I Just Cawed To Say I Love You

The photography session appeared well underway when I pulled up to our warehouse.

The historic brick buildings on our street are frequently used by photographers as a background. On this occasion, two fancy motorcycles and a pair of riders were set up in front of the freight depot’s doors, catty-cornered from us, while the photographer and his crew arranged different shots.

I watched for a moment before going inside to work at my desk, which is in the front part of our building. I could hear the photographer and his assistants arranging their shots.

And soon, I could hear a crow out there, too. Yelling for lunch.

At first, I tried to ignore him, not wanting witnesses, lest I become known as the woman who does a bird’s bidding.

But he was persistent. And I was weak.

It has taken ages to forge a relationship with these crows; to get them to visit more often. Hang out on our street. Help keep hawks at bay.

Since hawks hate crows and I hate hawks, I’ve been investing in peanuts and dry dog food and rolling balls of smelly braunschweiger to entice the crows to make this a regular hangout.

My success has been limited.

Some days, they come. Just as often, they don’t. But when they do, I try to be quick to come when they caw. It’s generally a single bird, with the rest of his murder waiting nearby.

The commander usually lands on a beam that once held a small roof, and loudly lets me know he’s arrived. He’s not a patient bird, so I’ve been trained to act fast. I hurried onto our porch and tossed two braunschweiger balls. They landed just under the bird. He immediately retrieved both and flew off.

While the photographer stood there, watching.

“Excuse me,” he said. “But did I see that right? Did he just order his lunch?”

“Yeah,” I said casually. “He always gets it to go.”

Hawk-repelling qualities aside, it’s the intelligence of crows that most draws me. Still, there was a time, at my last house, when I wondered how smart a particular crow might be. In our neighborhood, we had a momma crow that would feed its own wing-flapping, lookalike youngster, and then turn and feed the much smaller baby cowbird perched beside it. Time and again, I saw the big momma and her vastly mismatched youngsters. I was surprised a bird as brainy as a crow could be taken in by what’s known as an “avian brood parasite.”

Cowbirds, one of the most common of the avian brood parasites, are perhaps even more fascinating than crows. Once an expectant parasite mother bird finds a nest with eggs, she removes one of the host’s eggs and lays one of her own to replace it.

But before you think badly of cowbirds, consider for a moment what Momma Cowbird endures: She’s in labor. Knows delivery is imminent. Yet before giving birth, she must find an untended cradle, remove the baby, give birth to her own offspring, and then recover enough to leave before the other mother returns.

So, although familiar with cowbirds and their con-artist ways, it was still surprising to witness a crow being conned, so I went online to research their parenting instincts.

One of the first things I found was a YouTube video of a kitten raised by a crow.

Talk about an impressive parasitic parent! Apparently, the mother cat interrupted her labor long enough to find a crow’s nest, toss out one of the babies, and substitute her kitten in its place. Or maybe the crow just happened across the orphaned kitten in a less remarkable way. I prefer to opt for the drama.

Along those same lines, I once had a coworker named Norma whose dad raised a crow. She told me how, when her dad got old, he and the crow would go for walks together up the gravel road where he lived. She said they walked at the very same pace.

Even though I never met him, that’s an image I love. And old man and his bird. Side by side. Gravel road.

The only downside was what happened to Norma’s sister. Who was apparently tossed from her cradle by a mother crow.