Stone the Crow Chorus Blog

J. Sam Williams

Let us buck the old traditions and bring in the new. Crows, so long associated with the evil one—or one evil—with death, bad luck, and the afterlife should be seen as birds of intelligence, of remembrance, and of consequences.

I read an autobiographical story about a woman who once mistreated a murder of crows and they never forgot it. To the best of my ability, this is how I remember the story:
The murder antagonized her with flybys and much cawing. But this woman tried to make amends. She started to feed the murder. The crows became quiet and still and eventually she would be outside in her backyard and they would fly overhead dropping shiny objects near and around her.

These shiny objects represent the crows acceptance and warmth towards this woman. Does that sound like a death omen? Does that sound like the harbinger of evil? No. We should all love the murders flying about more.

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Cassandra Panek - High Dive

As a fledgling, I would leap from the twisted boughs of trees
Wings tucked tight to the bulge of my hollow breast
And force my black eyes open as the earth rushed up to embrace me.

I’m older now, canny enough to soar.
I throw myself off mountains
plummeting, screaming the thin air into my lungs.

One day I won’t unfold my wings.

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Marie Marandola - BAGGU for Irving Farm Coffee Roasters

I bought the bag with the crows on it at the station coffee kiosk, back when I was still learning to ride trains by myself.

“Do you know the difference between a raven and a crow?” the cashier asked.

I shook my head.

“Crows are the ones that travel in groups,” he said. “They menace and caw. Whereas ravens are bigger, with hooked beaks. You only ever see one or two ravens in one place. And the sound they make is more of a low croak, or a growl.”

My coffee was free that day. The bag’s been with me since.

A friend mentioned recently that, although he doesn’t mind the single life, he misses having someone to make breakfast for.

I don’t. These days, I like waking up by myself in undiluted darkness. When all I can hear is the murmur of Law and Order reruns circling my neighbor’s TV while she sleeps—and only if I strain to hear it.

If I strain to hear it, I can remember a time when my skin ached from lack of touch. When I cackled and flapped about with need. When my own breath wasn’t enough to circulate love through me. A lonely girl with a cache to fill, wandering hazy through an echoing commuter hub like a half-remembered dream.

Now, awake, I brew strong tea and test my voice to the sound of no one snoring. I paint my eyelashes into black, long-feathered wings.

Outside, dawn breaks.

I skip breakfast altogether. I want to live on air.

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Jane-Rebecca Cannarella - Rock Gardens

Crows will kill and eat a newborn lamb if given the opportunity, and despite their silky feathers and sharp intelligence, I can’t forgive them for that.

However, I don’t recommend tossing rocks at them either to shoo away from gentle livestock. Leave stones for land barriers in gardens, or collect them for a singular and then communal collection of wannabe flowers for a rock garden – like the one I had in my backyard growing up. Salty mini-boulders collected from the lip of the ocean, a shore filled with primordial pillars, the littlest of who now live in the back of a home almost forgotten somewhere on Long Island.

Save your stones.
 

I wonder if there is a bible passage, or a portion of another religious text, that mentions bird and beast cohabitating in harmony. Crows nesting in the curls of a sheep’s back, golden threads of sunshine turning the coal-feathers into oil slicks of blue. A heavenly place of accord – an illustration in a Little Golden Book.
 

There are no farms, or sheep, no crows where I live - in the middle of a city – I’m removed from pastures; and I am neither friend nor foe to beaked predators (I don’t see them often. But when/if I do are they an omen of murder? Not like how a group of them is called a murder, but on the rare occasion I see a crow I wonder if they are carrying death on their glossy backbones).
 

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But a squirrel did fall out of a tree last night, a dead branch collapsing right behind me – small-limbed furry buddy body splayed on the pavement, and quaking like an earthquake was moving through its body.

My boyfriend, a hand at the small of my back pushing me forward, said, “that’s it for that squirrel.” But when we got to the front door, I stalled looking for cigarettes. Heard the posse of people who were paces behind us scream, “SQUIRREL!” at what I assumed was its poor lifeless body.

When my boyfriend went inside, I went hunting for its body.
 
As a child, in the same neighborhood with the backyard rock garden, I once found the body of a dead bird in the gutter. For days I would leave the bird leaves from a Linden tree, dried lily of the valley, and the mustard yellow chalky filament that would fall from the tree canopies as gifts. Like the bird and I were ancient Egyptians, I recognized its humanity in death.
 
I wanted to do the same for the squirrel.

But despite my search, the squirrel was gone. I looked under cars and in shrubs, climbed over a parking fence to see if some beast or burden dragged its corpse. No remains, no indication that a hurt ever happened with the exception of a cracked bough still on the sidewalk.

​The squirrel – skirting death. Refuting postmortem gifts. So, I’m saving my rocks – that when lumped together would make a cairn – since no crow warned of a death on a thirsty Thursday night. For this moment, the squirrel is safe while the crow is absent – making plans to befriend lambs in their nurseries.