s state of mind, or as an instrument of psychological growth. Gilmour starts flying Benzene outdoors, because “a bird that always returns could be an antidote to loss.” Just when Gilmour decides that he’s ready to start a family, Benzene builds a nest. She lays eggs around the same time that Yana becomes pregnant.
“Brought up by humans, he is somehow reflecting the human idea of what a magpie should be,” Gilmour writes, after Benzene tries to pull a gemstone from a friend’s earring. (A common myth about magpies is that they steal shiny objects from people.) By the end of the book, she seems more like a reflection than an entity of her own. In the story’s final pages, a three-year-old Benzene flies off to live as a free bird just as Charlie settles into fatherhood at home. In the acknowledgments, however, we learn that she died “of natural causes just before her fourth spring came into bloom.” Readers who have come to love the cheeky bird will probably want to know more: Did she return to him eventually? Was it illness, hunger, or predation? How did Gilmour feel upon learning of her death? Benzene’s burial in the acknowledgements made it seem as though her life had become an inconvenience to the book she inspired. A bird that always returns is a problem for a story in which her freedom has become a metaphor for the author’s maturation.
I don’t fault Gilmour’s decision to set Benzene free, or doubt that he was anything but a loving magpie parent. The bird was lucky to fall into the hands of such a patient and attentive man. Nor do I mean to suggest that we shouldn’t tell personal stories about animals. Like the rest of us, I’m drawn to stories about animals in part because I think they can help us make moral and emotional sense of the world we share. I can’t imagine having endured the loneliness of these lockdowns without my daily visits from the crows. It’s a relief when they arrive each morning; the fact that they’ve survived another night suggests that I have, too.
Ultimately, though, the crows help me keep things in perspective. As much as I hate to imagine their disappearance, I dwell even more on what might happen if I move away. How will they process the loss of such a reliable source of food in their territory? Will the male vent his rage on my neighbors’ potted plants? Will the female look through the windows and understand from the empty apartment that I am gone? I feel guilty when I ask these questions, and wonder whether the birds would have ultimately been better off if I’d left them alone. Some friends have suggested that I should get a pet—and maybe I would benefit from a companion whose needs I can meet more completely. But so much of my affection for the crows has come from learning to see them as free and autonomous beings adjusting to a novel opportunity in their territory. Their different strategies—the male crow’s bad cop and the female’s good—must be the results of life histories and natural forces about which I can only guess. I remind myself that natural selection has equipped these birds to survive in an environment over which they have no control. I need to trust that they will adapt to my absence, just as they adapted to my presence. They are far more resourceful than I know.
Perhaps I have learned from the crows something about what it means to be human, but I’ve also learned to appreciate what it must be like to exist as something else. I love these birds not because they have taught me to raise a dog or child, but because they have challenged me to imagine what it means to be a crow. Before she becomes a symbol, Benzene teaches us the same lesson. “I puzzle over how such a tiny brain, contained within a skull no larger than a walnut, could possibly have room for such an imagination,” Gilmour writes. To accommodate the imaginations of animals in our stories, we must stretch the limits of our own.
