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The following essay was published in our October/November 2000 issue.
I heard the crow before I saw it. It wasn’t the typically bold Caw! Caw! Caw! But a peculiarly distorted crraw, crraw, crraw. A caw is stopped, abrupt. This crraw was strangely drawn out, elongated.
I wondered what was wrong. Was it sick, or hurt, or was it even a crow? Tree limbs parted and there it was, sitting on top of a pole, one of the many crows who dwell in our neighborhood, robbing birdfeeders, jousting mid-air with mocking birds, and competing with buzzards for roadkill.
The crow was looking hard in the direction I was walking, and even when I stopped and stared, it ignored me and kept issuing forth its measured and expressive crraw.
Then I saw the two buzzards perched on the rusty roof of an abandoned crab house. The buzzards, though I wasn’t fifty feet from them, ignored me too, locked in their private stare-down with the crow. By now, all thoughts of an early morning exercise walk dropped away for the moment. The birds were clearly putting on a show.
As I came over Kinsale Bridge I’d already seen an osprey flying overhead with a big stick in its talons. I watched it fly past the granary, where ospreys persist in trying to nest every spring, and I was already wondering where the other nest could be, and if I could track it by eye, when it made a quick U-turn back into the wind and landed on its old spot on top of the tallest grain head. I don’t care a whole lot for heights, and I was giving a brief consideration to what it would be like to climb 120 feet up a catwalk and fight that monster bird and its mate over the issue of nest placement when I walked up on the strange crow crraw.
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