The Crow Census

Common American Crow by John James Audubon

Certainly, they are common enough, these birds that so often when we look up are there, bracketing the sky with their uneven wingbeats. If we consider the crow as a punctuation mark, it's an ambiguously rendered one, one that means whatever you want it to mean. I was surprised to find out that people in some cultures consider the crow a symbol of harmony, but I can certainly see it. The meaning of the crow depends on context, mood. Like Walt Whitman, your average crow contains multitudes.

Of course, many people consider the crow a nuisance; you don't need a license to kill a crow, and there's no bag limit in the United States between August and March. And many people consider it an omen, like its slightly bigger, rougher, more scraggly cousin, the raven, and just about any other black bird, for that matter. Anything that eats carrion and trash tends to get a bad rap, but undeservedly so, I would say. Such scavengers merely take out the trash we ourselves don't want to deal with.

Regardless, the crow is a survivor. It has been around for a long, long time, and it can adapt to just about any climate. The crow is universal, world-wide. Crows are smart birds; they can be taught to speak. Legends abound about their intelligence. Aesop was rather fond of them. Crows are raucous, noisy, selfish, social, gregarious. But to see a congress of them -- what's called, in a somewhat unjustifiable maligning, a "murder" -- is to become aware of something crucial about the world we inhabit, and that is that they are much more at home in this place than we are. It belongs to them as much as or more than it belongs to anyone or anything else. When we clear out of here, I have a suspicion that they will still be around.

The etymology of "crow" is somewhat telling. Suddenly one day I was struck when it occurred to me that the Scottish word "corbie" and the Latin word "corvus" and the English word "crow" are all related. This suggests that there has been a lot of talk about crows for many years: the words that span multiple languages are often the words that have been around for a while.

Crows can supposedly recognize distinct features among human beings, but we are unable to recognize any defining differences between one crow and the next. I wonder: can a crow really tell himself apart from any other crow? Where does one crow end and the next one begin?

Each time I visit the Rocky Mountains, the crows there -- in much stronger numbers than anywhere else I have been -- remind me that they are the dominant feature of the landscape: more so than than the pines, even, which merely sway in the wind while the crows circle about them. Their cries call all through the wind as though the birds were themselves putting it into motion themselves with their calls, their breaths, their wingbeats.

I don't know that anyone would ever be able to perform a census. The king of crows himself couldn't pull it off. Maybe that's what they're up to, though, what they're attempting -- all that cawing and cakling about in the trees, on fence posts, atop dumpsters -- they're taking their own count, sounding off, checking names to see who's there. But every time they start to finalize the roster, confusion sets in: they can't tell who has been counted and who hasn't, and by that time there are that many more of them and they lose count. They scatter, break and combine, they multiply -- and the count starts again.