I was impressed / entranced by Chloe Dalton's Raising Hare: the winner of the 2025 Wainwright Prize for writing about nature, environment and conservation. I don't keep tabs on literary prizes [except wrt to Michael Crummey??] but maybe I should trawl through the Wainwright back-catalog because a dozen past winners / short-listees have been favourably viewed by The Blob. One of the gob-smacking episodes of Raising Hare, is when one of Dalton's adoptees elects to deliver a litter of kits behind a curtain inside the house. It is a testament to the non-threatening empathy of their host. It is less crazy than you'd think because hares are fastidiously clean about their person and leave no trace - because to do so is to invite the attention of carnivorous predators.
A key theme of commonality is that both father and son chose to rear tame corvids - treating their homes as free-range aviaries. Heathcote adopted, and wrote poems about, a jackdaw Coloeus monedula called Jack Daw. While Charlie found a magpie Pica pica in a London gutter, named it Benzene and looked after it for nearly three years. Hence the book-title [har har] Featherhood. The difference between hares and crows [and birds in general] is that the latter are not house-trained in the way that small childer, cats, dogs, and hares can be. The most aggravating aspect of keeping a flock of free-range hens in the 00s was that they drifted in to hang about on our warm salubrious South-facing stoop and shat all over it. Don't get me started on the pair of skittery-shittery ducks we had for a while. At least the ducks were adept at hoovering up slugs in the kale. And it's sweet to have robins Erithacus rubecula in the polytunnel - but don't leave the laundry hanging there longer than necessary.
Corvids, like most birds, are just cloacally incontinent. If you choose to keep them indoors expect shit on the table-cloth - and every other surface. But corvids are carnivorous and are programmed to stash surplus food against a rainy day. If you feed the wee darlin's maggots, mince and scrambled [shells-and-all please] eggs, then expect to find giblets poked up your sleeve, meal-worms in your hair, and old meat book-marks. And the smell - whooph! These matters didn't effect Heathcote much because he lived feral, unwashed and surrounded by brimming chamber-pots. Charlie and his avant-garde artist partner Yana adapted to the maelstrom because they were on A Mission.
Benzene isn't a difficult individual to please. Her medieval tastes are simple enough. She likes music. She likes men. She likes to consume small animals when they're still alive. They assumed their magpie was male until, as a yearling, she started building a nest atop the fridge: a most unsuitably slippy surface to start weaving twigs and detritus into a nursery.
Before I lived in their basement, my New England foster-parents had hosted a sooty mangabey Cercocebus atys in the same space. This beast had been rescued from a Boston brothel where he'd endured a miserable existence wanking away in a cage in the lobby. Some of the whores used to torment him, but the clients were in general more kind and supportive. In the cellar, the mangabey would roar blue-murder at the sight of any woman but pause in his frantic business to hold out a hand to men, in the hope of a treat.
Charlie was eventually adopted, and loved and supported by David "Pink Floyd" Gilmour when his mother dated and then married the guitarist. It didn't keep the chap from going off the rails with drink and drugs and mental breakdown as a teenager. But his new Dad was infinitely kind, tolerant and open-handed. Not all men, indeed. For one of his offensive off-'is-'ead escapades Charlie was banged up in chokey for 16 months, but new Dad embraced him at the prison gates when he was released.
So Feathered is less bucolic and meadow-sweet frothy than your average contender for a Wainwright Prize.
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