Crow call

 I have several shirts, and most of them don't need ironing because they're made of polyester-cotton. If I don't spin them too hard (or if I hand-wash them) and hang them carefully on the line, and fold them just as carefully when I bring them in at the end of the day, they can go straight back on the shelf ready to wear.

But my two favourite shirts are made one of cotton lawn and the other of fine linen. The cotton one is blue with a lovely pattern of massed flowers, reminiscent of William Morris's designs. The linen one is white and has pin tucks, narrow cotton lace and mother of pearl buttons.

Because they are all natural fibre, they do need ironing.

The consequence of that is I wear them quite infrequently, because they spend most of their time sitting on the top shelf of my bookcase, waiting for me to remember to iron them. I mean to, and then I put on one of my polyester-cotton shirts when I get dressed, and then because I am now dressed I forget all about them, and there they stay.

But today I determined I would get those shirts ironed, and I took them down to the kitchen, and first made myself a cup of coffee and sat drinking it outside in the sunshine on the decking by the studio door.

Then my attention was caught by next door's deadly creeper sneaking its horrid little hands through their fence. It is a beautiful plant, to be sure — a Passion flower — and the bees love it, but I don't. It stretches out until it covers the distance to one of our shrubs or trees and there it winds around and around whatever it can reach, binding itself tight to the branches, dragging them down, using them as a ladder to extend its horrendous ambitions to make a kingdom that will eventually swamp the whole earth. So every time I see one of its ghastly little fingers stretching through the fence, I break it off. It also throws its seed pods into our garden and tries to take over the world that way, and I keep vigilance over the area near the wall and pull them out when they sprout.

So I reached across from the deck, but the sneaky waving feeler was just out of my reach. I went down the steps and round to the wall where I could get at it, and this attracted my attention to the nettles growing back around the cherry tree. I tip out coffee grounds and washing up water down by that tree, so the nettles flourish there as well as the tree itself. So I went back indoors to borrow Hebe's gardening glove, and I pulled the nettles out.

While I was doing this, I heard a really strange bird call — like a quietish football rattle ending on a chuckling musical note. I've heard it before. Whatever is that bird, I thought, and straightened up to look. And there, on the chimney-top of the neighbours the other side, stood this year's teenage crow.

I realised what had happened. A few years back, when I first began to make friends with the crows, I bought a crow call — a thing you blow into in such a way that it mimics the call of a crow. You have to do it properly; if you don't, it just sounds like a party tooter.

But people use these things to lure crows with intent to shoot and kill them, so I was actually quite keen not to teach our crows to trust the sound of one of these devices used properly. I just used it badly, so it would sound like a party tooter but I could still call the crows. It was highly successful, and I came upon a whole posse of the crow family high in a Scots pine in the park, talking to each other about it and trying out the sound it makes.

All of them would stop in mid-flight to give us a shout out in a special party tooter voice if they saw us out and about walking the streets of our neighbourhood (which is also their neighbourhood).

That year's baby was a very chatty bird, and would often spend twenty minutes at a time conversing back and forth with me. He was an unusual bird with tatty feathers and a very long, thin, curving beak — somewhat clumsy but a very articulate bird who could say lots of different things. His parents had already taught me how to make a 'chuck' sound like a jackdaw to announce my presence and indicate that 'this is food', but that bird also taught me a word to say that lets all corvids know I'm a friend — a sort of tongue-rolling rattle. After he showed me to do that I stopped using the crow call because I could just make the sound with my tongue, and it's worked well for calling crows through the two years since he taught me to do it.

But this year's baby — also a very friendly and chatty bird — had evidently listened carefully to me doing this sound, and what he was saying from the chimney this morning was his best approximation of it.

The advantage of this system is that it allows him to announce his individual presence — 'I'm not just any crow, look, I know the password.'

So I called back to him, and went indoors to get him some more minced beef, even though Alice had already given them their breakfast.

He is still only at a learning stage — finds it hard to land in high wind, drops a lot of food everywhere, hasn't got the hang of stacking meat in his beak or storing it in his crop, is very scared to come down and get his food and stays so long in the tree gathering his courage that the seagulls get in first — so his parents have to help him out a lot still. I think they find him a bit of a nuisance — they detail him off to sit in the tall ash tree as the lookout bird, while they clear off to the park for some peace.

I went back indoors to iron my shirts, but if I tiptoed into the studio and stood by the freezer, I could see in the sunshine outside the shadow of crows sitting on the deck rail enjoying the meat I'd put out for them on the newel posts, which make handy bird tables.

Actually, those birds did very well today, because our cat Miguel also caught a rat this morning, and the crow family always sends someone by to pick up any rodent corpses we have to offer.

It's a happy relationship.