Crowing about, well, Crows
Yes, they’re loud. And yes, there have been times – usually around 4:45 a.m. – when I’ve been convinced the island’s entire crow population has convened outside my bedroom windows. Clearly, crows respect neither clocks nor borders.
They also plunger garbage, relish roadkill. Depending on whom you ask, they’re alarmists or effective guards dogs, either evil and brutish or intelligent and beautiful. Farmers mostly loathe them. Folklorists warn of their trickster ways. They’re symbolically linked with death in literature and numerous cultural or religious beliefs. One story goes that a crow showed Adam and Eve with their newly bloodied hands how to bury slain Abel’s body. In certain Native American cultures, it’s the crow that mediates between the visible earth and the invisible spirit world. Until the mid 20th century, crows were key participants in Tibetan “sky burials,” carrying off into the sky and presumably transporting to a new life the cut up pieces of a dead person’s body.
A U.S. bird population count suggests there could be as many as one crow per every five to ten humans. Others say that number is too low. Native to America and, as a corvid, in the same family as jays and ravens, crows are amazingly adaptable. Recently I learned that a zoopolis is a place where human and animal geographies overlap. As we homo sapiens increasingly make our homes on land once belonging to non-humans, there are many more such places. In them, crows are just one example of synanthropes (a word deriving from “with humans”) who prosper among us – “convivially” as Wendell Berry would put it.
Convivial is generally not what I’m feeling at 4:45 a.m. I could surely go with a few less wake up calls from my feathered friends. And I do have to wonder: what on earth do crows have to talk about, and so raucously, at that hour? Still, count me among the crow admirers. They often delight and puzzle me as they swagger about the lawn looking like avian sheriffs with holsters buckled to hips. Or, from the rooftop, like quality control inspectors, they study every move I make in the garden, emitting low guttural rasps of approval or a clacking-beak reprimand when it appears I’m about to do something stupid. One morning I was amused by but never did figure out what motivated a crow to alight on the back of one of our Adirondack chairs, hop down to the lawn, back up to the chair top, up and down, repeatedly for ten minutes, as though in a workout routine at the gym. Admittedly though, I did have to re-examine my loyalty to corvids after a friend told me how one of her regular crow visitors hoisted up to a branch a convulsing infant rabbit and with its thick bill, in spite of the rabbit’s last feeble, pitiful screams, thrummed it to death.
After reading crows can’t resist peanuts, I've succumbed. Each morning, onto a small round table in clear view of the house, I place a handful of peanuts. Three crows have become my regular visitors. One by one, they alight in nearby spruce branches, wary, on patrol, but usually bending over to repeatedly swipe their beaks on a branch, the crow equivalent, I guess, of tucking napkins beneath chin.
I’ve watched videos where crows use twigs as tools or drop pebbles into water to raise a floating worm within snatching distance. The most remarkable clip involved a crow that had figured out the best way to crack open black walnuts was to drop them onto a busy intersection trafficked by trucks and then, most amazingly, in order to get safely at the exposed meaty morsels, use the cross walk but only after the traffic light had gone from green to red. So it’s been a somewhat easy matter to train “my” crows. No matter how loud their congress of complaint and regardless the hour that I, by choice, awake, peanuts aren’t put out until 6:00 a.m.. By crows standards, I guess I can say they’ve developed a modicum of manners. Still, when it counts, I admire their loud, alarmist ways – how they gather up and attempt to run out of the neighborhood whatever in the crow world threatens and so tips me off to the roamings of the resident fox family or provides me with my first ever sighing of a goshawk.
And though I’ve resisted giving them names, there are mornings when, in the manner of a cartoonist, I can’t resist putting thought bubbles over their heads. Crow One swoops down and in the crow equivalence of running, bolts across the lawn, puts on the brakes a short distance from peanut table and then slowly, in a winding route, meanders up to it, his head cocking from side to side as he perfunctorily pokes his bill into lawn: “Me? Peanuts? Really, I’m just here checking out some grubs and ants.” Crows Two, in spite of repeated forays, takes off from a nearby spruce, hurtles toward the table in what looks to be a certain crash landing, barely touches down, grabs a peanut and, as though zapped by electrical current, flaps back up to branch: “Whoa, scary table.” And Crow Three, regardless the number of visits and before being satisfied he can with some confidence pop onto table top, circles the table below, circles it again, and then again: “So let’s see, just where are those rigged explosives?”
Not particularly smart these crows, some might say. But then what’s got whom buying peanuts?