Time Will Tell

A family of crows lives in the redwood tree that towers over my house. It consists of about three or four mature crows that generally fly in a pattern from the redwood tree to a rooftop farther away, over to a utility pole, and back to the redwood tree. Sometimes I sit and watch them. Sometimes they watch back. When the watching on either side gets to be obnoxious, they caw.

When I first moved in a year ago, they were clearly disturbed by my presence. I look nothing like the two women who lived here previously. I also spent a lot of time digging, planting, and doing repairs not just in the yard but around the house (see Dads & Doorknobs). I could tell they liked neither me nor the noise I made, and so they took a while to warm up to me, as much as crows can warm up to anything.

Eventually, the cawing and complaining died down and we reached a compromise. I don’t look up and stare, which they interpret as a threat. In turn, they don’t caw, grind their throats, or rattle as if preparing for battle. The compromise has worked thus far, though I do not tempt fate by walking underneath them. That happened to me once with a pigeon, and it wasn’t pleasant.

Then, one day this week things changed abruptly. One of the crows landed on a low-lying redwood branch near me. It cawed intermittently as if sounding an alarm and even looked directly at me, which was strange. None of them had ever done that before. Since no other crows came in response, I figured the alarm had to do with me. I got the impression that the crow wasn’t alarmed by me but for me. In other words, it was warning me about something, or so I thought. Wait a minute. This was a crow. Was I making it up?

As much as I hate to admit it, I went straightaway to Microsoft’s AI to find out what was going on. As an aside, whether the crows have warmed up to me or not, I definitely am warming up to AI. It’s like having a personal research assistant. Sure, that assistant may go rogue one day and turn off my life support as I lie in a hospital bed, but for now I’ll take my chances. It’s so helpful. I will eat crow over those words one day, I’m sure.

What my research assistant discovered is that crows are so intelligent they are often compared to six or seven-year-old humans. Now that I think of it, this one in particular acted as mischievously as a few kids that age I happen to know and am related to. But I wasn’t interested in the spiritual significance of crows or their role in various cultures, from the Celts to Crow Indians, Hindus, and the Ancient Greeks. What I really wanted to know was whether this bird was trying to tell me something.

I went to the Cornell ornithology website for answers. Who wouldn’t? That was somewhat helpful, providing information about what different crow sounds mean and how those differ from ravens. Actually, not what they mean but what they can mean. The experts give you an idea or point you in a certain direction, but, as you may have heard in another context, actual results may vary.

These results varied. The crow wasn’t alerting the rest of the family to a danger like a hawk or owl in the vicinity. It wasn’t calling for the corvid version of a flash dance, which is called “mobbing.” And it certainly wasn’t trying to mate with me. At least, I hope it wasn’t. So, what was it doing? Knowing that they can recognize faces and even mimic human voices, I believe it was doing one of two things. Either it was reconnecting with me after I had been away for a few days, or I am about to experience a run of no luck, bad luck, or death.

I am not an overly superstitious man. I like to think of myself as just superstitious enough, drawing the line at moments of synchronicity. I have to believe that my black feathered friend was welcoming me back to the neighborhood. That he came unusually close and looked directly at me has given me, as the vet once said about his patient’s feet, pause. Thinking of that scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963), when a large group of crows called a “murder” gathered on monkey bars in a schoolyard, has also given me pause. Had that happened here, I would have hidden in the basement.

There have been times in my life when birds acted as harbingers of death. One occurred years ago when I nearly drowned (see The Hand of God), the other when my mother died (see Return of the Crow). So, I do not discount the possibility that this was a sign of death. Life moves in cycles as if from tree to rooftop to utility pole. This could be the end of one cycle and the beginning of another. After all, you can’t have dying and death without resurrection. I guess time will tell.

Image credits: crows by Valeriia Miller; redwood Mathias Reding. Want more? Go to Robert Brancatelli. The Brancatelli Blog is a member of The Free Media Alliance, which promotes “alternatives to software, culture, and hardware monopolies.”