Esther Woolfson, in a blend of memoir and natural history, describes how she shares her home with birds, not only the rook that arrived as a young, abandoned fledgling, but also doves, parrots, a cockatiel and a starling. ‘Of all of them,’ she writes, ‘it has been the corvids, the rook, magpie and crow, who have altered for ever my relationship to the rest of the world, altered my view of a hierarchy of form, intellect, ability; my concept of time.’