A crow’s tale

April.02 : It’s the breeding season for birds. We have four birdhouses in our little garden and only one is occupied. An Oriental Magpie Robin has built a nest. I wonder if it’s the same sprightly little thing that was born in our backyard. I was hoping to see the Purple Sunbird in one but it flies off elsewhere after sucking the juice from our mandarin orange tree. I don’t know which bird is the singer that entertains us every morning.

I used to think that birds, like humans, build a home to live in it. They don’t. They build a nest only to lay eggs and look after their young, and abandon it the moment the babies fly off. The nest remains empty till the next breeding season, when another bird decides to make this its temporary home.
I see a flock of crows perched on a big tree in the park across our house. At times there are at least 50 of them and I have no idea why they are there. In the morning, when our maid tosses crumbs of bread for the birds, a few crows swoop in the moment she turns her back. At dusk they sit quietly before flying off to wherever their nests are. I find the evening stillness menacing — perhaps I associate it with the scene from Hitchcock’s The Birds.
When I was young I remember my grandmother telling me that if you hear a crow caw near your house it means you will have guests. Not that she believed in it. She was an intelligent woman. But like most people she did not like crows.
Crows don’t fit into our concept of beauty. We like good-looking birds with nice plumage and melodious calls. We feed them and build shelters for them. But crows are generally regarded as ugly and aggressive scavengers; we find their calls raucous and disturbing. When we see one hovering nearby, our immediate reaction is to shoo it off. Some people even consider them as bad omens, creatures from the dark side.
But crows are intelligent. I have seen evidence of this in my own back garden. A crow will pick a piece of dried bread and soak it in the birdbath to soften it for eating. And if you read naturalist Lyanda Lynn Haupt’s book on crows (Crow Planet: Essential Wisdom from the Urban Wilderness, published by Hachette), you may even start respecting these smart scavengers.
Crows are bipedal, can walk, tilt their heads when they look at you, and belong to the family of songbirds. Different matter they cannot sing.
They are also great problem-solvers: Haupt says they are “immensely intelligent” and “often engage in behaviour that we ascribe to higher animal groups”. I have also seen a David Attenborough video in which crows drop nuts on the road to be shelled by passing cars! If the traffic is heavy, they wait patiently for the lights to change and pick up the crushed fruit when cars stop.
Crow Planet is not just a book about crows: it’s also an essay on nature, the diary of a passionate and obsessive naturalist. She says these species of birds that belong to the Corvid family (a grouping that includes ravens and magpies) have become urban settlers: “you’ll find them wherever there are humans”. Human settlements are an easy source of food.
And, like humans, they follow certain social customs. They gather to find mates, and once a crow has found one, it’s a marriage for life. The pair will walk together (it’s difficult to tell a male from a female), sit next to each other and build their nest together. They both gather twigs, but the female does the fine-tuning.
They are secretive about the location of their nest. If you try to follow a crow to its nest, it will hop from one tree to another, leading you off track, says Haupt. Once the eggs are hatched they get a “helper”, an avian nanny who helps guard the nest and feeds the young when the parents are out foraging for food. They are good parents and teach their social customs to their young.
When a crow falls sick, or is injured, the entire community joins in to take care of it. They will hang around the bird and feed it. And when the bird dies they will first scream and then “cluster about the dead crow in perfect silence”. She calls it the “crow funeral”.
With all these “human” qualities, you start looking at them in a different light, a bit more sympathetically. And even if you still don’t like them, remember one thing before you shoo a crow: They have an amazing ability to recognise individual human faces. If you treat them badly they will hold a grudge against you for a long time. And if one crow dislikes you, the entire flock will.

Shekhar Bhatia can be contacted at shekhar.bhatia@gmail.com [2]

Shekhar Bhatia