Meet Corn Chip

It's spring, and two crows were wheeling in the sky in a sort of ballet. "That looks like courtship," I said, and Anna burst out laughing.

"What?" I said.

"Only you would name a crow Corn Chip."

Well. I didn't. But I will now.

Now it's just a matter of figuring out which one Corn Chip is. And that's the problem. Dave is in about the tenth year of a project trying to entice a crow to be his personal little buddy. It's sad, really. Crows make friends with people all the time. Some little girl is famous for  her personal crow that brings her some new bauble nearly every day. She has a whole collection. Dave doesn't even have a bird poop collection. That's how far away the crows stay from him.

He walks out every day and lines up peanuts on the wall for them. We've all heard the stories about how smart they are and how they can tell people apart and know who's good and who's bad. Our crows observe him from the top of a 200-foot Douglas fir and wait until he's all the way back inside to get their nuts off. The wall. They know perfectly well it's Dave providing the goods but they won't give him the satisfaction of a how-do-you-do. And yet, bless his danged hopeful bones, he persists.

This spring things are looking up a little. After so many years he's finally gotten a few crows to hang around while he flings his nuts. Naturally, we figure it's the same crew coming around all the time. We have the idea that crows have favorite trees and even though they go downtown for the night they come right back to the same spots. But since the crows we think of as "ours" all look exactly the hell alike and have exactly the same behavior, we can't actually name any. "That one there: the crow that ignores you, Dave," I say, but that describes ten thousand local birds.

But we do know one distinctive crow. We have to walk about three miles to find it but it's reliable. Half of its tail feathers are white. It is one fine and fancy crow. I always took it as further proof crows hang out in the same places all the time. This particular crow has been there for years. "Unless it's a completely different half-white-tailed crow in the same tree every time," Dave says, because he believes he has not yet driven me sufficiently crazy.

Crows can live a long time. One lived as long as thirty years in the wild. They sawed open his legs and counted the rings. That might have been what did him in.

The Quintessential Portland Crow: we put a bird on it

Supposedly the lack of pigmentation is common among urban crows, but I've only seen it twice. The other one had some white wing feathers. We had a kid in our grade school that had one white eyebrow and a white patch in the back of his head. It freaked me out at the time. I thought maybe it was early onset elderliness and worried it might be catching.

The condition is called leucism, because that sounds more scientific than Crow Tail Exuberation. So we should probably call this crow Lucy, but until one of our yard crows gets rid of the attitude and sweetens up, we're going to call it Corn Chip.

Get Your Gladys On

There's singing.

These are tough days, and it's not good to spend too much time in your own head. It's loud and cranky in there, and your internal political oratory is only slicing minutes off your life, to no obvious benefit. The best way to get out of your own head is to spend time in someone else's. It's springtime, and it's time to get your Gladys Kravitz on.

Your kids all know who Gladys Kravitz is. There's plenty of Legacy Television to watch instead of playing outside; but for you old folks out there who can't quite come up with names anymore, Gladys Kravitz is the nosy neighbor who was always spying on the Stephens family in Bewitched. She probably had a good idea about Darrin's sexual orientation before it came out in the general press.

There's tail-fanning.

But don't waste your Gladys on the neighbors. Snoop on the birds instead.  They're randy as the dickens right now. The males are spiffed to the nines and singing their hearts out. They're hoping the same lines that worked last year will work this year too, and they probably will. The females are completely on board, but they're playing it coy, hoping to get a few dinners out of the deal. You can see all of this easily enough if you just look. Love is in the air, and new birds are in the pipeline.

Our chickadees, Marge and Studley Windowson, are back this spring looking into the rental box outside my window. I just saw a pair of ruby-crowned kinglets nearby and got all excited that they'd be interested, even though it turns out they don't use boxes, but they didn't stand a chance anyway. Studley ran their asses right off, or maybe it was Marge. There's nothing our chickadees like better than picking on something smaller than them, like bushtits or kinglets. It makes them all puffy in the chest. They leave hummingbirds alone because they're too mean and pointy to take on.

We need new birds. There aren't near as many as there ought to be, since we persist in poisoning our gardens and ripping out stuff they like to eat and sending out death squads of darling killer cats and putting in windows that look like sky. In spite of all this there are birds. And right about now, they're all working real hard to make even more birds, and they'll let you watch.

There's THIS.

They won't necessarily show you their nests. That's a secret. You'll have to get lucky, by following a bird with nesting materials. Crows are easy. They're flat-out carrying lumber.  But I'm still hoping to score a bushtit nest this year. Bushtits are very plural. If you've seen one, you've seen twenty. They make a brief show of pairing off this time of year and starting in on their nests, but invariably they say what the hell and invite the whole crew in once they're done knitting it. It's a sock. A big stretchy bouncy sock with bedrooms all full of fuzzy little tits.  That'll get you out of your head, or you ain't right.

Don't worry about how you look. Yes, you're staring into the sky, and your mouth has gone slack, and there might be a little drool, and you look like one of those people waiting for the Rapture. But you're nothing like them. They suffer from more certainty, and less reward.

[...and then there's THIS. I'm going out on a limb with my little friend here and calling her an American goldfinch, and I don't know what the heck she's doing, but she totally let me watch. Ah, spring.]