The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree
Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.
Robert Frost, Dust of Snow
We have been watching blue jays, flickers, chickadees, nuthatches, downy woodpeckers, and a single pileated woodpecker visit our feeders and suet box. There are undoubtedly other species foraging there as well, but I do not recognize them yet. I am proving to be a slow learner when it comes to things avian.
We have watched ours invited guests long enough to recognize individual birds by their habits. We haven’t given them names, for I am certain they have their own secret names to which we humans are not privy. It would be arrogant to call them by anything other than their own secret names, and we haven’t yet developed the level of trust between us necessary for the sharing of something so tightly held, so personal.
Just as there are differing feeding habits among the species, there are differences among the feeding habits of birds of a single species. Most of the blue jays, for example, love to land on the roof edge to scope out which peanut they are desirous of having, heads atilt first one way and then another as they judge distance, desirability, risk, and timing. They hold this position for several seconds, and then swoop in to steal their chosen target, landing upon the feeder’s edge just long enough to grab it and to cause a scattering of seeds against our window panes, only to immediately escape to a nearby pine bough to smugly eat their prize and preen at meal’s end. Their chosen bough becomes both dining table and the staging area for yet another sneak attack upon the sanctity of our feeder. They are natural thieves, always certain, there on their bough of choice, that they have once again outwitted the feeder gods.
One of them, however, prefers to land sedately on the edge of the smaller feeder, and then, with body hanging vertically, tail thrust far underneath the feeder pan, neck craned impossibly over the feeder’s edge, to eat daintily of the seeds within. This bird always appears to be hanging onto the feeder for dear life. It’s as if the concept of perching upright on a rolled plastic edge is so impossibly foreign as to be incapable of achievement, and, therefore, unworthy of attempt.
Our visitors are endlessly entertaining in a way that television never is. They have a purpose that television might do well to imitate. In order to indulge in watching their behavior, I go outside into the cold of each winter’s morning to fill the feeders hanging above the deck outside our living room windows, standing precariously on a picnic bench to fill the large feeder and the suet box and on tiptoes to fill the smaller feeder. In doing so, I must appear to the oddball blue jay as awkward in my fear of heights as he appears to me when feeding so ingloriously. This mission accomplished, Helen and I will be brought together at unplanned, unscheduled moments during the day by the magic of the frenzied avian activity we have wrought.
Yesterday, we were decorating the house for Christmas (I say ‘we’ for narrative purposes only, for the truth is that Helen is the decorator and I am merely a hindrance; but I am technically expert in my duties) when I heard Helen exclaim from the kitchen that our fields were covered in crows. I joined her at the kitchen window to discover an impossible number of crows strung like black freckles across the green of our winter fields. There were several hundred – big and little, raucous and quiet, hopping and flapping, flying and resting – but all of a single, collective pack. A murder of crows so large, it approached a massacre.
As I went outside to take a picture of the phenomenon, they took flight as if a single being, becoming as one gentle susurration of wings disappearing into the west. They moved so rapidly that I was unable in my technical inexpertise to capture a single image.
Crows are common on our Farm; we see, hear, and suffer them daily. They dominate all other creatures frequently from afar, and sometimes by means of dive bombing. They are mischievous in their protection of their presumed turf, to the point of dropping nuts and pinecones at times upon the heads of unwary intruders. Marco, our black cat, is often the target of raining, ringing corvid insults if he dares appear upon open ground when they are in residence.
In fact, crows are so common to the Farm that I thought I understood them in their entirety, that nothing new about them was left for discovery. How wrong I was in my arrogance! Yesterday’s behavior proved me mistaken in my belief, leaving me astonished and amazed, in awe of their collective beauty and of the shared expertise, care, and wisdom necessary to accomplish the patterns,the rhythms, and the path of such unified flight. It was if strangely dressed, miniature Rockettes had come to Humptulips County from their New York stage to grace our fields, to form and reform in optically pleasing patterns, to kick in unison with their trademark precision – doing so while airborne, as if twisting from unseen cords dangling from the grids strung in the theater top.
It was if strangely dressed, miniature Rockettes had come to Humptulips County from their New York stage to grace our fields, to form and reform in optically pleasing patterns, to kick in unison with their trademark precision – doing so while airborne, as if twisting from unseen cords dangling from the grids strung in the theater top.
The sight of such a large flock – several hundred birds; perhaps as many as a thousand – caused me to go to my favorite bird website and discover that large congregations of crows are common in winter. If only I had known, I might have been able to plan, to lay in wait, to capture the photographic image that escaped me!
But I proved to be, instead, just another sad human observer of their logic and wit; as outsmarted as we humans always seem be when in their presence, but as delighted as I could possibly be while enveloped in their mystery.
