Talking To The Crows Seems Eccentric, But We Speak The Same Language

And anyway, I talk to all the wildlife. You don't? Hm.

Three really large crows regularly watch over our quiet street from on high, often suddenly appearing out of the blue, squawktalking (i) so loudly to each other it’s as if they were miked, with speakers on their breasts — I think that their size amplifies the volume — while simultaneously interweaving in flight like jets in weirdly choreographed balletic patterns, before landing on one of the 100-foot-high top branches of one maple or another behind my house.

Once I played the First Witch in a college production of MacBeth because my hair was very long and they let me play it as a man, and we witches were known in the text as “The Weird Sisters.”

The crows live up to it. (Part of me thinks that, right now, all the crows everywhere are scouting for a final assault. Who else is globally equipped to do so?")

***

A few days ago, as usual, I was out on the deck in the afternoon, trying to get some writing done, when, in their usual dramatic sudden-appearance fashion, their musical screeches rending the quiet stillness with all the subtlety of a trombone trio playing Sousa walking onto stage during “Swan Lake,” they arrived to drop into the top branches of one my maples, cawing at volume 11 as if the world were about to end, but not fooling me, because I think they’re going to be the world-end initiators. When they feel like it.

So as a rule, when they swoop in, I’ll (literally) sing out to the treetops, “Hey, guys! Sssup?” and offer a few more imaginative greetings, asking about how their day had been, because I have done the research (ii) and crows are smarter than dolphins and would probably pass a fifth-grade human school test, (iii). Face-recognition-wise they now not only recognize me, but can tell what kind of mood I’m in, and whether it would be threatening to them.

I make it a rule to always talk to The Sisters. So, this time, trying not to sound too aggressive, I said to the treetops (pretty accurate transcription), “Yo, any chance you could all move on right now? I’m writing some pretty meaningless stuff here, and I’d like just five more minutes in peace. Love ya.”

And, yes, a few seconds later, one of them flew out of the branches of the first maple, flew over to another maple in my neighbor Suzette’s yard, and squawked something. A few seconds later all three flew out of their respective maples and disappeared to the west.

So don’t tell me it’s stupid to talk to animals, or to ever pass up the chance to, whether’s it’s cows or horses or roadside cats. Today, on my backroads drive to the woods next to the golf course to hunt for balls hiding in the forest floor — a neon Callaway! Score! —

I had occasion to shout greetings to a hawk, not red-tailed, but still, and to talk to — well, technically, at — two different roadside rabbits. Very satisfying discourse, if one-way.

***

So in the last three days three identical-triplet fawns have started showing up in our backyards, keeping close to each other, nibbling as a group to find the tastiest growing things. They’re so fucking cute you could cry, although partly also because they’re nibbling on your only raspberry bush, but all told, the aesthetics outweigh the growy damage.

They’re transfixingly, beautifully designed: White spots on tan flanks, furry ears, and when they run and hop it’s much more graceful than Olympic hurdles. No species could run and hop like that if it weren’t meant to be appreciated by all the other species. Otherwise, they would just sprint, right?

This morning, I tried to gently tell them that they really ought to move on from Melissa’s berry bushes to, say, across the street, to Mark’s lawn. I spoke clearly, trying to keep it firm, but it wasn’t working. All three looked at me with an expression of, “Who are you?”

“Where are your parents?” I asked. They laughed, then went back to nibbling. But a few minutes later, they did move across the street to Mark’s lawn and a few minutes later, they were chewing Mark’s grass. They were even cuter across the street, since they weren’t lunching on my plants.

To the woman power-walking down our street, I guess they weren’t. My village has undergone extraordinary change in the three decades since we moved up. The original farm population has reluctantly relinquished their generations-old stake, given way to the modern profile, the new migrant civilization, based in the New York City metro area. In our own personal history, it’s been as if if the species of one human era had given way to the species of another entirely new human era, in glacier fashion. There’ll be no going back. They’re beyond rude, and possessed of outsized wealth and oblivious of where they’ve bought second houses in, but now they rule, so whatever.

So this walking woman had headphones on. Wearing serious walking shorts and top, she was walking faster than what a walk should be, which is an amble, right? Even faster than purposefully. She was walking too fast to enjoy a walk.

So I saw that when she glanced to the right to briefly take note of the extraordinary fawn triplets, she never slowed a step, then looked back at the road. I’m going to bet (because this is my story, I can do that) that later, when someone asked her how her walk had gone, she didn’t mention the fawns she’d looked at but hadn’t seen. Let alone talked to.

Had the crows been in attendance, looking down from some maple or another:

“Another reason to peck them all to death, right?" says Second Witch, and First and Third Witches solemnly nod their heads.

(i) Talking? Isn’t keeping in constant contact with your friends through cawing conversation by any definition?

(ii) Cherry-picking the data, sure.

(iii) Not if it were about Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay, which I wrote a report in in fifth grade, but you know what I mean. They have fifth-grade awareness-of-the-environmentness.