NATURETHIS BOOK SHOULD not work, but it does, marvellously well too. Esther Woolfson's happily eccentric memoir of domestic life with crows dances on a high wire over a landscape dotted with literary pitfalls. Sentimentality, pedantry, self-indulgence, prolixity of sentence and structure lie beneath every step she takes. She wobbles more than once, but still gives an exhilarating performance. In the end, the wire falls away and, like the birds she loves so passionately but with such clear vision, she flies.
This is a woman with two families in the one house. The humans - a husband, children, a grandchild - don't get much of a profile in this account. Happily, they seem to share the author's own joy in the company of birds. Their large granite house in Aberdeen is also home to a random collection that has, over many years, included rooks, a magpie, a company of doves, a handful of parrots and, most recently, a crow called Ziki.
This second family is not exactly housetrained. The birds excrete at will, on carpets, on jeans, on persons. Some of them cache their food - a ripe mealworm here, a regurgitated morsel of squid there - under carpets, behind cupboards, between the leaves of precious books. They can be frighteningly aggressive, even violent, towards residents, guests, and tradespeople. Keeping such company could lose one a friend or two. But the compensations have evidently been rich and varied.
You may, at this point, be recoiling in some distaste. We all know people whose passion for animals is a cloak for a sad incapacity to cope with their own kind. I recall a pious woman who was entirely unmoved by the human hecatombs of the 20th century, but lost her faith in God when her elderly dog died a natural death. Stay with us, if you will: Esther Woolfson is in a different class altogether. Her intimate liaisons with birds never blur her cool, intelligent and inquiring vision.
Woolfson was not, by her own admission, a natural candidate to make her kitchen a bird sanctuary. She remembers with "retrospective scorn . . . a display of abject panic, fear and horror on finding a pigeon dead in my mother's garden".
Her studies (Chinese poetry at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem) and career choices (short stories for BBC Radio Four) give no clue as to why she became so involved, though they do hint at how she writes about that involvement so compellingly. It seems to have all started by accident: "On an evening in spring, many years ago, I was given a bird."
This was Madame Chickeboumskaya, an infant rook named after a drag artist who featured in the New Yorker the week she arrived. Woolfson clearly fell in love with her, and still cherishes her as a friend and confidante. (You can picture the creature standing on her shoulder as she wrote this book, dictating certain passages, shrugging ironically at some of her more daring speculations on avian inner life.)
It was Chicken - with moniker mercifully foreshortened - who pitched Woolfson into a vast web of bird-related studies. She finds infectious fascination in every field, from taxonomy to ecology, from diet to migration.
In the early pages, a reader might fear that she is merely showing off her new learning. She relishes Latin names, uses obscure English words ("noctivagant flight") without explanation, and delves deep into increasingly arcane topics. All of the information she discusses is, of course, available elsewhere, in the textbooks and more "serious" works of natural history she meticulously cites throughout.
A NUMBER OF qualities make this unlikely book such a triumph. The first is the author's character, as revealed in the tone of her narrative voice. Only a real grouch would not enjoy her company. Then there is the deceptive simplicity of Woolfson's best writing: "I looked out of the window one morning. Snow in April? The flowerbed was hidden under a drift of white. In the middle, with an air of calm intent, was the hawk, plucking and tearing. The process was prolonged, the remains slight, only a pair of feet, a light scattering of feathers."
This passage reveals a third quality. The author is watching a wild bird eat one of her cherished doves, but observation trumps emotion. Again and again, Woolfson shows herself to be capable of deep subjective involvement with birds, yet this involvement is always given a telling extra dimension by her cool and critical eye. The mix of domestic incident, comic, sometimes banal and occasionally tragic, is tightly woven with the fabric of scientific inquiry.
Another attractive aspect of the book is its intellectual fearlessness. She repeatedly sees beyond the current dogmas of animal psychology. Her quirky combination of wide reading and unique personal experience lends credibility to her bold interpretations of bird behaviour.
Finally, though, it is her ever-present sense of fresh wonder which carries us lightly to the very last page. It illuminates line after line, whether she is discussing the aerodynamic structure of a feather, or recounting a demonstration of mischief by a magpie.
Helen Macdonald's under- credited illustrations add another layer of pleasure.
• Paddy Woodworth's most recent book is The Basque Country (OUP 2008). He is currently a visiting fellow at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, where he is researching Restoring the Future, about ecological restoration