I once wrote a column for the Daily Telegraph in which I made passing reference to my raven research. I described how a reader had recently made me aware of the author JA Baker’s favourite winter walking routes, following peregrine falcons through the Essex countryside, that he undertook in the process of writing his beautiful book, The Peregrine. Former Telegraph editor Charles Moore once described the book as ‘the most precise and poetic account of a bird – possibly of any non-human creature – ever written in English’.

I wrote that I too was attempting to beat my own path across Britain in pursuit of another bird; to examine our relationship with the raven and to unpick its ferocious intelligence. To ask why we find it so difficult to regard the raven as a mere bird. To document and celebrate its return after centuries of persecution and to ask what that means in these troubled times.

The following month, I received a message out of the blue from a woman called Sarah-Jane Manarin, who told me she had recently acquired a raven of her own: a two-year-old named Loki (after the mischievous Norse god), and so clever that he could play the xylophone and the children’s game KerPlunk, as well as mimic words. ‘Would you be interested in meeting him?’ she asked.