At last, it looks as if I might have time to write the things I have been meaning to for ages, about the birds, Ziki in particular, and about the book, which was published yesterday. The response so far has been astonishing—and delightful. I still wish that I had a photograph of myself carrying a large cardboard box with a magpie's backend and tail sticking out of it, across the road in Banchory, heading for the bookshop where the magpie and his companion and two crows, all rather larger than life although very beautiful, are now displayed in the shop window, along with copies of 'Corvus', all, I suspect, to the severe mystification of passers-by.
This morning, Ziki the crow, whose first birthday-or rather the first anniversary of his coming to live here- we'll soon celebrate, made a couple of the odd, non-crow like sounds he does. I will have to keep watch to see what encourages him to try to vocalise-the sound of crows outside perhaps.
But at the moment, the most urgent task is to do a bit of corvid-cleaning, that constant requirement in the life of the corvid-keeper...
