corvidæ

Here is a whole site dedicated to researching tool use among New Caledonian crows. There are movies showing these very self-possessed black birds bending wire into hooks for the purpose of fishing desirable objects out of narrow-necked jars. Astonishing.

I'm coming late to this, I see. Some of the media coverage of this phenomenon is from 2002, I see. And I'm only just learning about New Caledonia. That is was in Melanesia I knew; that it was French I did not. Caledonia, the old one, had been the name used by the Romans to refer to Scotland, that is, unconquered northern Britain. Given the cultural ties between Scotland and France over the centuries, it seems appropriate that New Caledonia should speak French.

Lord knows what these birds speak. Maybe I am suggestable. I have after all just finished reading the very wonderful Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, in which the long shadow of the magical sovereign of medieval northern England, John Uskglass, the Raven King, falls darkly upon all subsequent British history. I am in that queer state in which I have not made full exit from the fictional world drawn up in the novel, and I am thus not wholly convinced that the Raven King did not in fact exist. I may indeed be somewhat suggestable, but the footage of these black birds is most uncanny, and if were to read tomorrow that they had begun addressing the Oxford researchers in Scots gælic or some færie tongue, I would not be entirely surprised.