Every time I interact with crows, I come away with the same conclusion: they have an alert intelligence and try hard to communicate across species about things that are important to them. Unfortunately, I don’t speak their language.
I walked to our mailbox yesterday afternoon, as is my wont on nice days. It was a sunny, but cool, day with the temperature in the high 60s. As I reached a point under the pines about one hundred feet from the house, I heard a crow call and turned to see it fly out of the woods across the field on my left, headed in my general direction. I didn’t give it much thought at first, other than to wonder what it might be yelling at. It continued to caw as it flew.
It landed slightly ahead of me in one of the pines that line our driveway. It was then that I first sensed I might be the subject of its call, but I couldn’t understand why, if so. I couldn’t see a nest of any kind, crow or otherwise. So I dismissed the thought, and continued on my way.
The first crow was soon joined by a second, more silent, one, and the two of them began leapfrogging to pines in front of me as I continued my walk. The supposition that I was the object of their attention grew the farther I walked. The lead crow became increasingly insistent, only stopping his calling when I emerged from under the pines into the open space at the end of our driveway in which our mailbox resides. He quit calling then, content to watch me from the top of the last pine.
I retrieved the mail and our newspapers. Giving the crows no further thought, I began walking back toward the house. But as I neared what had since become, courtesy of my U-turn, the first pine, the lead crow began calling again. Both of them reversed their progress and followed me back up the driveway. It was now beyond doubt that I was the sole subject of their interest and calls.
There seemed to be more menace to them on my return. On my way to the mailbox, the lead crow would fly to a pine two or three ahead of me as soon as I had passed underneath his current perch, and call out as I approached. But on my way back, he always stayed immediately above me or to my rear, scolding the entire time. I could hear his wings flapping whenever he approached and wondered if I might be dive bombed. But he never got nearer than the tops of pines, content to tell me whatever he was trying to say from a lofty perch. The second crow remained silent the entire way, always staying in the second farthest pine from the one in which the lead crow perched.
My initial conclusion was probably the right one – that I was being warned away from something that the crows held dear. The fact that there were two of them added gravitas to this notion, given the assumption of parenthood. But why, I wondered, would they have come from so far away – 40 yards at least – to warn me about a nest in the tall cedar from which they’d originated? Certainly I was no threat to anything from that distance, especially when my direction was away from whatever it was they were protecting and my top speed is just slightly greater than lumbering.
I began to consider other reasons for their behavior. Maybe they’d just woken up and were feeling querulous in the absence of whatever it is that serves as caffeine for crows, or perhaps they hadn’t yet had an opportunity that day to annoy a larger animal and were desperate for the opportunity.
But then I began to wonder if they were trying to entice me toward the cedar from whence they’d come. Maybe they were asking for assistance of some kind; maybe an as-yet-unfledged newborn had fallen from their nest and they expected me to return it. Perhaps Marco, our black-as-a-crow cat who spends most of his time coming in and out of the house in order to provide Helen with as much exercise as possible as she opens and closes our side door at his demand, had decided to investigate their neighborhood and they wanted me to chase him away. Or perhaps the resident deer had somehow annoyed them and I was meant to restore peace between species. The latter seemed particularly unlikely since the crows and deer coexist in the same woods and have differing spheres of influence, but I have seen them yelling raucously at Marco in the past. But they were at least sixty feet in the air when they first noticed me, and Marco couldn’t have seemed much of a threat from such a distance; and, if they did consider him a threat, surely they would fly at him, not me.
Nothing made sense then, and I still haven’t any answer to offer on this morning after – either to them or to my curiosity. As I walked up and down our driveway yesterday, I tried talking to them in English and in badly approximated crow, but it did no good whatsoever. It neither encouraged nor discouraged them; they remained content to follow their down-driveway or up-driveway routines with near-religious fervor, only quitting whenever I reached either the open space at the end of the driveway or the 100 foot mark from the house – the territory in between being their active strike zone. I only know that while I was in that zone I was the object of their interest, and they were trying their best to give me a piece of whatever was on their minds.
Helen would tell you that I am an indifferent communicator at best on the human level, and I am as certain as I can be that I have no facility whatsoever for communication with crows. Yesterday’s failure was ample evidence of the fact. When I tried to speak to them, my attitude fluctuated between curiosity and outright disdain, but they stoutly ignored me, caring nothing at all about my thoughts and feelings and staying tightly focused on their own – whatever they might have been.
It’s Sunday now. There is no mail, but our three Sunday-sized newspapers await me in their appropriate boxes on the post that holds our mailbox. My Sunday ventures to the mailbox are usually made in late morning, since I don’t need to wait until the afternoon in order to retrieve the mail as well. I wonder if they’ll be waiting for me this sunny morning. If they are, I won’t have any more clues than I did yesterday about how to respond. But I wish I did. How wonderful it would be to understand something about the world from a crow’s perspective!.
You’ll have to forgive me if I end this piece here without any further musings and without any hint of a thesis or conclusion, but I’ve just now remembered that we own a copy of Tony Angell’s and John Marzluff’s In the Company of Crows and Ravens and maybe – just maybe – it might teach me something more about crows than the fact that they are a pesky bunch.
