The Sea Inside

surprisingly comfortable, and worn out by my early rising and the afternoon sun, I fall asleep. I wake abruptly – with that disconcerting sense of not knowing where I am or how much time has passed – and realise I’m not in bed, but on the edge of a five-hundred-foot cliff. There are strident voices coming out of the air. ‘…
That’s a risky business
…’ says one. For a moment I assume they’re talking about my perilous nap, but they soon drift by and I scramble to my feet.
    As I walk on, the ground grows more fissured as the island narrows and the sea expands. The sheer unboundedness seems to invite me to throw myself off. ‘It is as well, however, not to go too near the cliff-edge,’ my 1950 guide cautions in solemn tones, ‘as in this exposed corner the wind often comes with sudden gusts that might have awkward consequences.’ I’m too close. I can hear my mother telling me to be careful, and see my father frowning when I persist in my daredevil ways. He feared for her heart. But then, so did I.
    Here where the grass parts company from the white, chunks of cliff are preparing themselves for collapse, as if the whole thing might give way any minute. As the wind gusts enticingly around me, I wonder that the Poet Laureate and his photographer friend weren’t caught up in its embrace; billowing cape, wide-awake hat, Indian shawl, red velvet dress, glass plates, manuscripts and notebooks, all sent flying over the edge as an airborne bundle to be dashed on the boulders below. As for me, there’d be no audience to my final piece of play-acting, only the birds, whose careless launchings encourage my fantasy of falling or flying, the same fear that feeds my apprehension in the sea. I trust to the water; they place their faith in the air.
    As I stand there, I hear a sudden whoosh by my ear. A raven rises on the updraft, near enough for me to feel the wind from its wings. Riding on fingertip darkness, stark black against the bright white and wide-winged, it looks more like a bird of prey than a passerine, commanding the air around it. Landing deftly, it is joined by its partner, eyes glinting as they stalk the turf, a twitchy, mythological presence. Ravens, I have decided, are my new favourite animal.

    If an animal’s brain exceeds the size which the efficient running of its body would require, the excess is measured as an encephalisation quotient, or EQ. It is one way in which we can measure the capacity of the forebrains that govern sensation, memory and emotion. In the global clan of corvids – crows, magpies, rooks, jays and jackdaws – this index far exceeds that of all other birds. Above them all is the raven,
Corvus corax
, the
über
-crow. It boasts a brain-to-body size comparable only to primates and toothed cetaceans such as dolphins and sperm whales, even though a raven’s brain weighs a fraction of an ounce compared to the latter’s eighteen pounds.

    If we were once aquatic apes, owing our brains to our seafood diet, then such is their intelligence that some biologists go so far as to call corvids ‘feathered apes’. And as ever with science, one conclusion only invites another in the endless cycle of what may or may not be true. ‘It may be impossible to prove in a literal or absolute sense that any one particular animal has or does not have emotions, consciousness, or capacity for insight,’ as Bernd Heinrich, a biologist who has raised ravens by hand in order to study them more closely, writes. ‘These subjective, individual, and hard-to-define qualities of mind are found in separate independent evolutionary lines, with the highest end-points reached in some species of primates, cetaceans, and perhaps corvids and parrots.’
    A carrion crow will place nuts on a pedestrian crossing for cars to crack, and wait for the red light to retrieve its meal. New Caledonian crows hook food out of holes with leaves and sticks, displaying the same insight and creativity that Aesop related in his fable of the crow and the pitcher, in which the thirsty bird learns to drop pebbles into the jar to raise the level enough to allow it to drink. Magpies recognise themselves in the mirror, suggesting a sense of individual identity. Jays remember the ‘what-when-where’ of past events. Rooks will support their fellow birds after a fight in a manner which in humans we would not hesitate to call sympathetic. These birds all demonstrate co-operative action which is clearly not instinctual. They are