Well, folks, we’ve just completed Corvid Redux Week, and you know what that means. Or maybe you don’t. It means we had a whole week of posts about the antics of some noisy and spooky looking but truly amazing birds. Our offerings went like this: Sarah celebrated “scatter hoarding,” a wonderful seed-saving thing that smaller […]
corvids
My grandparents live on a farm in central California, in a small ranch house surrounded by rolling hills. The house is shaped like an L, with a long hallway stretching one way, and a short stubby kitchen and living room not-quite-stretching the other way. In the long hallway there are paintings and photographs on the […]
Like Ann, I’m a recent convert to the charm of crows. This has led to a running joke with my husband’s cousin, Roger. At family reunions, I tell him how much I like crows. He tells me how much he likes to shoot them. Hilarious, right? Here’s the satisfying part: Crows remember Roger. They don’t just remember Roger’s […]
This first ran March 9, 2011. I haven’t changed my mind. Crows take care of each other, talk constantly, have their enemies lists, are smart, are wicked, and remind me a lot of the rest of us.“Light thickens, and the crow makes wing to the rooky wood.” MacBeth is talking, telling his wife it’s a […]
Corvids are a wonderful genre of beast. I was reminded of this fact not long ago when, biking back home across southeast Portland from the waterfront, a veritable river of crows began streaming overhead. Thousands of them blurred and bobbed and circled each other in a stuttering current from east to west. This current eddied […]
Like Ann, I’m a recent convert to the charm of crows. This has led to a running joke with my husband’s cousin, Roger. At family reunions, I tell him how much I like crows. He tells me how much he likes to shoot them. Hilarious, right? Here’s the satisfying part: Crows remember Roger. They don’t […]
Ann, I see your crows and raise you ravens. With a beak like a Swiss army knife and an intellect to match, the raven is an icon, mascot and pest, as mysterious as it is ubiquitous. For me, as for most people up North, these winged scavengers hover just below my conscious radar. They steal […]
“Light thickens, and the crow makes wing to the rooky wood.” MacBeth is talking, telling his wife it’s a good night to murder the king. Even a century earlier, the collective noun was “a murder of crows.” Three centuries later, a poet watches a horse that’s been shot: “gorged crows rise ragged in the wind. […]