Kwanhaeng

Many drops of water make a river. Write to Kwanhaeng at kwanhaeng@radsoft.net.

Both crows and ravens are corvines. They are very close relatives. Ravens tend to be a bit larger. The easiest way to tell them apart is that a crow goes 'caw! caw!' and a Raven goes 'grruk!'

Crows are not bad. They are good omens. Of course the one outside your window could be the odd miscreant. (They have individual crowy characters.)

At me mum's old place in Newport, the backyard happened to be the members-only club for the high council. Every day, rain or shine, for a few hours in the afternoon, seven crows sat in a circle. This went on for fifteen years. They were always there, sitting facing each other and talking. Sometimes one or more would get up and stretch or turn its back to the others and think solitary crow thoughts, but they would always all return to the circle before flying away in the evening.

And I always asked her about them when we talked on the phone, and she would go to the window and say 'yep! they're out there!' and tell me what it looked like they were up to.

Then a few years ago it stopped. No more crows in the afternoon. What had happened?

The following year, in the evening, for two solid weeks, the entire ring of 60 to 80 foot trees, branches almost touching, around the yard (probably about 100' sq.) were filled with crows. The trees were black. They would fly in just around sunset. The din was unimaginable. The high council had done their work and departed, and the revolution was at hand.

The entire island became a two-level event, crows flying everywhere, thousands of them, roosting together at night, every few nights in a different ring of trees. During the daytime you could not look up without seeing maybe three groups of several crows each flying in different directions, yet seemingly on related errands somehow. Important crow business! And there were sentinels keeping watch in every yard.

They are much more organized as a society than we are. No one notices them. They're a tribe actually. I haven't any idea whether the activity of the past few years is a convention of crows with Philco dealerships, or a normal cyclic event, or a part of the widely reported changes in animal/human interaction the past few years - coyotes in the Bronx, wild animals losing their fear and moving in towards us rather than away - or what.

They talk to each other a lot, lots of vocabulary, signal back and forth, and they are very organised, yet very democratic in a way. No dictatorships in Crow Country, yet their movements are highly coordinated and purposeful, both collectively and individually, and by crow standards they are mostly well behaved.