The Sea Inside

they gather here in a great fluid flock of two hundred or more. Perhaps they’re evolving into aquatic birds, just as the gulls have moved inland to rubbish tips and shopping precincts.

    There are other worlds of communication going on here, unknown orchestrations of action. Every so often the crows will rise up in waves, bird-shaped holes in the sky. They’re a lustrous lack of colour, denuded of detail; a fluttering negation, as dark as the night. Ted Hughes, who made a new myth of the crow, saw the bird as suffering everything even as it suffers nothing. Encouraged by its ugly name, we indict its assemblies as ‘murders’; yet crows mark the passing of one of their number in funereal demonstrations, cawing their grief in the way elephants and whales mourn their dead.
    These ignored birds – whose ubiquity only makes them less visible – display the fascinating behaviour of their family. Broad-shouldered males swagger from one leg to another. Using their thick, oiled-ebony beaks, they peck over stones so much more dexterously than a wader or a gull. There’s a determined, discretionary air to their epicene foraging, although actually they’ll eat almost anything. They seem surprised if you stop and look at them, as though no one had bothered to do so before. They stare back briefly, abashed, then turn away, unable to believe that anyone other than their own might find them interesting. Or perhaps there is disdainful pride in that sideways glance, assuming the reverse: that they are the most intelligent of all birds.
    As indeed they are. Raptors may be more majestic, songbirds sing more sweetly, waders are more elegantly poised, but corvids such as crows and ravens exceed them all in matters of the mind.
    You can see it in their body language. They’re full of character, with their grizzled, quizzical stances; individuals, possessed of particular attributes. Their eyes glitter and their heads swivel with curiosity, ever alert to what is going on around them. Bold and twitchy, timid and territorial, their restlessness is a sure sign that something is going on in their heads. Singly or en masse, they react to every sound and movement. They’re always aware of what the others are doing: fighting, preening, competing, conspiring, minding each other’s business to see if it can be outdone. If a fight breaks out between two of them, the others will swoop in from the trees around to see what’s going on, like children in the playground chanting
Fight, fight, fight
. They’re irredeemably nosy, socially-adjusted birds.
    Crows appear crafty to our eyes, since we seem to find intelligence in any other species than our own suspicious (I write all this down in my policeman’s notebook, as if I were about to arrest one of the avian young offenders). They’re an alternative community over our heads; gypsy birds, a mysterious race with their own hinterland. They live on the periphery in the way that all animals do, existing on the same plane as we do but inhabiting another time and space. They even have their own voices, resembling the patterns of human speech: captive corvids can be taught to speak as well as, if not better than parrots; it is one reason why they were said to be carriers of dead men’s souls. Acting in loose unison, at some unspoken signal they will fly out of the woods and onto the shore, as if they were the spirits of the monks evicted from their dissolved abbey. No one really knows what they do or how they think. Perhaps theirs is just a convenient congregation, only motivated by food and sex. But then, you might say the same about us. As a species, we are unable to resist the temptation to impose our own failings on animals; it’s almost an act of transference, and I’m as guilty as anyone else.
    When the water has fallen back far enough, the crows will swoop on shellfish, rising up to drop them on a stone from a perfectly judged height. All the while they keep one eye on their fellow birds, ever ready to steal from friends or passing squirrels. They’re a disputatious, bullying, larcenous lot, forever finding fault with one another. They’ll tumble two-against-one in aerial combat, before falling to the mud to scrap over a mussel, the soon-to-be-loser on its back, eyes glaring, claws defensive, determined not to let go of its hard-won bivalve. Then, as suddenly as it started, it’s all over. A moment later and the same birds are strutting alongside each other perfectly amicably.
    They