With his swashbuckling gait, ominous associations and garrulous demeanour, the magpie is the dandified razor boy of our avifauna and provokes ambivalent feelings (the ‘pie’ part signifies many a mixture). His pilfering reputation has inspired work from Rossini to the prog-rock band Marillion, and in lab tests he’s one of the few creatures brainy enough to recognise his own image in a mirror – even some Marillion fans can’t do that. But it’s hard to see how this corvid could be truly lovable.

The artist and poet Frieda Hughes, however, fell for a little foundling Pica pica back in May 2007 when she was refurbishing her ramshackle new home. He was an unloved, unfledged orphan, and adopting him changed her life. George is a diary-based record of the sprightly saga that ensued.

In an intriguing prologue, Hughes describes a peripatetic childhood: her mother Sylvia had killed herself before Frieda was three, and she followed her father Ted rootlessly for years. She attended 13 different schools (‘forever an oddity, not belonging’) and had no toys or proper friends. There was the occasional pet, including a badger called Bess – ‘I found ways through marzipan and sliced cow-lungs to befriend her’ – but not once a ‘forever home’. After years in Australia, she finally settles in Wales with her third husband (retrospectively dubbed ‘the Ex’) and seems to find the place she has always needed.

Although Hughes comes to adore and indulge him, George, the foster bird, proves troublesome from the start. There are serious problems with projectile excrement and kleptomania, and he develops a penchant for caching doggie doo and light bulbs. He attacks the heads of visitors, and grows into wayward adolescence. Still, his ‘surrogate mother’ finds him ‘a magical creature’. He makes her laugh and appears to return her affection (I’d say there was a degree of cupboard love there) and becomes a kind of antic daemon – cute, exasperating, impish, attention-seeking and destructive.

His cartoonish ways are sometimes more Pingu than Pica, and not everyone finds him engaging: the neighbours are resentful of his pranks, and the Ex (who appears to lounge around eating salami sandwiches and watching re-runs of The Matrix) regards him as an interloper. You occasionally wonder why Hughes doesn’t take the little wretch by the throat and throttle him – the bird, I mean.

As George grows and spreads his wings it is clear he may not wish to stay forever. Hughes feels guilty about confining him, yet is aware that his half-taming may make him the victim of a cat, fox or gamekeeper’s vermin gun. As he begins to spend more time in the wild, she experiences ‘terrible separation anxiety’, yet realises her obsession with him is unlikely to have a happy end. She decides to construct an elaborate aviary. Harsh physical labour proves a distraction from things that are beginning to fall apart (she personally mixes some 65 tons of concrete for the garden), and although this could never be mistaken for a misery memoir, the author has much to contend with – ME, dyslexia, arthritis, ADHD and chronic back pain from a teenage car crash. George, with his harlequin panache, is the least of her problems.

There are some tremendous set-pieces (a visit to a chandelier breaker’s warehouse; her father being engulfed with flies hatching from a forgotten bait box of maggots). Hughes is also an accomplished poet, working throughout this period on what would be her collection The Book of Mirrors (2009), the year her brother Nick took his life – a few of whose verses are included here. The diary is for the most part easy and vernacular, but occasionally there’s an overload of sentimentality – the repeated adjective ‘little’ to describe her surrogate child suggests a lack of editorial tightening when we have in a single paragraph his ‘little head’, ‘little glass’ and ‘little face’. A little of this goes quite a long way.

When the Ex returns to Oz, the bird takes flight, and Hughes loses her weekly poetry column in the Times, leaving her feeling ‘rootless all over again’. The column has become her ‘very identity’, as she is fed up with being pigeonholed as the daughter of her notable parents (one can only sympathise). There are other animal rescues, plus a surprising passion for motorbikes; but you feel the magpie memory is pecking around for consolation.

One vignette describes Frieda’s chain-smoking Aunt Olwyn – Ted’s sister and erstwhile agent, with a reputation in the literary world for being somewhat difficult – who took the train down one Christmas and, in an attempt to assuage her nicotine cravings en route, polished off all two pounds of the glacé fruits she had brought as a present. Frieda herself once had an 80-a-day cigarette habit and tacitly forgives her. But the bountiful candy box arrives empty. Now that’s surely one for sorrow.