A Visit From Beyond

DooDah is a mess

Ever since Studley Windowson faded out of our lives, I have become a backyard nuisance. I am a pest. I need another personal bird. Every bird out there can sense it and most find it alarming.

The crows are coming along nicely. Dickens and DooDah, along with their occasional companions Auxiliary Dickens and Ancillary DooDah, are accustomed to us and, I'd like to think, well-disposed. They're still a little skittish, but they're no longer so skedaddlish. Without question they show up when we do and project thought-images of peanuts in our direction. That's not the same as landing on us with delicate chickadee teeny-feety perfection and a pure heart, but crows are larger and stabbier, so it's probably for the best. Anyway, we're working it out.

But I can hear a single chickadee chip-note from anywhere in the house. I'll pop right up and run outside with mealworms. My mealworms are getting senile. I've had them for well over a year in the refrigerator and the ones that are still alive might very well be stringy or tough or morose, but they still move around a little. The chickadees hang out in the hibiscus. I approach them like a total creeper. And they don't exactly fly away. They sit in the shrubbery as I approach, and until I get my hand all the way in there they'll stay put and look at me.

Out of pity.

They think about it for a minute, and the first one says to the other, You know, that's getting a little aggressive, and the second one goes Oh, that one's okay, she used to be friends with my dad, and the first one says Kind of stalkerish, though, and the second one is all What's the matter, you scairt? and they discuss it among themselves, and then the first one says Suit yourself, I'm outa here, and the second one, who has held out just a little longer than he really wanted to anyway, says Oh, okay, if you're going, I'll come with you and make sure you're all right.

 

I know at least one of them knows what I've got. I think he is one of Studley's more recent kids. Once last summer I was feeding Studley in the hibiscus and this kid kept getting a little closer and watching very carefully. When he got within a foot of my hand, Studley ran him the hell off. So I'm figuring now that he's not being supervised, he's going to go for it. Any day now.

After all, Studley took a little time at first too. It was breeding time, and he needed a boatload of grubs because of all the beaks to feed, and at first I put a few out on the windowsill. Once he spied them and started looking for them there, I put one on my hand and edged it out. He was wary and then finally went for it like the big brave buttonheaded beauty he was. After that, the clip was off the chip bag. He landed on me, he landed on Dave, and eventually he landed on everyone we knew. Any friend of ours was a friend of Studley's. The man was a total ambassador.

So what I'm thinking is if I can just get this one fellow to give it a whirl, I'll be in 'em. Or a nuthatch. I'd totally be fine with a nuthatch buddy. All of which means I am now spending an unconscionable amount of time standing under the seed feeder like a statue with a hand full of worms, waiting.

Studley was easy to tell from the others. I did get to where I could tell Studley and Marge apart from the back--one of them had a slightly wider white edge to the wings, but I could never remember which was what. Mainly, I knew Studley was the one that landed on me and had a bum foot, and that left Marge for the other.

So now I have at least two standard chickadees loitering around. They're identical. But now there's a new, third kid in town. A distinctive chickadee. It's almost all white on the back. Oh my god.

It's Ghost Studley!

Caws For Celebration

The ten-year crow project is off the ground and flapping!

We've been trying to befriend a crow for ages. Any crow will do, but it must be particular, a personal crow that can be distinguished from the rest. Probably by being the only one that comes up and says Howdy. Because, basically, if you've seen one crow you've seen them all.

Like ants. If you've seen one ant in your kitchen, you've seen them all, or you're about to.

 

Anyway for years now crows have deigned to accept our peanuts as long as we go all the way inside and shut the door after we toss them. This is hardly the relationship we were looking for. I blame Dave.

I blame Dave because for some reason birds have it out for him. They dive at his head, they bop his hat, they are unhygienic on his shirt. And he doesn't deserve it. Crows supposedly not only remember individual humans they don't like, but teach their children to hate them, too. If Dave inadvertently damaged a crow or hurt its feelings when he was seven, the word probably got out, and he remains a dark legend in the corvid annals. I say "inadvertently" because Dave can't even skoosh a bug and the only time he's ever harmed an animal was when he thought it was in distress and tried to mercy-kill it, but, lacking any skill for murder--I'm a beneficiary of that--he ended up making things a lot worse and sobbing for hours.

 

We have four crows associated with the neighbor's Douglas Fir. Two of them have been busy whomping up the next generation, and the other two are, presumably, teenagers who are still hanging out for the wi-fi. And those two always pal around together, and they're starting to feel warm toward us. Dickens and DooDah. They'll both come within six feet for a peanut, and you can't expect much more than that in a pandemic.

Not only that, but we can totally tell them apart. Dickens is sleek and black and shiny, and DooDah is a mess. He's browner and less shiny and disheveled and itchy. And he makes the most wonderful sounds ever. He coos, he warbles, he chuckles. He sits on top of our little clock tower and chuckles his heart out. Our clock was never designed to be outdoors and the hands have long since told Gravity rather than Time. It's perpetually six-thirty on that clock, and DooDah thinks that's hysterical.

And before you ask, no, I do not know what their preferred pronouns are. I have enough trouble with that in the non-bird world.

Dickens on the left, DooDah on the right

Both of them are still a mite cautious about peanut retrieval, and if there's a scrub jay within a quarter mile, it will bomb in and get the nut first. But when they do go for it, they hop in sideways with a wary eye, ready to peel out, and dash in at the last second for the nab, after which they retreat about two inches and commence hammering. They're all, like, Careful, careful, Oooh! Peanut, and they forget all about the dire danger that is Us.

So we think we've been making headway.

And then yesterday I saw it. A bright foil circle shining from the vegetable bed. If you turn it over, it says "SKIPPY." Nobody opened a new jar of peanut butter in our yard recently. I think Dickens found it somewhere and brought it in for us. I'm sure of it. DooDah's too busy scratching.

Bonus video: sound up!

 

 

Hope Bleats Eternal

It's sunny. It's seventy degrees. The birds are pitching woo, and apparently that is all the evidence I need to determine it will never be cold, ever again, and so I have gone to the plant nursery and jammed a bunch of little pots in the back of my car. None of this bucks tradition.

One tradition is, I will buy more flowers than I can plant in a day, or three. I will scatter some of them here and there while I think about where they should go, and change my mind and move the pots around, and finally I'll get around to planting them except for one. It might say "hardy in zone seven" on the tag but what it needs to be is "hardy left in a black plastic pot in the sun without water for three months," and odds are it isn't. Another tradition is: I'll get everything settled in and then we will get one night close to freezing and they'll all sulk for a month. Oh, they won't die. They will just mope around like kids who didn't ask to be born.

The first thing I do is fill the flower boxes. I used to shake that up but for quite a few years now I've put in the exact same plants. Geranium-Lantana-Cuphea-Callibrachoa-Heliotrope. I worry about this. There was this lady on my mail route, Mrs. V., who could politely be described as "rigid." The first time I met her, I was crisply informed I was late. A few days later I was unacceptably early. Mrs. V. employed a miserable-looking gardener and every year she directed him to plant the flower beds all at once: tulips, to begin with, lined up like soldiers, socially distanced on a grid. Then they got pulled out and tossed so they wouldn't naturalize. A fresh platoon would be mustered the next year to stand at attention. At a precise moment that was neither late nor early they were pulled out and replaced by a row of obedient salvias and a precise edging of lobelias, just the way Mrs. V. wanted them. The gardener never smiled and the garden itself, although quite well-behaved, looked unhappy too.

So I worry a bit that I have gotten into a routine with my flower boxes, although I would like to point out in my defense that everything but the Cupheas come in lots of colors, and I mix those up a bit. The thing is, it is a grand mixture, they play wonderfully well together, and in a good year, this is a thing of beauty and a joy for the whole block.

Meanwhile a number of things are conducting springtime in their own fashion without my input. For instance, I have grape hyacinths. There is such a thing as too much of a good thing. And there is definitely such a thing as too many grape hyacinths. They are a rolling blue tide thundering through the soilscape and lapping up against the walkways and how anything else wheedles its way through the mass of bulbs, NONE of which I planted, I will never know. I begin yarding them out by the bucketloads year after year, starting before they even bloom, and it does not slow them down one bit, because Jesus loaves-and-fishes them till Kingdom Come.

Meanwhile, we enjoy our seventy degrees. A lady crow in the tippy top of the fir is putting out a metronomic bleat every ten seconds from dawn to dark, indicating she wants a treat. I used to find this repetitive but now I am rather charmed by the dedication she applies to thoroughly annoying the neighborhood, and the fine results she obtains. Per tradition, now that I have my prescribed flowers planted, with their tentative, petite rootage, a crow will come down and yank one of them out of the flower box and replace it with a hole.

He is presenting his find to his lady friend, and his lady friend informs him yet again--does he even remember last spring?--that the nest is done and she is not interested in a bouquet, but maybe a snack of some kind, and he drops the limp $4 flower into the yard and plucks out another one, dully thinking "Maybe she doesn't like pink, let's try orange," and his intended reaffirms that actually she would like a delectable larval item or at least something in the arthropod family, thank you very much, bleat bleat bleat. And the courtship goes on apace.

Meanwhile a few weeks of significantly less friendly temperatures ensue, everything botanical pouts except the grape hyacinths, and I examine the empty spots in my flower boxes and go right back to the nursery.

It's a tradition.

One Bird Too Far

baby

So many things going on during nesting season if you're paying attention. The trill of victory, the agony of de tiny little feet! Everywhere one soap opera after another is playing out. Studley and Marge plumb disappeared shortly after the scrub jay incident and didn't show up for worms even though we extended our beer-thirty hours JUST for them, and we had no idea where they went or even if they still...were. The resident crows are just past the stage where their baby has plummeted from the treetops and been grounded for a few days, and we knew that because every so often we heard a great cawcophany from the neighbor's yard followed by two little kids screaming their heads off and dashing back into the house. It was very satisfying. Now the crow baby is aloft for good and pecking around the garden beds with its blue eyes and gape-remnant lips and it will soon be the best-looking one of the bunch, because the adults are all about to go gappy and drop their feathers.

Then Studley came back with three of his little guys in tow! They're not any littler than he is, of course, but they're beebling away in the trees waiting for Daddy to show up with snacks, and we couldn't be relieveder. They too can be recognized by their shiny new suits and I do believe they outweigh their father too, because as usual he has worked himself skinny. His molt will start any day now. Last year by this time he had a ragged cheek bib and a bald spot on his head. This year his head feathers look okay but he's had this one feather sticking up on his back for weeks. I tried to smooth it down once but Studley has stopped just short of allowing me to touch him in a personal fingery way. And I know this because it's everything I can do to keep from chucking the little dude under the chin.

wayward feather

And because it is not enough to have a private tit to show off to your friends, my niece was inspired to try to entice a pair of juncos that were nesting in her yard, and succeeded in getting them and their babies to take food from her hand, and start a new brood, and get those babies to do the same, and, what the hey, the local song sparrows seemed to show an interest too, and what with one thing and another, she is basically encrusted with birds every time she walks outside. Dave shakes his head. Brewster girls, he says, without elaborating.

It's not a competition, but I will point out she doesn't have a chickadee yet.

And so I'm happy that I've made my garden a destination resort for the feathered set, and contemplate what more I can provide, because birds are awesome in every way, but I would like to mention that I the hell did not mean I wanted freaking pigeons nesting under my solar panels with their stupid breathy cooing like they're fat little Olivia Newton-Johns in a world of opera stars and all walking around like they do with their tiny stupid heads poinking along behind them like they're trying to catch up to their own plumpety bodies. But there they are flapping down to the rental house's gutter and coming back up to our roof with big old sticks because not only do we have freaking pigeons committing lavish poopination under our solar panels but sure enough we didn't get around to clearing out the gutters last season and thanks for reminding us.

I know I'm supposed to be more even-handed about this as a bird lover but I really don't care for pigeons much at all or the whoop-whoop-whoop Three Stooges routine they do or their unmatched outfits, the best of which look like a motor oil slick in a puddle, walking around all dumb and eating white bread preferentially, and I know they have plenty of admirers and can do some amazing things such as find their way home even from a very great distance, which they can go ahead and do any time now as far as I'm concerned and I hope it's way the hell across the ocean.

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.

Crowtitude

"I suppose you want something," I said to the crow on the wire, who emitted a noncommittal squawk. "I've got walnuts. But hey. Since I have you on the phone line, what the hell was that all about the other day, when you and your gang mobbed me halfway down the block? I was already walking away from your kid. You guys are supposed to be smart. Recognize faces, and all that. You know perfectly well I've been nothing but friendly to you."

I fetched the walnuts, squinted up at the wire, and decided to hold out.

"Yeah. So smart. And they say a crow is as smart as a seven-year-old human."

The crow emitted a noncommittal squawk and then cleared its throat.

"Easily. And age seven is the pinnacle of human intelligence, after which you all dwindle down to Candy Crush and reality TV. So."

"You DO talk?" Dave had been hollering "Hey, Walnut-Boy" for years as he placed nuts on the patio, hoping someday the crows would start saying "Hey, Walnut-Boy" to him.

The crow ruffled briefly and sleeked back down. "Tsss. Remember when you used to stare up into the trees and go 'Caw, caw, caw?' Were you expecting some kind of reply? As if. How about if we sat outside your window and yelled 'Dude, dude, dude' over and over again?"

"That would be awesome. That would be cute. It's not like you don't say the same things over and over again already."

"Hardly. You're so provincial. If you hear something that doesn't fit into your narrow world view you just ignore it. But have somebody put on a minstrel show and say Dude Dude Dude and you brighten right up. It's offensive."

"Well, I do like Chucklehead over there in the cedar. He's cool." Chucklehead rarely caws. Chucklehead starts with pairs of hoots and then cuts loose with a virtuosic string of clicks and ratchety noises.

"Her name is not 'Chucklehead.' Cecilia Clickenheimer is a sage."

I was willing to believe that.

"Anyway, glad we can make you feel good about yourself with the walnut distribution."

"You never even take them until I go away."

"They're not going anywhere. And we see no reason to reward you for a blatant case of cultural appropriation. We've been eating walnuts for generations, but you discover them and now it's all about you. You don't even know where walnuts come from."

"I do too. They come from Costco."

"They come from trees. Trees you people keep cutting down and replacing with fancy non-native bullshit trees or something."

"Walnut trees are messy. You should see what they do to cars."

"You should see what we do to cars."

"Hey. I plant plenty of natives. I leave the seedpods to ripen for you guys."

"So occasionally you manage to not mess everything up, and then you want credit? Anyway we just saw you pull out the foxgloves as soon as they quit blooming."

"Oh. You saw that. Well you don't eat seeds anyway."

"The hell. Besides, sparrows eat seeds, and I eat baby sparrows."

"That's disgusting."

"Cry me a river, Veal-Girl."

"The point is, there's no reason to scream at my head if I get near your baby. You know I'm not going to hurt your baby. You know all, see all. Wait. Is it because we let Tater out on the patio with us at Beer-Thirty? Is that it?"

"It's not the cat. It's perfectly obvious your cat is only out here to eat grass and throw up. Awesome little sidekick you have there. A real Einstein. But remember when you put that baby robin in a shoebox and dropped an earthworm on its back? And then you couldn't get it back off again?"

"It was wiggly. I missed. I was only six."

"That poor robin! Peeping away with a worm wriggling through its little feathers."

"That poor robin you would have happily scarfed down?"

"As is my wont. I can take care of myself. You would starve to death in a full pantry if you didn't have a can opener."

"Not true. I saw a Life Hack. You can rub a can against the pavement and the top will pop right off."

"Excellent! It's Cling Peaches and cold goopy black beans for the rest of your days! Honestly. The fact is you people are wrecking everything, and you know it."

"Now, now. I've read that crows do very well in an urban setting."

"Of course. We're smart."

"So you're all high and mighty about the sorry state of the world when you know perfectly well you'll do just fine."

"I see! You think I'm all 'I've got mine, I don't need to worry about anyone else! Howdy, howdy, howdy!' Typical."

"I didn't say that."

"You just did say that. You assumed I'd be as oblivious and self-centered as you people. That's called 'projection.'"

"That's not true. I'm not like that. I am a Democrat and a dues-paying union member."

"Ooo, ooo, ooo. Somebody should give you a cookie. Where are you going? Leave the walnuts."

"Sure. I'll leave the walnuts. You won't eat them until I'm out of sight, but you always eat the walnuts. 'Cultural appropriation,' my bald fanny."

"Reparations, baby. Reparations."

All Night, All Day, Watching Over Me

Here's the thing about birds. They're always doing something you should know about.  They're beautiful, even the ugly ones. They're all over the place. And if you pay attention to them, you will find yourself several notches happier, effortlessly. Besides, they're paying attention to you.

And yet most people pay so little attention to birds that they can't identify more than three or four. Here we are, under constant surveillance, and we're walking around completely oblivious to it, like the birds are Homeland Security or Facebook or something.

So I've advised people over the years to get in the habit of noticing birds. The noticing of birds is its own reward. After a while you're paying more attention to their troubles than your own, which is healthy, and cheering on their social conquests, and whacking neighbor cats on their behalf, and you're getting to know where to look for individual ones and what kind of nest they might be cooking up, and you're driving your car with your head out the window staring straight up, which can get loud and exciting too.

You could see someone special.

I might be amazed now at how unaware people are of what is all around them every day, but I used to be pretty unobservant myself. I remember thirty years ago Dave and I noticed that crows kept flying over the house heading southwest right around beer-thirty. That was the extent of our scrutiny. We didn't know where they were going or if it was just a little group of them going to Book Group in the next block or what. Years later, when we were paying attention and doing a lot more walkabouts, we realized they were going downtown for the night, and they were gathering in big groups, and we did a little research and found out they like to roost together most of the year and only stay in their home trees during nesting season. And we began to admire them more and more. Their roosting place varied. Sometimes it was the south end of town, sometimes north, sometimes midtown. They'd fly around and make a bunch of noise, and we'd be home before they turned in proper.

A lot of people only notice birds when they poop. A while ago a woman wrote a letter to the editor. She'd encountered massive amounts of bird poop on the street and sidewalks and was incensed that the city didn't clean it up more often. Disease! Pestilence! Dry cleaning bills! She was het up. Sugar? You're in a city that owns one snow plow and employs a single pothole dude with a bucket. We aren't going to have a poop removal force. That's what rain is for.

So now I'm constantly watching crows and reading up on them and using words like "tactile rictal bristles" without embarrassment and, in general, thinking I know some stuff. And then my own oblivitude rears its baffled head yet again. I'm downtown for my monthly date with my friend Pat Lichen. I'd walked around a bit in the dark, vaguely taking in an interesting polkadot pattern on the pavement, without giving it much thought. When I meet Pat, she asks if I'd seen the heroic amount of bird poop on the street. Shoot! Of course. Usually when you see a bunch of bird shit it's all in a row under a light post or something, but this was all over evenly, like a Jackson Pollock painting, so it hadn't registered for me. "Don't look up!" I joked.

Learned that lesson more than once.

But we couldn't help it. We looked up. And there, in the dark winter silhouettes of elm branches, for blocks and blocks, with the starry sky beyond, were large black shapes, sleeping crows, thousands of sleeping crows, motionless, presiding over us heedless goofs below with our blathering and our headlights and our traffic and our pointless noise. A soft stratum of feathered life, a blanket over us all. We both knew about the roosts. But we'd never looked up.

No Caws For Complaint

I don't like to complain, but sometimes I do anyway.

More than one person has sent me a video of a sweet little girl who feeds crows and the crows respond by leaving her little trinkets as a thank-you. She's got hundreds of baubles and treasures by now. The whole thing is adorable.

All our crows ever leave us is alone. And we've been sucking up to them for years.

I know at least a half dozen people right here in town that have personal crows. We like crows too. We know how smart they are. We figured they're so smart they'll know how much we like them and appreciate all the little ways we try to make their lives more pleasant. We think they'll start to approach us on their own and ask if we maybe have an extra walnut, and tip their heads to the side and flare their rictal bristles at us as a sort of howdy-do. The relationship will progress, we'll give them fancy British names like Nelson and Chauncey and Percy, and ultimately they will converse with us in a form of English that is imperfect and yet still easier to understand than Matthew McConaughey. We will all sit around of an evening enjoying walnuts and beer as the sun goes down. We're grownups and have no need of a bunch of baubles; one or two would be fine.

But none of that has happened. We line up walnuts on the wall and they observe us and take them away just as soon as they're sure we're not looking, because they know that would give us too much satisfaction. It makes us feel like pimply seventh-graders who are trying too hard and still don't get to sit at the popular lunch table.

I don't know where we went wrong. I remember at one point I found their cawing sort of obnoxious and I went out to the yard and cranked my head up to the treetops and yelled HEY! HEY! HEY! HEY! HEY! HEY! HEY! HEY! just so they could get an idea how annoying it was, but that was years ago, and I'm really sorry. But they may have pegged me for an asshole then and there, and passed the information down through the generations. I don't know. I've been real nice since then.

It's nesting season now and some of our crows have young'uns hopping around on the ground. That is what they have evolved to do: hop around on the ground for a few days before they're old enough to fly. I'm not sure how they get to the ground without getting all dented up but maybe they get just enough wind resistance from flapping their nubbins to cushion their landing. Their folks keep an eye on them and do their best to rout predators and scalawags, but it's not a perfect system as long as there are domestic cats around. The crows have been working on their strategy since the Cretaceous but domestic cats have been around here for a few hundred years tops, and this is true even if you've had a cat all your life and so did your Grandma--that's still not forever, sugar pie. Over a third of American households host a cat, and that's quite the uptick from zero.

So now we've got upwards of, let's say, fifteen cats per city block and fourteen of those are well-fed, subsidized, vaccinated, healthy, glossy little killing machines that are let out of the house so they don't get all mopey and also so they can shit in the neighbor's tomato bed instead of in the icky-poo litter box. Most people who let their cats out to terrorize wildlife are real softies, but their concern extends to only the one species. House cats are obscenely effective at killing wildlife. So I try to make my own garden a sanctuary by discouraging them. It's effective only inasmuch as all my neighbors' cats now blast out of the yard whenever they hear me turn the doorknob, but you know? I can't be turning my doorknob all day long.

Anyway, because it is that time of year, we have noticed that our crows occasionally make a particularly pointed racket, and when that happens, I go out and spot the crows and see exactly what direction they're racketing at, and then I go running and hollering in that direction and flush out the inevitable cat, and I have been hoping the crows are noticing which side I'm on and will henceforth reward me with their companionship and approval, but they haven't. So be it. I still wish them the best.

But when they're in full molt in August and have to slink out of the lunchroom all ratty-tatty, I plan to point and snicker.


Because I am an optimist at heart, I prefer to think of the following twenty seconds as a concert just for us, by our own personal, if recalcitrant, crow:

Jammin' In The Hood

I'm walking outside, and there, on top of my topiary salamander, is a tiny plant that looks an awful lot like one I'd put in my flower boxes, only sadder and upside-down. And on the sidewalk, there was yet another, roots-up. Huh. Two of my five flower boxes have been raided and their contents strewn about. It looked like the work of adolescents in need of some impulse control applied to their pimply butts.

I suspect this even though I know there are miscreant corvids in the 'hood who make a point of pulling up shallow-rooted little plants. They are looking for nesting material and they don't really care all that much if it cost $3.99 for a 4-inch pot, especially the scrub jays, who can be downright disrespectful that way. But usually they'll just take one or two plants out of the boxes. They won't strip them clean.

Still, it is nesting season. Crows make a big ol' stick nest and line the center portion with nice soft material, and the nursery doesn't call them "bedding plants" for nothing. And of the eight plants that had been uprooted, I only found four plants. So maybe a crow did pull them out and brought them back home. And half of them didn't make the cut. "Too matchy-matchy," says the female, back at the nest. Or, "Again with the purple?"

We've got a couple good working crow nests within sight of our yard. One of them has been emitting a raspy bleat brraaak brraaak brraaak every ten seconds for days now. Periodically the bleats speed up, and sure enough an adult is circling the tree, and then you see him land and you can hear something being jammed down a throat, brraaak brraaak bluph bluph blaKACK KACK KACK, and there's a fifteen-second pause, and then it's back to your regularly scheduled bleating. I get a kick out of it. I  think: this is how nature provides for the helpless babies in the world. It makes them totally obnoxious and they never shut up and all anyone can think to do is go out and find something to jam in the noise hole.

Then I read up on the crow manufacturing process. And it turns out it's not the baby up there making the racket. It's the adult female. And she does this even before laying any eggs. She doesn't shut up until the eggs pop out, at which point there's a cone of silence over the nest so as not to alert predators; or else because she finds the egg thing too astonishing for words.

And all this time I thought Dave fed me because he loves me.

Raawwwk On!

Every day, as evening approaches, dozens of small airplanes fly over the house, headed northeast for the airport--package planes, Dave says. And at the same time, crows in huge numbers fly in the opposite direction. For several hours, they can be spotted winging their way southwest over our yard. Clearly, they have declined the lucrative small-parcel routes that FedEx and the like specialize in, but for a long time we didn't know what they were up to, or where they were going.

Our crows--the family we like to call the Walnut Boys, who live in the big Douglas fir across the alley--head out too. But their friends are also streaming in from much farther afield. It's a daily mini-migration. As far as we can tell, every dang crow in the metropolitan area goes flapping in the same direction at dusk.  Come morning they're all back again and ready to join the dawn raucous. I mean chorus.

We've learned that some of them convene for the evening in the larger neighborhood trees, but those are just minor cliques and outliers. Most of them are bound for downtown. Hundreds. Thousands. We happened upon them during a walk. They had settled in a large construction site. The tarmac was lined with them. It was the softest parking lot in town. Some of them spruced up in puddles and the rest hung out behind the velvet rope until it was time to hit the club. Currently they're favoring a stand of trees near Portland State University.

That's what it's all about. They're going to a roost where they can let it all hang out. It might seem like having a slumber party every single night makes it less special, but they're fine with it. Maybe there are a few introverted crows out there but you don't see those. They're nestled into their favorite conifer boughs with Jane Austen and a scavenged bag of chips.

The experts have theories about why they gang up. Perhaps they're warmer, particularly if they're downtown. Perhaps they feel more secure against the rare marauding urban owl. Perhaps they exchange information about which humans need pooping on, or about good food sources they found that day.

As if! Please. They might talk up a good dumpster find, but nobody's giving away any coordinates. They're just social. They're all about family and friends. It's hard to tell the age of a crow. The very youngest have bluish eyes, but other than that it's a sea of conformity. Everyone gets a uniform. And the kids don't leave. They'll be kickin' it with the adults for at least a year and sometimes two. But you can get clues to their maturity by their behavior, and there's no better place to observe that than at one of their sleepovers.

For a while it's all yap yap yap and nobody is really listening to anyone else. Then the old ones nod off. The teenagers stay up and flirt. Midway down on the broader branches is where they have the Twister game set up. The adolescents are playing Truth or Dare for a while until they split off into smaller groups and swap implausible rumors about where eggs come from. The second-year juveniles sneak off as soon as the adults are asleep and head over to Ross Island to toilet-paper the heron rookery.

That leaves the youngsters, egg-fresh and blue eyes fading, to hold up the banner of innocence. As if! Please. They're the ones making all those crank caws.

The Cawcus

It's spring, according to the birds, although otherwise it's hard to tell it from the previous four months of damp and drear. And that means we're getting ready for nest-building, and drowned peonies, and the annual ant infestation; and people will tell each other earnestly that they really didn't mind the cold all winter but this is just ridiculous, and some people will be moved to open a vein just to see some color. And soon our dominant crow population will undergo its seasonal Tourette's. I'm a fan of crows. They're sleek and smart and they don't skitter at all when you walk by, just adjust their swagger to throw you the stink-eye over their shoulder. They even use tools, such as our friend Bob Smith, who will crack their walnuts if they bring him one, and they're particularly impressive when attending a platter of possum in the middle of the road. They'll eye that Buick coming up the pike and they'll calculate the angle of compaction and they'll hop two inches to one side and let the Buick tenderize the possum, and then they're right back on it. Crows have a long association with humans and many have picked up odd jobs as spirit companions. I talk too much to attract a spirit companion, but would be happy to audition a crow as a sidekick. Except for the seasonal Tourette's, which gets on my nerves.

It's just like when a new family moves in down the way and you can't figure out where they're from, but they're not from around here; and all you know is that they're diverse and need embracing, but the best you can do is smile, because they just say "ock ock" and smile back, and all is well for a while. But they're always cooking something that smells sour and weird and drifts through the air, and then they start accumulating car parts in the back yard and sofas on the porch and before you know it there are thirty of them in there, and they keep the windows open and the weird smell comes out and all thirty of them are yelling "ock ock" all day and all night, and you're a big liberal and can't figure out any way of communicating nicely that we don't "ock" in the middle of the night in this country, and your face hurts from smiling in an inauthentic but embracing manner while you are actually thinking that your fellow shotgun-wielding countrymen might have more economy in their reasoning than you'd given them credit for. It's like that with the crows, when they're having their seasonal Tourette's.

Crows vocalize in a number of ways, most of them raucous, but I don't mind. It suits them. They are even able to mimic human speech if they've got the notion. Sometimes they all yammer away when they're gathering in a tree or taking off again, and then they settle down. But once a year they all go off at once and all day long for weeks on end, and it's just like listening to O'Reilly when he's got some poor academic on the show who thought he might be able to slide a point in edgewise--you know they aren't listening to each other. If they were mimicking people it would be all hey hey hey hey dude dude hey hey hey hey hey. Might as well teach trees to bark. I swear.