My partner Surya goes out but immediately comes back. There’s a fledgling Crow by the road.
My heart leaps. Ever since I was a child, I’ve longed to have a tame corvid. I used to watch Magpies from my bedroom window and pretend I’d made friends with one of them, who I called Dock. In my imaginings, Dock would come and go as he pleased, flying to my bedroom window before heading off to the trees again, sometimes bringing me gifts, but mostly just dazzling me with his iridescent feathers. But the real Magpies where always too wary, and never came close enough for me to befriend them.
Suddenly, all these years later, there’s an opportunity to make friends with a corvid. I rush out, and find the Crow crouched in a ditch close to the tree where it was born. It stares up at me with unflinching, slate blue eyes. As I bend down to pick it up it doesn’t move. Neither does it struggle when I lift it, nor when I bring it close to my body and walk it away from the road. This intrigues me. I expected some resistance; flapping wings perhaps, panicked wriggles, cries. But instead the Crow accepts the situation like a master Stoic. I look down at the Crow’s large beak, thinking of the damage it could do to my fingers. Surely it must know that one swift peck would draw blood from my veins? But it does not peck me. Instead, it wraps its toes tightly round my fingers and waits.
The nest is too high in a Scots Pine tree for me to return the bird and besides, this is the way of Crows. Their young leave the nest before they can fly. It sounds counterintuitive, but as chicks get larger they make more noise, which in turn entices predators. Exiting the nest early leaves them vulnerable, of course, but it’s thought that by spreading out, some of the fledglings avoid predation.
I make my way to a Horse Chestnut tree growing opposite the nest tree and place the Crow in its lower branches. Its remarkable how attached to it I already feel. I back away a little and watch. It watches me back. I know it’s probably never seen a human before so it has no reason to fear me, but there’s more to the look in its eyes than that. What I can see, clearly, is intelligence – an intelligence akin to my own.
When I have helped other birds, the look in their eyes is different. I do not think this means they are any less perceptive, it just means that their brains are working on a different frequency to mine. Us humans have an odd way of studying intelligence in other creatures, in that we only declare a creature intelligent when its behaviour matches our own. But I think that’s a failure of imagination on our part. That said, it is difficult to think outside of the human experience, which is perhaps the reason why we are so moved by the eyes of animals whose brains work on a similar frequency. There’s recognition there; a feeling of being understood.
Although the idea of taking the Crow back to our house to befriend it had clamoured through my mind at first, I already knew I couldn’t keep this bird. A Crow visiting by its own volition is one thing, but forcing one into a life it was not designed for is wrong, and with every second that passed I felt this more keenly. I backed away, so I could keep an eye on the Crow from a distance to see if its parents were still feeding it. However, this young Crow had other ideas.
After initially staying still, and quiet, for a good twenty minutes, he (I had no way of sexing it but was convinced it was male) began to climb the Horse Chestnut. Being unable to fly, he had to jump-flap his way upwards. Before every jump, he analysed the gap he had to traverse, and if he thought it was too far, he looked for a simpler route. I was impressed that he not only seemed to have a destination in mind but also that he had the cognitive abilities to work out how to get there at such a young age. This didn’t look like random movement. It looked strategic. Until he fell.
On ‘landing’, he picked himself up and started to strut, in that way that Crows do, real cock of the walk-like, straight back towards the main road. I scampered after him, and managed to convince him to turn around. Then he and I walked, side-by-side, back up the driveway. He stopped to pick up a stone, to which I found myself automatically replying: “Yep, that’s a stone, useful for grinding but not for eating.” He dropped it, walked a little further, then began to gently peck at a Buttercup. Again, I responded: “That’s a Buttercup. Pretty, isn’t it? Although you can’t eat that, either.” It was like walking along with a toddler. Everything had to be looked at more closely, analysed, touched and tasted.
By the time we reached the top of the drive I felt even more responsible for his safety. So when he decided to turn into a field which leads down to the local river, I was in a quandary. His parents wouldn’t feed him if I was close by, but if I wasn’t close by, there was a likelihood that he might just cock of the walk himself straight into the water – if, of course, a Fox or a Buzzard didn’t pick him off first.
I intervened. I picked him up, his toes clasping my fingers as before and, climbing a ladder, took him to the roof of the building closest to the nest tree. I could hear his siblings up in the nest, and presumed that his parents would have an easier time finding him if he was in full view. Then I retreated back inside and watched him like a hawk, hoping that his parents would find him before the local Sparrowhawk.
His parents flew over him a few times, and although he called they seemed to ignore him. I found myself willing them to feed him. By now a couple of hours had passed since Surya first found him, and I was starting to think that I might have misjudged the situation. Perhaps he was too young to be out of the nest, although he didn’t look it, as he’d lost most of his downy baby feathers and was able to flap and walk fairly confidently. How long could he go without food? And what was I going to do if they continued to ignore him?
Then, after half an hour on the roof, he vanished. Oh. God. Why did I ever think it was a good idea to put him in such a vulnerable position? Up there, he was a sitting duck. If he wasn’t attacked but the local female Sprawk the likelihood was that he’d fallen off the roof and broken a leg.
I went out to see if I could find him. But he was nowhere to be seen. I tried to carry on with my day and do some work, but my thoughts spiralled around him, this plucky little Crow. Please don’t let him be dead, I thought again and again. Don’t kill something with so much spirit.

Surya came back, dinner was had, things carried on, as they do. Although I clung on to the hope that he’d made it, logically I knew the Crow’s chances were slim, especially as I hadn’t heard him for hours. But after dinner, I heard a familiar sound. “It’s the Gravy Poe!” I blurted out. Of course, I meant ‘baby Crow’, but the strange sort of spoonerism stuck.
Sure enough, I located him in the lower reaches of the field by the river. He had resolutely walked himself through grass twice his height to get there and, although I flinched at his proximity to the water, I concluded that clearly this was where he wanted to be. If he’d gotten that far his legs couldn’t be broken, and the fact that he was calling for his parents showed he still had some energy. I didn’t like that he was on the ground but told myself to trust him, for this was the way of Crows.
Gravy Poe kept calling. At dusk, my curiosity got the better of me. I needed to know if he was being fed. If his parents were feeding him, somehow, I felt like he’d be okay. I stood at the gate to the field and watched. By the river, I saw the dark shapes of two adult crows hopping through the Alder branches, intently watching the grass below. They knew he was there. And he’d seen them too. I know this because he suddenly vaulted out of the long grass, wings spread like stretched tarpaulin, and cried at the top of his lungs. “I’m here!” He seemed to say, every atom in him desperate to survive.
And that scene etched itself onto my mind’s eye, because I knew at the same moment a friend was losing his battle, his own atoms failing in an alcohol-fuelled hell. And I sensed then that he wouldn’t make it, because he’d lost the determination of that little Crow, which called again and again from the grass, until his parents flapped down and fed him.
The following day, I went down into the field by the river and tracked Gravy Poe. He’d left a thin trail through the grasses, accompanied by numerous black and white droppings. Eventually I found him. Somehow, he’d managed to get into the trees above the river, where he now perched, looking down. “Good boy.” I told him, as if he could understand.

I don’t know what happened to his siblings. They may have fledged while I was out. But from that day until this, I have only seen one young Crow near our house, and I always presume it’s Gravy Poe. In truth, it could be any of them, as he had no distinguishing features, like a white feather, to set him apart. But it’s something about the dogged determination of this one young bird which makes me believe its him. He is an exemplary bearer of life. Each day, he flies into the branches of a tall tree and calls out, loudly: “I’m here!” As if that’s all that matters. And maybe it is.
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