Crow

When the big old ash tree in my neighbour's garden had to be cut down earlier this year the crow's nest that had perched in its branches for years came down with it, of course. This was nesting time and for a week or two I watched the crows disconsolately flying around, perching on roofs and chimney pots, as though wondering what had happened and where to go.

Mother crow with young one at the end of the garden 

I lost sight of them for several weeks after that, though I did wonder from time to time whether they'd managed to find somewhere for a new nest. They certainly were not interested in building one in my lime tree next to the missing ash, as I'd vaguely hoped. Last Tuesday, however, I woke up at 6am and wandered out into the garden to get a view of it at an unaccustomed hour and noticed a group of four crows hanging around in a next door tree.

They seemed to be acting oddly, just standing about aimlessly in the branches.  Occasionally one would fly off, do a short circuit and then come back. Then one of them began stuffing food down another's throat so I realised this was the young brood and the parents must have managed to find a good tree and built a new nest and produced a family. In the afternoon the young ones practised more flying and you could hear their rather high pitched caws overhead.

I came back indoors and went back to bed but later I googled crows and they are extraordinary creatures.  The whole family of Corvids including crows, ravens, jackdaws, jays and magpies have the biggest brains of any bird and among the many things they can do is learn by experience, teach themselves how to make tools, learn to copy sounds and possibly understand some of their meanings.

Because the ash tree used to overlook my garden I have been a close neighbour to this particular family of crows for a long time. They haven't been a nuisance (like the foxes and squirrels) except one year when they  made a hole in the soggy lawn and then enlarged it day by day to get at the fat worms that lived there. In fact on the whole I admire their practicality. Once  when I laid out some man-made soft insulation matting that had come wrapped round a ready meal thinking it would make good nesting material, all the other birds spurned it, the foxes happily scattered it in little bits all round the garden but the crow gathered up  huge great beakfulls  for its nest.

I suppose because these birds are big and black and intelligent and their call is definitely harsh, they have always had a reputation for being sinister and threatening. A groups of crows is called a murder for example. When Edgar Allan Poe wrote his dark poem The Raven it was translated into French not by one French poet, but by two: Baudelaire and Mallarmé. The Scottish ballad The Twa Corbies tells of two crows deciding to eat the body of a dead knight. In fact there is no end to the stories of these birds in myth and legend and some more optimistic experiences today.

Two informative books on crows:

Corvus, A Life With Birds, by Esther Woolfson, (Granta Books 2008) is about the author's long relationships with these birds. I have ordered it, but haven't received it yet. I will tell you my reaction it in another post.

Gifts of the Crow by John Marzluff and Tony Angell (Simon and Schuster 2012) is a scientific look at the crow's brain in quite a lot of detail with many back up stories of true crow antics.