"Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children."

Every spring I know less about what I am seeing, or, the ratio between what I know and what I am seeing is smaller. I had not before realized the mortality rate among crows. A crow could live 20 years and more, but few seem to survive past two years. These pictures I took last week at breakfast indicate one reason why, but it is one of the less common reasons.  At least fifty crows were mobbing an eagle that had one of theirs in its claws.

We had fewer crows than usual over the winter, and this spring there are only three I recognize. Washcrow and Her are not breeding this year, but they visit frequently, and spend time sitting companionably, apparently watching the two of us sitting companionably.  I have seen Washcrow for 4 years now, since he was brought to our feeder as a fledgling. One of last year's young -- I can't tell if it is Wow or Futhark -- talks to us frequently.  A handsome gleaming male I do not recognize comes to the feeder to collect food for his mate -- he will feed her for the three weeks of brooding, and then for the 5+ weeks until the young fledge.

There is great difficulty defending the crow feeder from the seagull, and the ground-feeding birds are at great risk from the neighbor's cat which usually lurks under our car. The Oregon juncos, normally ground feeders, have learned to graze at the squirrel and crow feeders, so they are safe. Sometimes ground means "ground," and sometimes ground means "flat" instead of "perch."

The raccoons discovered the crow feeder last year – it is on the porch outside my bedroom – so I have been leaving cracked corn and peanuts in shells for them. They come irregularly. There is a beautiful male, a very shy female with a tiny face, a pair of twins, a female with two young. Sometimes at night, in downtown Washington DC, and park-side Seattle, there is a horrible squealing shrieking noise. I identified that sound long ago as the sound of something being eaten, and would lie in bed feeling miserable when I heard it. Recently I discovered it is the sound made at the encounter of two raccoons who have not been previously introduced, and that it need not involve violence at all, though I think two were fighting Tuesday night.  I have also learned that raccoons are not particularly afraid of humans, or of us, and if one starts to leave from anxiety, s/he can be persuaded back: the soothing tones you use for babies and pets are equally successful with raccoons.

We keep a steady supply of black-capped chickadees who tell us when the feeder needs refilling, or when we are in the wrong area of the yard. There is a nest in the bathroom window frame, and in summer I can lie in the tub and listen to little scratchings and chirps. Chickadees can live up to 12 years, and I don't know if the same chickadees come back to the window frame  year after year, or if we have had dozens of residents since the house was built in 1905.

From 4 in the morning until after supper, the yard is full of small fragments of music. The birds are calling while the owls are still out, while I am talking to the raccoons. When the sun is up the sounds give the sense of showers of glitter. "Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children." I don't recognize all the calls, but we -- and the neighbors and the park --have robins and house finches and varied thrushes, song sparrows, Townsend's warblers, wrens, juncos, and now bush tits. The tits were absent all winter, but now they are back with dozens of babies, so small they look as if you could grab a dozen at a time. There are so many finger-sized pine siskins that the feeders have to be refilled every second day.

We have made a good start on a small plantation of meleagris where it can be admired from the sidewalk, and a hellebore garden in the damp under the nut tree in back. I have become enthralled with hellebores.

                                     

                               Other echoes

Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?

Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,

Round the corner. Through the first gate,

Into our first world, shall we follow

The deception of the thrush? Into our first world.

                                                                   T.S.E. "Burnt Norton."

Crow Summer 2014: Part Two

Crows in moult: the view from my desk.

Watching the crows this summer, we have learned to distinguish several of them by a combination of size, curve of the beak, amount of feathers hanging down under the neck, bushiness of leg feathers, and so on. We have lost track of Wow, Tak, and Futhark: there are about eight young the same size. They have lost the red in their mouths, and they no longer scream to be fed. I suspect it is Futhark who dive-bombs a sibling and yanks on his tail. The moult is nearly completed, but so many crows replacing all their feathers has made tremendous demands on supplies of protein.

Korax continues to visit. Washcrow and Her continue their late afternoon quiet time. Her is quite shy and continues to be skittish about our presence, but Washcrow visits, making a quiet rattle which I try to imitate, and then we will exchange assorted clicks and rattles for a bit. At least two other crows have followed his lead, and sometimes from the feeder there will be a wonderful, brief, flourish of crow sounds. One makes a series of small sneezy sounds when he sees me, while one makes small coughs. Washcrow will also, when the feeder is inadequately supplied, come near and let out a blast of two caws, demanding food which I immediately provide.

Watching the crows this summer, we have also gained information we would prefer not to know. Crows get sick. They have crippled feet. They have deformities.  They have avian pox with white spots and tumors. One has a blind eye.  The unwell crows are cranky, snap at other crows on the feeder. The healthy crows don't seem to discriminate against the unwell when we are watching. There is ultimately nothing we can do about the unwell.  The number of them is distressing -- do we have an accurate view of the ratio of well to unwell, or do we see more of the unwell because we provide a reliable food supply?

Sometimes we can help them a little. Pierre constructed a feeder so the crows have three different possibilities for standing – on a rounded perch, on the narrower edge of the pan, on a flat plank. The crow with the crippled foot will land on the plank, foot curled, and then press it down on the plank until it opens up to support him. I discovered that the two crows  with poxy faces liked soft bread – the pox makes sores in the mouth. After a week they rejected it, and I saw that one was getting better: the other has disappeared.

The unwell crows are more difficult to photograph.  They stay at the feeder a shorter time, their  movements are jerkier, and I have wondered if they see the lens of the camera as the eye of a predator.

Skin problems on the chin. These seem to be much improved.

This is the crow who makes sneezy noises at me.

Crippled foot.

Avian pox and damaged beak.

Avian pox.  

Tumors of avian pox.  The one on the left foot has become
 much larger, and the one on the right began since we 

started noticing.  

This crow, a relative of Hork, has the pox tumors
on one foot, and is blind in his left eye.  

To end on a more pleasing note, the young
squirrels of late summer have discovered
the crow feeder.

Crow summer: 2014

Washcrow and Her, courting, early March.

It's been a very satisfactory year for crows, beginning in March when we were able to follow a courtship. Most crows remain single, and those who do not are usually in their 3rd year when courtship happens. I have no idea how crows are selected for courtship. Pairing is normally for life.

The photograph above was the only one I was able to get, and you have to take my word that they are courting. Courting usually happened in the mornings, on a power line where the sun would shine into the camera.  Washcrow would move close beside Her and nibble on the back of Her's neck -- properly called "grooming" -- the one part of Her she could not reach for herself.   She never groomed him.  This reminds me of the saying: In every love affair there is one who kisses the cheek, and one who extends the cheek to be kissed.

Grooming continued for several days, and then we would see Her settle down low on the power line, tilt her head sideways, spread out her tail & wiggle her bottom.  The Betty-Boop-gender-stereotyping was almost shocking.  

Why we call him Washcrow.
He has taught several other crows to wash food for the young.

We saw them inspect an unused nest, and then saw the occasional stick being transported to the upper reaches of a cedar two houses away.  Then Her disappeared.  The male crow feeds his nesting partner.  When the young hatch, the male and some of their relatives feed her and the infants. About three days after we realized there were young to feed, we first saw Washcrow first visit Ann's peacock-designed birdbath, and carefully soak food before he took it home.  

On 4 June, a Wednesday, we were having coffee in the yard with Aislinn, when there was a thud on the roof of the car and a homely little tailless crow said, "Wow!" He said "Wow!" several times, we said "Wow!" in response, and for the last month he has normally appeared when one of us calls "Wow" Wow is the grandson (granddaughter?) of Korax whom I introduced here last year.

 Wow on his first day out of the nest.

On 5 June, Tak appeared, tagging after Wow.  Tak spoke less frequently, with a lower voice. 

Tak and Wow, 5 June.

Then on 9 June, Sunday, Futhark appeared.  Four-plus weeks later, Futhark is still smaller than the others.  Wow is the most outgoing, Tak the shyest.  Futhark will look at us, cock his/her head, and then make quiet rattling noises, sometimes a sort of cuckoo-sound.  When the others are screaming to be fed, nothing distracts them.  Futhark can be distracted into conversation.  

Futhark, 1 July.  All three still have the distinctive red mouths.

At the time of writing, the three have not yet started taking the initiative in finding food, though they will follow their parents to the feeder, then sit there alternately gobbling mouthfuls of food, and screaming to be fed while their mouths are still full of food.  The parents are admirably dispassionate.  When the young beg for food, they assume the same submissive posture of the female in courtship.

Wow, Tak, and Futhark have made us exceptionally aware of   crow mortality in our neighborhood.  In the past week we have twice found masses of small feathers.  A month ago we found feathers that appeared to have exploded from a central location, their points driven into the ground.  A very young crow had encountered a mesh of power lines and transformers.  The two feathers on the left show the results of electrocution -- the blackening inside and the melted tips.  The two on the right show the results of having been chewed. 

The cooked and the raw.  

Hork, who was with us the past two years, has not been seen since February but Korax shows up several times a day with two young crows of his own. We have fewer crows at the feeder than we did last summer, but they are putting away huge amounts of food, more than on any day in the winter when we would have as many as 15 and 20 crows.  They get primarily cat food and corn meal, with occasional treats of suet, walnuts, bread.  Last year they stole all the blackberries, but this year it has only been the cherries.  Every year they get the cherries.  They seem to know which day we have scheduled to pick, and they get to the tree before we are out of bed.

But about the food-washing.  Because of the food-washing, I have been putting clean water in the birdbath twice a day.  Today -- the day of writing this -- I put clean water in for the first time in three days.  Abruptly, the young have to deal with adult food. It is still sometimes brought to them, but it is no longer softened.  

Futhark, even though he is conspicuously smaller than the other two, can definitely deal with adult food.  In fact, he is showing signs of delinquency.  We have, several times now, seen him fly up to a parent and jerk the food out of the parent's bill, without even pausing to beg.

Wow, Futhark, & Tak, or possibly Tak, Futhark, & Wow. 6 July.
Beaks open on a hot day.

 I thought I had finished writing this entry to post tomorrow, but while we were having our late-afternoon ouzo, Washcrow came as he usually does to keep us company.  This time Her landed beside him and leaned Her head against him.  Washcrow caressed the back of her neck and stroked under her chin.  Then they sat quietly side by side.

Air erodes feathers

Primary feathers from left and right wings, thinner on the fore-edge.

Erosion is evident on both edges.

From July on, the crows are in moult, even the ones that hatched out in the summer. The feathers that grew in beginning last July work their way out, and new feathers grow. There is a period of more than two months when crows lose their glossy black and become not just a drab brown, but because of the feathers coming out and the feathers coming in, they look like a medieval band of lepers. This is when you see bits of their insulating undercoat made up of little fluffy grey feathers.

Crow at the worst stage of moult.

Air -- and sunlight -- erodes feathers. The brilliant black that sometimes flashes blue and purple in the right angle of light is a matter of refraction, not only of melanins. During the year the structure of the feathers that refracts the gloss wears down, and at the end of summer crows show the underlying pigments. 

Not all of our crows are evenly-pigmented.  The Korax family has patches of lighter-colored feathers all year around, some of them with a light ring around the neck. They are not discriminated against by the black crows.

The fore-edges of the wings gradually deteriorate.  Brushing against the nest, or tree branches and telephone poles, or other crows, wears down feathers. If you want to see nearly perfect feathers, go to this site created by the US Fish and Wildlife Service where you can identify most of the individual feathers from 100+ species of birds. 

It is illegal to possess these feathers.  I brought them inside to scan, and then returned them to the outdoors, to the crow shrine.  We have a place on the edge of the yard where we put odd things dug up in the course of gardening -- strange-shaped rocks, enormous nails used for railroad ties, crow feathers. Passers-by sometimes take the stones, never the feathers. As far as I can tell, when the crows eat cracked corn beside the feathers, they never notice them.  

I am fascinated by the evidence of the seasons, something I take for granted with the trees, with the plants in the garden. When the chlorophyll in leaves breaks down at the end of summer, we see the underlying carotene and anthocyanin pigments. Until this year, I had never made the connection across the species between the change of leaf color, and the change of crow color, between shedding leaves, and shedding feathers.  But that analogy goes only so far.  One of the Korax family came up to the car when I drove into the driveway this afternoon, and I saw the glossy black of the new feathers, not fully grown out.

Crow Summer

The weather and the crows have been splendid this summer. Two pairs -- one for the third summer -- have brought their fledglings to the crow feeder, and we have spent an inordinate amount of time watching their behavior. The fledglings are very nearly the size of their parents, but a bit smaller and more slender. On the first visit for one family, a parent supervised four on the feeder. Three pecked away, while the fourth sat in the feeding pan and screamed to be fed. Time out for a few pecks, then another series of screams for feeding. (The interior of a young crow's mouth is brilliant red.) The parent was admirably impervious.

After a week, the fledglings learned that if they sit near the empty feeder and scream, I would bring out more food. This is probably not good for their sense of ethics.  When the pan is empty, they will go over it carefully and tap at regular intervals, then poke underneath it as far as they can.

When we sit out in the yard with our late-afternoon drinks, several crows, as in the picture above, will come sit quietly on the power-line and keep us company.  Occasionally, one will swoop down low enough to make us duck, and then return to sitting quietly.  Hork, below, seems to be quite solitary, and spends a great deal of time perched above the back yard.

Hork, with a distinctive cere/operculum (can someone tell me?)

It is very good to be able to recognize two individual crows -- they certainly recognize us, and announce our presence outdoors to other crows with 4 caws.  If we walk anywhere in the neighborhood, various crows will give our current position with 4 caws. To us they often give 3 caws, which I hope is a greeting, and sometimes a single caw with a down-turn.  The fledglings  "feed-me" call is a single caw with a hint of a whine, which probably translates more correctly as NOW!   In the mating season, there was a great variety of calls, some quite melodic, some sounding like small wooden bells.

Korax, with the identifying light-colored feathers. This is one of the parents
of the crow I wrote about two years ago. I have a feather s/he moulted. This
year's fledglings also have light-colored feathers, mostly under the edge of the cape.

For a long time, whenever we would put out a new kind of food, the crows would assemble a parliament and discuss it.  One crow would come down and look carefully, then go back -- without eating anything -- and report.  Then one or two would come eat one bite each, and apparently pronounce it safe.  After a several months, this shifted to one crow coming from the parliament and tasting immediately, without discussion, to be followed by all the others in turn -- it is impossible to understand how turns are worked out.  Now the first crow to notice something comes down to eat immediately.  Most of them will call out in the process to inform others, but at least one is content to eat without sharing.  The neighbor across the street knows when I have put out dry bread, because they take the pieces over to his pond to soften them up.

Loading up with meat for the nestlings.

Most days in the winter, there are 12 - 20 crows waiting to be fed when I get up.  Those crows did not consume in a day what two pairs and 7 nestlings have consumed daily this summer.  For a while I was putting out twice as much food as I did daily in winter. Crows, of course, like meat best of all, and nothing makes them any happier than when we discover forgotten meat in a corner of the refrigerator, or have a couple of fish heads for them.

They have a great sense of order and fairness in eating, although it is impossible for me to understand the components of the order.  The fledglings have not learned order yet, or they impose it on each other like young children on the playground.  They come to food and spend more time squabbling about who is first than they do eating.

I used to put out crow food before I went to bed, as crows like breakfast earlier than I do, but the raccoon discovered it.  These days I put food out around 5-5:30 in the morning, whenever they perch outside my window and call to me that they are ready.  Crows  have mortal enmity towards raccoons -- that is just about their only 4-legged predator  -- and attacked this one in force whenever it appeared in daylight.  Now it waits until they have gone away for the evening.  I leave something for the raccoon in the evening down by the garden where it feels obliged to overturn the birdbath every night.  

Raccoon at dusk feasting on crow food. This one is about half-grown.

The crows know that the black cat lives here.  His first two years, they would scream at him unmercifully -- he was terrified by them, and I would pick him up and scream back.  They learned.  They have also learned that I despise the black cat from two houses away, the one that thinks our birdfeeders were established for his benefit, and now when they see him in the yard -- they know precisely the territorial boundaries for humans -- they scream him back to his house.  That has worked so well -- and may have been so gratifying -- that they have taken up screaming at his housemate, the striped cat, who is quite inoffensive.

These birds are astoundingly beautiful. They have a cape over their shoulders, a soft black triangle of small feathers that is a striking contrast to the long glossy black tail and wing feathers.  The feathers are intensely reflective. When they perch above us in the late afternoon, say about 4:30 with the sun just below, they flash platinum, and their beaks glitter. By seven they reflect bronze and copper.  And once, when the sun was low and a crow flew up in front of me past the sun, for an instant that crow flashed a deep peacock blue.

Sappho's Broom

  Goldfinches in winter.

Surprised by Time began four years ago today.  This is the 250th post -- at least 398,000 words -- and I am more surprised. I've loved this work these four years.  Surprised is linked to by nearly 150 other blogs, websites, and university research sites, and has had, as of writing this sentence, 140,135 readers page loads.  The past week has averaged 140 page loads a day. (Other than the total number of readers page loads. I only know the statistics for the most recent 500.)  I don't really know what 140 a day means in the blog world, but it seems generous when you consider that Wikipedia reports 156,000,000 blogs in existence a year ago. 

A strong number of readers look in regularly, and have for most of the four years.  Usually the largest percentage of readers is from Greece.  But readers baffle me.  Someone from Paris loads the same page 38 times, then comes back and looks at the same page a dozen times more.  Someone from Athens loads up 78 pages about Cleofe. (Everything I do here can be Copied and Pasted into your own document.) Someone from Bulgaria or Greece or North Carolina or Algeria finds the blog, makes 40 -120 page loads in a single day -- do these people have no diapers to change? no kitchens to clean? no gardens to weed? -- and disappears.  I have been awed to find readers from St. Helena and Reunion Islands.

Many readers arrive, clearly looking for something else -- "second-hand hats," "sophie's corner painting" -- and apparently a great many restaurants in US cities have names I thought were stratioti names. It was a mistake to have titled one post "Dating."  Many people have ended up there looking for women, and I hope they have been crushingly disappointed.  I remind readers again that my software tracks readers of the site, where they have come from, what they do on my site, and in most cases identifies their specific organization or university.

Most of the entries in this blog are work-in-progress, background notes for my book. I write as part of trying to solve problems I encounter.  Opinions have shifted.  More sources have been found. Corrections are needed.  Fine-tuning.  Readers should be wary of what they collect.  I do try to go back and correct facts as I identify them, but interpretations are more difficult.  Do not assume that I still hold a conclusion from a year or three years ago -- but I might.  Should you want to make use of material here, my work is available under a Creative Commons Copyright which you should read.

 Stellar's Jay

The garden is fine, thanks to all the time Alexandra spent getting it into something we can just about maintain. The five species of red poppies suppressed the pink, white, yellow, and orange poppies, and a good feed of horse manure pushed the Greek poppies 4 feet tall.  We added a new rose. a second Just Joey, a Christmas present from Rosalind bought from a local garden shop, but otherwise the roses were very slow, held back by exceptionally cool weather.  Rose buds prevented from blooming when they should will open out deformed -- this is important to remember whether you raise children or roses. 

Previously questionable, and cheap, no-name roses have done well, while half the catalog roses have done abysmally. Three name David Austin roses -- a  Winchester (stunning the first year, and never again), an Abraham Darby, and a Just Joey - - died off, and their root stock produced shoots with quite different roses.  Two of them are beautiful, but not what I had paid for.  David Austin's Pat Austin (no petals ever had a lovelier curve, but its stems were too weak for the blooms) died.  Or so we thought, but two shoots appeared overnight last week, so we are waiting. Altissimo has been spectacular. A friend's gift of  Rosa Mullaganii (from the UW Horticulture Center) has become huge, striking out in different directions and pushing a white tunnel through the pink cascades beside it.  It must have had several hundred blooms scenting the whole front yard on the one day of sun when the lavender beneath began to bloom.  (The lavender harvest will be this afternoon.)

Our aged broom with the sculptural twisting wood died, but the new broom plants I abducted from Sappho last November have flourished. (We had our Thanksgiving Day picnic there last year.) Sappho is a  three-way intersection in the north-west corner of the state, with a filling station, a bus stop, and a road sign that says "Entering Sappho".  You never know at which point you have left Sappho in three directions.

There is a place near Sappho called Pysht.  It is generally believed that Pysht is an attempt at Psyche, but for me that explanation does not carry the ring of conviction.

The pictures here are my attempts to record our birds.  We have six bird feeders now, plus the squirrel feeder, plus the upstairs balcony for the crows, plus salvia, penstemon, and Hot Lips sage for the hummingbirds and butterflies.  All June we had baby birds around the feeders, fluffy untidy things with blurry markings -- from the chickadee nest in the bathroom window frame, from the nuthatch nest in the lilacs, from the wren nest in the hawthorn, and chestnut-sided chickadees from the far side of the yard. A baby would land -- on the suet or sunflower seed feeder -- and then look around, not knowing what to do until a parent arrived and demonstrated.  The little nuthatches took turns handing each other the seeds they pecked out of the suet, clearly aware that a beak should have food put into it. The baby house finches arrived in early May and caused great anguish by their tendency to take food to the ground to eat.  The cat was severely reproached.

One squirrel has learned to come around the house to the power line in the hawthorn tree 20 feet from the window where I work.  He looks at me with an air of quiet desperation until I bring him a walnut. The crows get up before I do, and fly over the skylight over the bed cawing if they see no food. There is always one on watch for me to come onto the balcony who announces when I appear with food.  Another flies back and forth in front of the study window cawing when more food is required. There is always a crow watching us . . .

Crows have strong food choices.  Walnuts and meat are preferred.  Beef cat treats are good, but chicken cat treats are rejected.  Pizza crusts, but not toast crusts.  Occasional suet, but not daily. My hairdresser said her neighbor fed his crows corn meal.  My crows spilt out the corn meal and shrieked criticism until they had adolescents to feed, and then it was acceptable.  They have learned to eat dry cat food, as have the jays.  From the kitchen, we hear the steady thumps of crows landing above, the rattle of beaks in the metal food pan.

Female Anna's Hummingbird.

The crows used to cluster above  the yard and caw at the black cat.  After four years of that, they seemed to have accepted that he was part of the yard, and left off.  Yesterday I heard a mob of crows shrieking danger, swirling up and down the street in their carmagnole. It turned out that they had spotted Pierre a block away, wearing his big floppy black sun hat, and had been diving into his head.  Did they think him a stranger wearing a dead crow on his head?

One crow has started dropping pine cones in the yard. Gifts in exchange for food? 

Early in the spring, I started another blog -- Firesteel.  I did not know the word until I was looking for an explanation of the Palaiologos flag with a B in each quarter and read that the emblem was derived from firesteels.  I became obsessed with the word, have identified a blacksmith who can make me one, and finally reserved a blog address for the name -- firesteel was taken for all the servers I tried, but not pyrekbolo, the Greek version.  The word linked in my mind with the translucent grey sphere that covers The Garden of Earthly Delights when the side panels of the triptych are closed, a grey world humming with the first evidence of the creation of light.  Today's poem is "The Creation" by James Weldon Johnson, and I have never lost the thrill of hearing it on a 78 rpm recording when I was nine years old.

Firesteel is a blog for poetry and the occasional prose that thrills, that make chills run along my neck, or sparks shimmer inside my head -- a blog for words that strike fire.  It appears on Sundays, and has a modest core of faithful readers. 

Thank you.

Townsend's Warbler

Crow

Crow died when he landed on the wrong part of an electric power line just after noon on Wednesday.  It took two and a half hours for the part to be replaced and the electricity to come on again in the four houses that were affected. 

Crow had been inhabiting our yard for more than a week.  He was newly out of the nest, still accustomed to being fed, and he spent most of his -- and our -- waking hours demanding to be fed.  Screaming to be fed. The inside of his mouth was brilliant red, still detectable after death. 

Despite the fact that we had been putting out abundant crow food well within his reach, he wanted his parents to bring it to him, and would fly to wherever they were perched to do his demanding, even if they were much farther away than the food.  One parent -- crow genders are tricky -- would simply fly away after a certain amount of time, while the parent in the picture here would sit patiently, and then let out a withering sequence of caws that would have made any other creature shut up permanently.

Crow did not shut up.  He demanded more, and then would move closer and closer to the parent, apparently trying to groom, if not snuggle. So we don't know if he ever quite learned to feed himself. 

Our yard was raucous with crows all summer, but since Wednesday noon, we haven't seen a one and the quiet is disturbing. I have seen the parent in these pictures down in the park, three blocks away.

These crows were tool-users.  We frequently saw them poking in the chimney of the house next door, and under the edge of the roof with sticks about 4 inches long. Most mornings they would wake us up by skiing down the roof over the bedroom, claws scraping along the slates, and they have spent much time pecking on things under my desk window, just out of sight.  We put food for the crows on the roof of the shed under the lilac bushes, and it took them several weeks to feel secure about coming down into such close quarters.  Often Squirrel or Ms. Squirrel would get to the food first -- squirrel genders are quite easy -- and then it took the crows a few more days to come down and eat with the squirrels.  The squirrels hated it and the crows did, too, but neither side was willing to concede.

Alexandra dug a hole for Crow where we used to keep the beehive. He was surprisingly light in the hand.  Some famous ornithologist said that if humans were birds, very few of us would be intelligent enough to be allowed to be crows.  We had great expectations for Crow.

Crow's Theology

Crow realized God loved him-
Otherwise, he would have dropped dead.
So that was proved.
Crow reclined, marvelling, on his heart-beat.
And he realized that God spoke Crow-
Just existing was His revelation.
But what Loved the stones and spoke stone?
They seemed to exist too.
And what spoke that strange silence
After his clamour of caws faded?
And what loved the shot-pellets
That dribbled from those strung-up mummifying crows?
What spoke the silence of lead?
Crow realized there were two Gods-
One of them much bigger than the other
Loving his enemies
And having all the weapons. 
                                       Ted Hughes