Living with birds has allowed Woolfson to learn aspects of bird behavior which would otherwise have been impossible to know - the way they happily become part of the structure of a family, how they communicate, their astonishing empathy.We hear about Chicken's fears and foibles: her hatred of computers and other machines and her love of sitting on Woolfson's knee in the evening and having her neck scratched the birds' elaborate bathing rituals, springtime broodiness, and tendency to cache food in the most unlikely places. But above all, it has been the corvids (a talking magpie named Spike, Chicken the rook, and, recently, a baby crow named Ziki) that she has formed the closest attachments with, amazed by their intelligence, personality and capacity for affection. Other birds have also taken their place in the household - a magpie, starling, parrot and the inhabitants of an outdoor dove-house. That rook - named Chicken - has lived with the family ever since. Įsther Woolfson has been fascinated by corvids, the bird group that includes crows, rooks, magpies and ravens, since her daughter rescued a fledgling rook sixteen years ago. But above all, it has been the corvids (a talking magpie named Spike, Chicken the rook, and, recently, a baby crow named Ziki) that she has formed the. Esther Woolfson has been fascinated by corvids, the bird group that includes crows, rooks, magpies and ravens, since her daughter rescued a fledgling rook sixteen years ago. The living trees were cut down, their wood used to fuel the city's growth, it's trade, it's life.The ancient wood ,preserved in peat, was found underneath the city(The site of the killing is fairly well buried -the wolf and the king had their encounter some time around the early years of the eleventh century)It's the same as in any other city, built up and over and round, ancient woodlands cut down, bogs drained, watercourses altered, a landscape rendered almost untraceable, vanished.Here, there's a history of 8,000 years of habitation, the evidence in excavated fish hooks and fish bone reliquaries, in Bronze Age grave-goods of arrowheads and beakers, what's still under the surface, in revenants and ghosts of gardens, of doo'cots and orchards, of middens and piggeries, plague remains and witch-hunts, of Franciscans and Carmelites, their friaries buried, over-taken by time and stone.
Every day when I leave the house, I may walk over a place where a king killed a wolf in the Royal Forest of Stocket, one of the medieval hunting forests ,where alder and birch, oak and hazel,willow, cherry and aspen grew. “In a city it's impossible to forget we live in places raised and built over time itself.
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