Crows are the most visible of the species that remain wild while clustering with humans. They thrive, not just on the edges of our neighborhoods (as coyotes do), but throughout. In congested city centers, they are outnumbered only by pigeons, which are morons by comparison. Crows are smart, smart enough to recognize death as a transition to be honored: stories abound of "crow funerals" and of small clusters of crows "being with" a dying crow, as though easing its passing like the family clustered around the bedside of a dying patriarch.
Many people consider crows and ravens pretty much the same. This image and the next show two of the clues one may use to distinguish them. First, the tail: In flight, a crow's tail ends in a smooth fan curve or nearly straight edge. A raven's tale is wedge-shaped or somewhat pointed (see below). Second, the head and beak: A raven's head is larger compared to its body, and the beak is correspondingly thick with a somewhat Roman-nose look.
A raven is also much larger than a crow, but this can be hard to detect in a bird at an unknown distance. Where a crow weighs scarcely a pound (0.45kg) and is half again as long as a robin, a raven is half again as long as a crow and weight 2.5-3 times as much. They also sound different, but a raven's croak is hard to describe, and as they are less vocal than crows, you might not get much of a clue anyway.Because crows not only tolerate the human landscape but thrive in it, people in a newly-constructed neighborhood—that started out as a meadow or forest—sometimes note the shift as many songbirds vanish over time and crows move in to replace them. I feel fortunate to live in an area where there is a goodly patch of forest bordering most neighborhoods, so that, while we see plenty of crows, we also see robins, blackbirds, jays, goldfinches, cardinals, mockingbirds, magpies, a few kinds of hawk, vultures, and—in addition to the ubiquitous squirrels—raccoons, foxes, mice, voles and shrews…and an occasional deer. I have heard owls, but not seen them.
In Crow Planet: Essential Wisdom from the Urban Wilderness, author Lyanda Lynn Haupt writes with two things in mind. Firstly, that the crow is a harbinger of our self-made doom, as we continue to produce a human landscape in which fewer and fewer nonhuman species can subsist. Secondly, that humans are, like crows, smart and adaptable, which sheds a glimmer of hope that we will restore balance by taking our place in nature, realizing that we are as much "natural" as any thrush or woodchuck, leaving "elbow room" for the rest of nature in our midst.
It is not just a matter of switching out our light bulbs for CFLs and turning down the thermostat a degree or two. It is fighting the tendency to jam new neighborhoods cheek-by-jowl; it is persuading planning boards to leave untouched some reasonable percentage of the land so that the animals are not totally displaced. We need to remember, also, that while the built-over landscape ranges around two percent of a nation like the United States, in city-states like Singapore that proportion is well over half and growing. In the U.S. we can well afford to set aside forested enclaves throughout our cities and suburbs, but not everywhere do they have that luxury.
The author tells stories of Louis Agassiz, who would give a prospective student something to "look at", such as a preserved fish or other animal. He would gently prod his victim to look and look again over a few days, hours daily, and finally learn to see deeply. I understood, better than every before, why naturalists draw so much. Agassiz called the pencil "the best set of eyes"; by observing closely enough to make a good sketch or drawing, one will see what went unseen before. Based upon this, Ms Haupt spent three days, seven hours daily, studying a preserved crow (she closed her study's drapes so the neighborhood crows would not be disturbed by the sight). It helped her see crows better in each daily encounter.
Thus, it happens that crows are a gift to us, a portion of non-human nature that won't hide, that makes the in-your-face statement that we share this world, and we'd do well to get used to that. It may be easy in the abstract to rejoice that wolves and cougars are returning to the wilderness. It is quite a bit harder when the new neighborhood fox eats your cat.
It may be unsettling to see a crow stripping down a roadkill squirrel, but it is better than if it stays there until it rots. No scavengers would mean the squirrel becomes a maggot pile in short order. Y'got any stomach for that? Me, if I get there before the crow does, I shovel up the body and toss it on my compost heap. The birds and the ants can share it, and any crow that visits won't become roadkill in turn.
Crows thus become a metaphor, a symbol of us, fellow omnivores, just making a living on this planet. When times get hard, crows drive out other species; so do we. Can we learn to prosper graciously, as crows will? Creeping climate change may melt the arctic. Other environmental insults we barely understand might make living quite a bit harder, even in the prosperous nations. The author closes with such musings, and I'd rephrase her ultimate question thus: will we ever learn to live as a part of nature rather than in opposition to an imagined "Nature"? and if we do, will we do so in time?
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