Pleasant Living Magazine

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.

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.

I’ve always liked crows. Despite their reputation as birds of ill omen, and carrion eaters to boot, they are far too common a part of the local natural scene to get excited about either way. I certainly don’t fear crows, and don’t cross myself when I see them as I do when a black cat crosses my path, for instance. Crows are wise birds. Odin had a pair of them, Thought and Memory—and to me they exemplify a feisty Homeric quality. When I see a lone, arrogant crow taunting a couple of buzzards two or three times its size, I think of Ajax the lesser: “He was a little man, and his breastplate was made of linen, but in use of the spear he excelled all the Hellenes and the Achaeans.” Little Ajax was not afraid to go lightly armored into the fray, and rely on fast footwork to take out the hulking heroes on the Trojan side.

Buzzards, on the other hand, are nobody’s friend. They moved into Kinsale some years ago and now we are starting to wonder if they will ever leave. Roadkill is what they’re feasting on most of the time, but aren’t they also keeping an evil red eye on us? Buzzards remind us of our own mortality, and who needs more reminder of that? The evidence stays in front of our eyes all the time.

I learned quite recently in passing that one of my forty-nine high school classmates had died of breast cancer. I attended the funeral of another, who died of an aneurysm, about a year and a half ago. Every week now it seems that someone’s elderly mother has inoperable cancer, or a colleague’s father-in-law was expected to live but unexpectedly passed away. Nearing age fifty myself, I can see an endless train of funerals stretching away into the future. Family, friends, friends of friends, they’re dropping like dead limbs from a mighty oak. Sometimes the lime decays for years and tatters away almost imperceptibly, and one day you realize it’s gone. Other times you walk back in the woods after a storm and half the tree has crashed to the ground, including parts you never realized were rotten, but they came down like thunder, right on a spot where you’d stood the week before, digging around in the brick pike heaped at the base of the tree.

Don’t ask for whom the buzzard flaps, it flaps for everyone.

As evening falls, they return to their roosts, certain favored tall trees near the water’s edge. There they jostle and flap, change positions, shift about, and gradually cluster until a whole huge tree seems to be filled with black skulls, stark against the fading glow of a sunset sky.

It was just below one of their oldest roosts, beside the creek shore and amidst the trees they’d already killed with their excrement, that I walked up on the little parley between the two buzzards and the crow. The place they chose had the air of a graveyard about it, as if they were rival grave robbers, arguing over a spoil.

The crow was perched on top of a creosote pole, the remains of a winding rig once used to manhandle oysters. There was a handmade iron arm attached to the side of the pole with an iron ring at the end where a pulley used to hang as part of a block and falls. Besides the pole, there were about thirty old piles left from what had once been a short but serviceable oyster wharf. The wharf’s deck, which my late great-uncle by marriage, Mr. C.F. Unruh, had salvaged from a bridge repair job, and which in its prime had been strong enough to support a loaded ten-wheel truck, had gradually fallen into decay and been removed to keep people from venturing on it and hurting themselves. The pilings though, and the pole where the crow was perched, looked like they were going to be there for a long time. The wharf had already outlived the oysters that caused it to be built. I had stood on the wharf as a teenager, and tossed wire bags of oyster seed from the back of a truck into Dad’s skiff. The shed where the buzzards perched predated the wharf by some years and owed it origin to a tenant arrangement between Plug Kilmon, and Mr. Unruh.

In her book Deep Play, Diane Ackerman cites researchers to support the playfulness of crows. Crows live in complex, extended families, somewhat, she suggested, like humans. “They help raise nieces and nephews, they often hunt with others, and they play all sorts of games…tug-of-war…gang up…swing upside down…drop-the-stick…””

Ackerman did not mention they can talk. According to “The Crow Hunter’s Page” on the Internet, crows have a big vocabulary of calls, including “alarm feeding, rally, comeback and fight calls. They also use a series of courtship calls.” I’m convinced the crow was playing with the buzzards, offering to make love with them in a way that was physically impossible, as they say. We have to add, to the list of calls noted above, the sarcastic courtship call. This bird was being “arrogant, boastful and quarrelsome” (Encyclopedia Mythica), characteristics attributed to Little Ajax, who boasted he could escape Athena. You worthless sons of buzzards. I can take you. pl

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