My Friend Olenna

easiest of the corvid types around here to get to know, and helped me cross the bridge. When they’d known me well enough to get excited by my approach for two or three years, the crows started to notice and get in on the act. Now, finally, this year, the magpies like me too. This only holds for birds who know me, obviously; strangers initially react only with the boldness or caution taught to them by their environment and fellows – countryside birds flee at the sight of me in the distance, snack-bar corvids wander up nonchalantly to see what I might drop. How far I get with any given bird in the amount of time I have varies wildly.

     Olenna was so smart and so experienced that I never saw her at all until I got to know her. I heard her, though; she had a very distinctive low burbly call. It could have been rust with age. You see, by the time I got to know her she was already elderly. I did a lot of research and compared her to a lot of photos and queried a couple of people who work with them and we decided she was definitely in excess, four years ago, of twenty years old. I’m pretty sure she’s Alastor’s grandmother, maybe even great-grandmother. When I met her, she was significantly greyed (well, whited), one of her legs had a frozen joint (I never did learn whether it was her hip or her elbow) so that she walked with a bad limp, lurching to one side, and it took her a bit of effort to get off the ground sometimes. She was just starting to go bald; it’s probably what eventually killed her, this past spring. A bird that can’t fly well and can’t keep warm won’t make it long. I like to think that when I heard her calling from the tree outside my window, in April or May, she was saying goodbye. I never heard her again; I wish I’d made it out there in time to see her that day.

time and people drop and throw away food all day long, but the crows seem to stick to smaller territories. I saw her with Alastor a few times (not in winter) so I wonder if she went over there by the botanical gardens, or maybe a few blocks farther to the shopping streets. This last spring she did come back after all – to call outside my house one last time. Before she started overwintering elsewhere, she would always find me if I was out around the neighborhood. Back then I carried peanuts, and she would collect and stash them, returning to me over and over until I passed out of her range. I remember one time, I was standing at a bus stop waiting to go to work. I was well back into the small three-walled bus shelter, wearing a bulky coat and a hat that Olenna had never seen before pulled low, scarf up past my nose. Visibility was poor as snow swept along the street in oscillating curtains. And yet, there was Olenna. She spotted me somehow and plumped down in the middle of the street, bold as you please, and just started calling for peanuts. I had to pardon-me-excuse-me to the front of the huddled mass of people, my place at the back immediately and gratefully taken over, to toss her peanuts until the bus came. I try to keep a low profile but sometimes my friends make that difficult.

     Olenna’s limp got worse over the years and she began to go more obviously bald. Not so much, just a patch of exposed down here and there and some missing primaries. The primaries were, when it wasn’t cold, the problem because with every one that didn’t grow back, flight became more work. Most wild birds don’t live long enough to experience this. She was always there, though, respected by the other crows and jackdaws enough that she could walk or fly in and eat wherever they gathered, smart enough to follow me around whenever I was outdoors, uncannily turning up anywhere a trash bag was torn open by gulls or a grocery bag fell off the back of a bike. I knew she was really starting to flag when she started getting bullied, two years ago. First the younger crows, then the jackdaws, and then one day I walked outside and found her being attacked by doves. Don’t get me wrong: doves are hard-core thugs really, but they would never have dared when she was younger.

with little Billy over the year he’d been alive, because my normal route walking the dog went through “his” park and I was entertaining and always had food. He also started following me home sometimes, hanging out for a little while in a big tree a few houses down after I went inside, and in summer, sometimes he would call me from there if I was in my back garden, but he never came around for a visit. The thing is, though, that Beckett came to love again, and Castle 2 didn’t take much to being an adoptive parent. The days preceding Billy’s disappearance had been punctuated with dramatic chases through the park as Castle 2 harried and harassed Billy until he just didn’t come back.

     I was deeply concerned for my little guy. He’d grown up in around a park so safe and comfortable that the jackdaws leave their young there every spring under the babysitting eye of old Rincewind. Now he was out in suburbia where there were dogs and cars and humans and bigger crows and bicycles and so many things that looked like food but could kill. Billy was a completely goofy, naive young crow, still all elbows with a tendency to overshoot branches he was trying to land on. I fretted. Until one day there they were – Billy and Olenna. Side by side they were foraging over by the children’s experiential gardens, and both of them were very excited to see me.

     From that day until she died they were inseparable. Billy grew rapidly into a big, glossy, confident young crow as Olenna aged farther, limped more badly, landed more awkwardly. He protected her from bullies and she taught him her decades of wisdom. It made me very happy to see them. They faced the world together for a year before she died. After that I didn’t see him for a long time but he’s back now, with a mate and everything, and although we no longer share a territory, we see each other sometimes.