May Sarton quoted in the October calendar of the 1996 Old Farmer’s Almanac, said, “On random wires the rows of summer swallows/Wait for their liftoff. They will soon be gone/Before All Saints and before All Hallows/The changing time when we are most alone.”
The summer swallows may be on their way south but there is a murder of crows about.
Author and naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton wrote of his many exciting adventures in the 1870s when he explored the valley around the Don River and other wild places around Toronto. One of his stories was about an old crow who was very wise. He took it upon himself to teach the younger birds how to avoid the attention of owls and hunters. The story was called “Silverspot.” It doesn’t surprise me that he encountered crows during his many adventures. These creatures are everywhere. Seldom do you see them alone. It’s not uncommon for them to be seen in huge numbers.
Yesterday while I was raking leaves I heard a terrible racket overhead. I turned to see the sky filled with these birds. A few landed on a neighbor’s old tv antenna. The rest were close by, probably on fences and maybe even backyard jungle gyms. I will always remember that scene in the 1963 Alfred Hitchcock classic film, “The Birds,” when Tippi Hedren’s character is waiting for the schoolteacher and her students to emerge from that old schoolhouse. She is completely oblivious to all the birds that are gathering behind her as she waits outside the school. They arrive one by one, and then in groups, until there doesn’t seem room for even one more bird. Yesterday their arrival was noisy but I was still uneasy about their numbers. We see crows throughout the year but their appearance in October seems to complete the backdrop to the season.
The Alfred Hitchcock film was based on the short story by Daphne Du Maurier. Did you realize there was a sequel? It was the 1984 film, “The Birds 2: Land’s End,” that had a flock of killer seagulls that begin to attack the inhabitants of Gull Island off the east coast. You didn’t miss much. It tried to recapture what Hitchcock created but failed miserably. Believe it or not, Tippi Hedren was even in the film as one of the town’s shopkeepers, but it was about as memorable a role as the film itself.
I recently read a very interesting article by Mark Sunlin in the 1994 Almanac For Farmers and City Folk about this creature. I’d like to feature an excerpt from his article.
“One of the more puzzling crow habits is that the big birds sometimes gather in enormous flocks numbering not just in the hundreds or thousands, but in the tens of thousands. In the spring of 1863, W. E. Endicott, an army private, was stationed along the Potomac River between Washington, D.C., and Harper’s Ferry standing Civil War duty as a sentinel when he noticed ‘two or three crows fly over, then five or six more, followed by nine or ten,’ as he reported to American Naturalist.
“Nothing curious in that, but they just kept coming. ‘Seeing them increase,’ he went on, ‘I thought to count them, and for half an hour was able to do so. After that they formed a continuous stream flying in perfect silence, and I could only estimate their number by calculating how many had passed a given point in a minute. When it finally grew dusky, they still presented the appearance of a low, black cloud. I estimated their number was 80,000.’ Endicott’s estimate was one-upped by an army doctor who guessed 90,000. In 1889, not long after this sighting, ornithologist Arthur C. Bent estimated there were no fewer than 150,000 crows living along the Potomoac. For some reason, crows like to flock in huge congregations during fall and winter nights at wooded sites called ‘roosts.’ They may travel as far as 80 miles daily between their foraging grounds and a roosting site, where they gather in numbers ranging ‘from a few hundred to a million birds,’ says naturalist Bill Gilbert, who is founding member of the American Society of Crows and Ravens. The reasonfor these massive get-togethers is unclear, however. It certainly doesn’t help the food situation, for a crow requires some 11 ounces of food daily, so these megaflocks would consume between 250 pounds and 11,000 tons every day!
“It has been suggested that perhaps the birds’ combined body heat helps them stay warm during the cold season evenings.”
Mark Sunlin goes on to write that he once braved a walk on a frigid morning in Minnesota. It was 20-degrees-below-zero. He saw a lone crow sitting atop a 100-foot tree cawing in the freezing wind, defiant as ever.
The article is well worth a second glance if you have a copy of the almanac.
I’ve always believed that in the bird kingdom the crow is the ‘T-Rex’. The description of it alone on top of that tree where the winds were at their worst only confirms my belief.
Tonight between 9 and 11pm we’ll take flight and follow this mysterious bird.
The only shadow against the harvest moon this night, is a single crow in flight…
***
Don Jackson
