Living in moderate climates with a dog means you spend a lot of time with crows, whether you want to or not. Dogs and crows enjoy similar things – namely, smelly rotting things on sidewalks and parks – and they are constantly engaged in a low level contest to consume such things before the other can get to it. My dog gets along with crows as well as any other dog, I suppose, which I appreciate as I enjoy spending time with crows, and if they really didn’t get along, I’d not have the opportunity to spend time with them.
Crows aren’t the same from place to place, although I’d hesitate to identify any national character in them. In Maine growing up, the crows were habituated to nature, and you generally encountered them in fields or along country roads. In London they were truly city birds, you found them mostly in the mornings or towards evening except in the parks, where they would cluster around their rookeries during the day – sometimes in tangles of uprooted tree trunks, or in brambles, or in abandoned or poorly maintained old Victorian buildings. In Seattle they tend to prefer the city, I’ve noticed. I’d be curious to know if Canadian crows are different in the east versus the west, but I only know the prairie kind intimately. They cohabit with Canadian prairie types perfectly – both prefer lots of space, both seem to inhabit more the low long flat stretches between buildings more easily than the buildings themselves. In France, the crows are everywhere – but France feels more like a place where every space has been inhabited before, even the wild bits in the mountains. The crows just never leave, while the people who once perched on every spot of the land slowly migrate to the cities and leave the countryside to the crows.
Birders apparently have lots of classifications, based on socialization, size, feather types, break shapes, you name it – I’m not a birder, though, and frankly, shiny black birds of about the same size all over the Northern Hemisphere really seem no different than the varieties of people inhabiting the same zone. Some are slightly larger, some smaller; some are more social, others more distant. We might call one variety “ravens”, another “jackdaws”, another “crows”, but how different is that from how we’d characterize Asians, or African Americans, or Scandinavians, or the all-encompassing North European Mutt that I am? Especially considering the fact that when you encounter them, they all do have a roughly similar outlook – on you, on the smelly bit of something in the bushes over there, on your dog. My guess is they are probably as distinctive as humans were a couple of hundred years ago over the same territory – their wings can probably knit distances only about as well as sail and wagon, so if humans were regionally more distinctive, if their dialects sounded more foreign 250 years ago, then crows are something similar still today.
I find them to be strikingly good looking, if somewhat sinister. Their feathers have a coarseness to them that is softened by their sheen, and their eyes are expressive in a way that songbird and seagull eyes are not. Their eyes are usually wary but they can flash with anger and hate, and when guarding their young, their panic is visceral when you approach too near and their relief just as palpable when you get beyond whatever perimeter they feel is safe, their eyes and their heads bouncing with the hangover of adrenalin but the calm still comes noticeably back into their eyes and their call moderates to something approaching normalcy.
They seem more intelligent than other birds, and indeed, a quick look at Wikipedia reveals that they are considered to be the most intelligent birds, with cognitive skills which surpass that of most mammals and a brain-to-body weight ratio close to that of humans (and we have the biggest brains relative to size of any mammal). They can recognize themselves in mirrors, memorize sophisticated instructions and repeat them to other members of their rookery. In fact their rookeries are complex social systems themselves, and maintaining that social cohesion – sometimes requiring group migrations, invasions, and thoughtful strategic defenses of their territory – likely is part of what reinforces their intelligent and over time is making them smarter, just as human society is thought to be increasingly the driver for our own evolution of consciousness and intelligence.
And what a great word to describe their society, too – rookery. The word is crisp and full in your mouth, like an apple just picked from the tree on a chilly fall day, the sky that deep morning blue you only get after the autumn equinox when there’s a risk of frost starting to creep into the air. Saying “rookery” and I can see in my mind’s eye the contrast of golden wheat colored dry grass on a field with an island of bramble bushes in the middle which one rookery called home when I was a kid, in the middle of a field a half mile into the woods behind my house. By fall the rookery was a bit quiet, the children having grown up enough to no longer require constant stalking and protection by their parents, the whole family either resting or out foraging for late season berries or tossed out food cartons by the road or for dead mice in small hollows in the grass.
Most people see crows as evil or dirty, and while history gives a lot of different perspectives on man’s relationship to crows, there exists in the stories an undercurrent of danger or chaos or malice that never entirely goes away. The Celts and the Norse associated crows with their most powerful gods, but their gods weren’t benign in any way – they were simply personifications of the cruelty and randomness of the world, their human streaks softening them slightly but never taking away their association with nature’s wrath. Otherwise crows and ravens have a pretty bad reputation, their omnivorous willingness to eat carrion resulting in our associations of them with death and ruin. Ravens picking through corpses on a battlefield is a too-familiar motif.
I’ve always liked watching crows, though. They deserve more empathy, although admittedly you see few examples of them being empathetic to other species so why they so particularly deserve empathy is maybe hard to justify. I think maybe I hope they deserve empathy because I hope human beings deserve empathy, too, and watching crows, you start to realize that they are a lot like people. They are kind to one another, especially their partners; they are doting in raising children, and the partners help one another. Families come together to protect children while they are growing up, with aunts and uncles or friends guarding the rookery while the parents nudge the children out of the nest towards food and flight.
They are also astonishingly greedy. Alone finding a dead raccoon, I’ve seen a large crow savagely stab and bite other crows that come to steal some of the prize. The bird cawed with a delirious passion, fighting off bird after bird until finally three crows worked a tag team, each of the three taking turns engaging the vicious fighter while the other two pecked at the corpse and got a snack in during the fight. This went on for quite awhile, I guess until the three birds had had enough food to justify their fight, and then the original bird was left alone, wailing in pain and anger and stepping around the now-tattered corpse like one whose beloved has been unfaithful. He still had more food than he could eat, but he had lost his primacy, lost the defining excess of his wealth. The emotion, the raw devastation of the original bird was terrifying, but at its core it was just frustrated greed. It was disturbing – such power from a creature but power arising from an essentially empty source.
That vision of greed haunts me, and reminds me a bit too much of humanity. We are greedy too, and I know this from knowing myself. I have howled like that crow in his frustrated greed, having lost things that were never mine. I have felt my heart implode and shatter for my inability to get something, to have something, while meanwhile I’ve ignored the joy of simply being alive.
But I still watch crows whenever I can. Outside my house, there’s a family of five birds who recently displaced some songbirds from the front gutters. I liked the songbirds but they were admittedly not very bright; one flew into my front window in the spring, and they’ve struggled with the slipperiness of the vinyl gutter. The crows – with three youngsters in tow – more or less took over the nest in the course of a couple of weeks. The songbirds moved to the back roof, where I actually think they’re probably happier.
These new crows talk most of the day with one another – there is a huge variety of sound that they make, yes, all of it some variant of a “caw” but really, the range is astonishing. Right now it’s a deep throat raspy caw, with a kind of roundabout curl to it – in a single “caw” the tone feels like its wrapping around an axle. They fly around the block, spending time at dumpsters and behind bushes, the same places my dog snoops around. They were more aggressive a month ago when the youngsters were really young; they hadn’t invaded the gutter yet, but in their former perch across the street, they would dive bomb pedestrians and bikers if they got too close, especially one day when they were teaching one chick to fly and he fell onto the ground, where he waited and rested and was plucked upon by his parents for a few hours until he managed to get back up into the nest (or was eaten by a cat – I missed the big reveal).
At the park last week, I saw a smaller crow viciously attack another crow over a bit of bread. This wasn’t like the dead raccoon – it was just a small piece of bread, torn from a slice somewhere out of sight – and I came upon the battle late, so I’m not sure if the larger bird had stolen the piece from the smaller bird or if the smaller bird was trying to do the stealing. The intensity was amazing, though, feathers flying, the smaller bird using his beak to wedge open the beak of the larger crow, each screaming in pain as the sharp beaks ripped into feathers and flesh. The large bird looked to be winning but the small bird never gave up – they were still fighting when I had to walk away to find my dog. You wanted to break up the fight, but on another level, you also sensed you were watching more than a fight over some bread – the smaller bird, at least, was fighting almost to scream his existence to the world as personified by the larger bird, not fighting for his life but fighting as a means of declaring that life is being lived.
Other birds are often prettier – crows being the Mr. Ford’s Model T of birds, they come in all your favorite colors as long as you like black – but you don’t get primal existential challenges from them. Once you’ve seen them peck at the ground a bit, or seen the condor or eagle hang on a slipstream before diving for prey, you’ve pretty much seen their whole act. Not with crows – crows talk, and argue, and can in the same hour strut, defend, evoke and feel fear, and then reset themselves for another conversation with another crow. It’s all about eat, reproduce, find shelter, yes, but like humans, once you have a good spot and don’t need to worry so much about finding the basics, life really becomes an exercise in how you go about doing it.
I think there’s something to this idea that crows are like people a few hundred years ago. Before steam and then internal combustion and electricity, people were caught in their villages and towns except for the adventurous few who traveled and the forced migrations of peoples whose land was torn by famine or drought or war. Rookeries are much the same; some crows branch out, every now and again a couple will find a new nest in some distant place, but mostly the rookery is the village, where crows will be born, grow up, live, have children, and die. Their calls become distinctive to their rookery, and they become brilliant in the narrow confines of the territory that surrounds it. They are deeply suspicious of outsiders, and their lives are dominated by fear.
What would happen if crows could board our planes or book cabins on our ships and freighters and oil tankers? What if they could travel easily back and forth to pleasant crow type places, visiting exceptional crow eating areas like large third world dumps and mingle with other crows from rookeries on other continents? I think crows would do what we do: cluster with people who speak like us, put out tentative and timid feelers but quickly withdraw when the sensation of newness gets to be too much. Even so, the ability to travel would change crows. My guess is their fear and greed would dominate, but that fear would have odd consequences. Rookeries would get larger – knowing how diverse and dangerous the external world of other crows are would inspire small rookeries in one general area to come together, to protect themselves and to compete for the rich resources they would find abroad – which would inspire more complex organization, which would further reinforce the tendency to have larger rookeries. Fear would increase but would get channeled into the equivalent of crow bureaucracy and role specialization. What had been scattered but locally optimized small villages would grow into clusters of rookery cities that are at once more complex, more aggressive, more fearful, and more productive.
In fact I heard a radio program on CBC exactly to that effect a few years ago. I was driving to Edmonton on a winter afternoon, and the program told of how around Toronto, as suburbanization creeped further into the Ontario farmland, crows were being displaced by development and were combining smaller rookeries into gigantic merged rookeries which were creating problems for town managers. Rookeries with hundreds of crows had taken over entire barns, and swarms of crows were uniting to steal food from dumpsters and the town transfer station, occasionally swooping down and attacking garbagemen and maintenance staff. Biologists were puzzled as to how to react – they couldn’t break up the rookeries as the social organization was too strong, and even if they tried, the growth of the suburbs meant there wasn’t any place for smaller rookeries to thrive. The program ended with speculation that they might try to lure the rookery further out into the countryside, maybe to Quebec, where suburbanization wasn’t an issue.
I remember the program mostly because as I drove north – the denouement of the program, where the biologists were inspecting the rookery and describing how they had spent weeks getting the crows to trust them by wearing really distinctive hats while walking slowly or laying out food – the afternoon sun got lower on the horizon until finally it hit an angle where the snow around Innisfail lit up in one giant flare of light, erupting the vista in a pure play of deep indigo sky and golden yellow light. It was bright enough that traffic slowed down – everyone was blinded at once – giving me time to look at the scenery and out across the prairie as my eyes adjusted to the light. Only in winter could there be a sight like this – not just created by sun on snow, but by the way light moves through a sky that’s hovering forty degrees below zero. On the side of the road as I zipped by, I could see a long-distance power transmission tower in silhouette, and on the tower, dozens and dozens of crows, their thick feathers buffeted in the icy wind.