They go unnoticed overhead
Above the supermarket malls and cities
Countryside
Suburban fields and meadows
Watching
Airborne gangs dressed in black feather jackets
Fearless wise guys with a raucous comment
For the goings on below.
Published: Pulsar Poetry (UK) 2011
One
of the things I’ve noticed since being retired is that I have more time
to notice things. There’s never as much time as I thought there would
be, but enough. I’m sitting on the front porch this fine, blue sky,
Monday morning, watching crows, a murder of them—eight. A family. This
is their neighborhood, they own it, it’s their turf, and air space. I
have put a feeder at the edge of our front yard for them.
By
mid November, gulls get hungry and fly in from Puget Sound. A lead
gull flies a scanning grid of parallel paths – airborne geometry, serene
high flight, an interesting thing to watch. They never miss a feeder
contribution, and when such is spotted there’s a screech that brings the
other members of its group. Then there’s an air war, with the crows,
like fighters, against gulls, the bombers. Gulls most often win, but
they are sometimes driven off by crows with higher numbers.
Since
I have been observing crows, they’ve been observing me. They know my
car, and follow for a block or two before I pull into my driveway. Then
they wait on the roof of my house to see if I’ve brought junk food
leftovers. French fries are prized, and also pasta. One crow usually
hangs around to keep an eye on the feeder while perched on top a lamp
post just across the street.
Such
interesting birds. Some people are against them. They rob smaller
bird’s nests when they find them, eat the young. I cringe while watching
them patrol the fence in my back yard, scanning our evergreens for
nests. Not nice, but all of us kill something to survive. A Buddhist
monk’s remark: “We are all food, and the eaters of food.” All of us part
of earth’s biota*
I
am quid-pro-crow. They fascinate me, so damn smart—and cautious. After
years of being fed, the older ones now to dare to stand their ground as
close as twelve or fifteen feet away. They watch my every move, of
course, poised for a quick escape, a burst of flight. Their mortal
enemies are owls and hawks. Crows mass and chase the owls away in
daytime, swirling cloud of twenty birds or more. But later on, at night,
the owl returns to deftly pluck a sleeping crow from off of its branch.
I
miss my family of crows. Though there are crows in Sweden, I don’t see
them very often. Seems they’ve been replaced by magpies that look very
much like crows dressed in tuxedos. Doubt we’ll ever have a close
relationship–don’t speak their language.
A well dressed magpie
*
Biota: The total collection of organisms of a geographic region or a
time period, from local geographic scales and instantaneous temporal
scales all the way up to whole-planet and whole-timescale spatiotemporal
scales. (Wikipedia)
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