||| MIDNIGHT MUTTERINGS by JACKIE BATES |||
Recently, still taking a break from voter suppression, I threatened to tell one or two crow stories and now here is the first. Would love to hear your crow stories or any story at all that can fit in the confines of a reply here. Or just write your own column. A ‘murder of crows’ is a group of crows of undetermined (as far as I know) number.
Crow Story #1:
This was just before the pandemic or maybe when things had just started getting weird. I was walking toward my house from a few hundred feet down the beach when I heard a great cacophony of, well, I wasn’t sure what. I could see the tall (? 60+ ft) Sitka Spruce that is in my front yard and towers over the house. It was glittering with what I came to realize were crows reflecting the sunlight. Hundreds of screaming, roiling, crows. Just before I got close enough to really see them clearly, they suddenly stopped screaming, which was almost as shocking as the noise they had been making.
Then they took off, flying away over my head in sheets of twenty or so birds at a time.
By the time I got around the house to the front yard, all the crows were gone and all that was left was an eerie silence. I couldn’t even be sure I had really witnessed what I thought I had.
As I got close to the base of the spruce, I saw there was a dead crow on the ground. It didn’t seem harmed in any way, but it was certainly dead, still a bit warm. I waited a few minutes to see if any of the departed crows would return. None did and I took the dead crow for a final swim in the beautiful Salish Sea. Then into the house and onto the internet where I learned about crow funerals, described just like what I had seen. A large group of crows gathers near a dead crow, seemingly to mourn the departed friend/family member.
Then there were a couple of alternative explanations of the behavior. That sometimes a crow is attacked and killed by the group for some egregious behavior (unspecified). And sometimes (and I know this is a family-oriented community news source, but…) some of the surviving crows, perhaps even the murderers in the event of an unnatural death, gather around the dead crow and attempt to engage in some unspecified sexual contact. That particular article did not suggest any gender-specifics of the perps or the recipients. If such events were carried out by ‘my’ crows, they were well over by the time I arrived on the scene. In fact everyone had left except the one unfortunate crow who was, well, too dead to leave on his or her own.
Since I witnessed this crow funeral I’ve thought a lot about it and about human behavior, and what would happen if the attendees of a funeral were accused of being the causes of the demise of the central figure. Or, in some cases, whether they should be accused. That is, if they were, in fact, guilty….
Raping the dead? Sounds like anthropomorphism to me.
Jackie– You’ve witnessed a Crow funeral, with everyone all dressed up in the shiny finest, and gathering in a generously sized wake. Powerful stuff, yes?
Just an hour ago I witnessed a pair of crows, and one Stellar Jay (they are stellar, are they not?) grouped loosely on a low Fir branch. One held in its beak what looked like a shredded plastic bag. This was “Strut”… yes, they have names. (The same pair show up every morning. The Other was named “One Foot” mistakenly. Her foot was missing, tucked away, for a few months, after tangling with some fishing line, ending up suspended like Tarot’s Hanging Man . Her original name was “Barker.” Couldn’t crow for a damn. Neighbors freed her — this was last spring– and told us the story after we returned from Iceland and the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee. Now she’s just gimpy. Is that a good name?)
The plastic raggedy bag fell from the branch, and the cawing and Jay shrieking stopped. Turns out it was a Hawk kill, from an hour earlier, when I heard a 20-Crow ruckus up in the top of our neighbor’s Fir out back (75 feet back, 100 feet up). Strut must have retrieved the deceased and carried her down for a farewell ceremony (or the deceased may have fallen to the lower branch).