Crows (15 page)

Carolee Caffrey has a lifetime of crow stories. There was the time she was watching two crows in Encino, California—a year-old male and his father—foraging under a flowering magnolia tree. When the young male’s sister flew in to join them, she accidentally dislodged a petal, which landed beside her brother’s face and made him jump. His sister watched this happen, turned, inched along the branch to a flower, plucked a petal with her beak, and inched back over his head. Then she leaned forward, dropped the petal right beside him, and made him jump again. Was she just being a pesky little sister?

There have also been more somber moments. In Oklahoma, for example, Caffrey once saw two adult crows, a breeding male and a helper, break away from their group and come back to feed a family member that was terribly injured.“It was sad,” she said, “and so tender.” Another time, she was observing a nest through a spotting scope when the breeding pair returned to feed their nestlings, only to discover that their nest had been raided by a raptor in their absence. “In all my life, I’ve never heard such horrible, bloodcurdling
screams as the crows made at that nest.” The male flew away after a minute or two, but the female stayed behind and, for the next four hours (until Caffrey reluctantly left), tended a surviving but injured nestling by nuzzling it, picking up its neck, and preening the side of its head. All the while, the crow uttered mournful-sounding
ooh
s.

Caffrey doesn’t pretend to know what the bereaved bird felt, though as an onlooker, she herself was moved to tears. And she has even more questions about the remarkable behavior of another female. Remember the story of XT, the male crow near Oklahoma State University that in 2001 was ousted by his son and took up with the widow next door? That widow, known as AM, was a special favorite of the researchers because they never knew what she would think of next. On one occasion, for example, when a climber scrambled up to her nest, she let go at him with a barrage of angry caws and then flew up into the tree above him and proceeded to hammer at a branch.“I could see she was totally pissed,” Caffrey says, “and I thought the hammering was a displacement activity,” or a way of letting off steam. Instead, AM kept banging away until she broke off a pinecone, which she then picked up, carried into the air, and launched at the head of the intruder. “Direct hit! Bam!” By the time the poor climber was back on the ground, AM had dropped three more pinecone bombs, two exactly on target.

AM had four chicks that spring. When banded, three of them looked healthy and they soon fledged, but the other was sickly and did not flourish.
One day, Caffrey received an SOS from one of her graduate students, Tiffany Weston, who happened to live across the street from AM’s nest tree. The little runt was walking around on her lawn. What to do? The researchers knew from experience that if they left the chick on the ground, it would not be long before a dog or cat picked it off. But they were also reluctant to interfere with natural process. As a compromise, Caffrey suggested catching the baby crow, feeding it a meal of dog food, and then lifting it up to safety on a branch.

Even though the crow could not yet fly, that little bird could run, and it led Weston on a noisy chase around, under, and through the bushes. Meanwhile, all the cawing and commotion had attracted the attention of its mother, AM, who was not impressed by the sight of a human pursuing her offspring. Cawing wildly at the top of her lungs, AM flew repeatedly at Weston, with an ominous rush of wings, and landed a solid blow to her head. When Weston fled into the house with the nestling to feed it, AM stared at her through the window and continued to yell.

Once the chick had eaten, Weston brought it back outside and threw it high in a tree, and things calmed down. The next day, however, the youngster still did not seem to be thriving (it hung on for another couple of days before disappearing, presumably dead), and AM again took up her grievance. She renewed her vigil at Weston’s window and stalked her from room to room. “It was the spookiest thing,” Caffrey recalls. “Tiff would come out of the living room and walk to the kitchen and AM, who had been peering through the living room window, would follow her around.” Sometimes AM cawed loudly; at other times, she was eerily silent, just looking and looking. This went on for the next four days, until Weston made a previously planned move to a house in another neighborhood. “It was amazing,” Caffrey says. “We liked AM a lot.” Sadly for the researchers, she and her family all disappeared in 2003, at the height of a West Nile virus outbreak.

It is disconcerting to find so much of ourselves reflected in a feathered reptile: a bird. Disconcerting, but also revelatory. Our kinship with crows reminds us of the irrepressible creativity of evolution, that endless, free-form expression of the miraculous that has shaped all of Earth’s beings, including us. In the vernacular of creation, crows and humans are a kind of living pun, two species with different meanings but the same vibration. It’s the kind of double entendre that the mythic Raven would have loved, a cosmic witticism that both puts us in our place and raises our spirits. When a crow leaps into the air, our hearts take wing with it and we join in the rowdy revel of existence.

 

18 Raven speaks, from “ Tlingit Myths and Texts: Myths Recorded in English at Wrangell: 31, Raven, Part I.”
http://www.sacredtexts.com/nam/nw/tmt/tmt035.htm
.

22 Raven speaks, from Edward Nelson, “The Eskimo About Bering Strait,”
Bureau of American Ethnology Annual Report for 1896-97
18 (1899), pt. 1, quoted in Peter Goodchild,
Raven Tales,
49, 50.

23 Diamond, Jared M.
The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee
(London: Vintage, 1992), quoted Alex Kacelnik, Jackie Chappell, Ben Kenward, and Alex A. S. Weir, “Cognitive Adaptations for Tool-Related Behaviour in New Caledonian Crows,” forthcoming. Available online at
http://www.cogsci.msu.edu/DSS/2004-2005/Kacelnik/Kacelnik_etal_Crows.pdf
.

29 “The Crow and the Pitcher,” from V. S. Vernon Jones, trans.,
Aesop’s Fables
(London: Pan, 1975 [1912]), 23.

37 Carolee Caffrey, personal communication.

38 Carolee Caffrey,“Catching Crows,”
North American Bird Bander
26 (October-December, 2001), no. 4: 149.

39 Ovid,
Metamorphoses,
from
http://www.auburn.edu/~downejm/Ovid/Metamorph2.htm#_Toc476707511
.

40-41 Kevin McGowan, personal communication.

45 Carolee Caffrey, personal communication and “Female-Biased Delayed Dispersal and Helping in American Crows,”
Auk
109 (1992): 617.

47 Robert M. Yerkes and Ada W. Yerkes, “Individuality, Temperament, and Genius in Animals,” from
http://www.naturalhistorymag.com/editors_pick/1917_04_pick.html
.

49 Kevin McGowan, personal communication.

52 Vittorio Baglione, personal communication.

53 “Nest Defense,” paraphrased from
http://members.tripod.com/~srinivasp/mythology/storypa7.html
.

60 “Raven Gets His Way,” from “Tlingit Myths and Texts: Myths Recorded in English at Wrangell: 31, Raven, Part 1.”
http://www.sacred-texts.com/nam/nw/tmt/tmt037.htm
.

61-62 Bernd Heinrich,
Mind of the Raven
(New York: HarperCollins, 1995), xiv.

64 “The Three Ravens,” from Bertrand Harris Bronson,
The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads,
vol. 1 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959), 309-10.

69 Bernd Heinrich, personal communication.

70 Bernd Heinrich,
Mind of the Raven
(New York: HarperCollins, 1995), 319.

73 “Silverspot’s Treasures,” Ernest Thompson Seton, “Silverspot: The Story of a Crow,”
Lobo, and Other Stories From Wild Animals I Have Known
(London: Hodder and Stoughton, n.d.), 71-72.

77 “Raven Opens the Box,” based on “Raven Stories by the Marshall Journalism Class, Spring, 1995.”
http://www.ankn.uaf.edu/Marshall/raven/RavenStealsSunStarsMoon.html
.

79 Thomas Bugnyar, personal communication.

85 “Quoth the Corvid,” Theophrastus, quoted in Peter Goodchild,
Raven Tales: Traditional Stories of Native Peoples
(Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1991), 146.

85 “Quoth the Corvid,” H. Douglas-Home, quoted in Iona Opie and Moira Tatem, eds.,
A Dictionary of Superstitions
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 331.

91 “Hansl the Talking Crow,” Konrad Z. Lorenz,
King Solomon’s Ring: New Light on Animal Ways
(London: Methuen, 1952), 86-88.

95 “The Seven Ravens,” paraphrased from
http://grimm.thefreelibrary.com/Fairy-Tales/55-1
.

97 William Shakespeare,
Troilus and Cressida
Act 111, sc. v.

97, 98 Bernd Heinrich,
Ravens in Winter
(New York: HarperCollins, 1989), 250.

98, 101 Kevin McGowan, personal communication.

101-102, 105 Carolee Caffrey, personal communication.