A Feather from the Crows

by ERIKA CONNOR

Where did it all start, my following the crows? 

It was in Montreal, on Mount Royal, the beacon hill that had given the city its name, where the French had installed an illuminated metal cross and where First Nations people had once lit fires. I was looking down at the city shimmering chrome and glass in the heat, a young artist with sketchbook under my arm. The world lay before me, but I didn’t care. I was lost.

The Spell

There was a tree full of crows. They were all gathered there like anchors, ink black bodies in the gray limbs, so dark, but with a buoyancy in them, satin surfaces, iridescence, indigo, midnight blue, heads poised just so, mesmerizing. My eyes lit up. There it was. I ran home with the image clutched to my heart, and took out my paints. That was the beginning.

They were everywhere at once, on the news, in films, on radio commentaries. They were the underlying soundtrack, interspersed between a conversation on the street, a telephone call, a child’s laugh, a siren, a pause in thought—and no one noticed. I saw them from bus windows, from the canyons of office towers, and as I emerged from the underground. They appeared when I thought about them, then disappeared again. The more I searched the more they escaped my grasp. They always seemed to have somewhere better to go. Were crows always like this—elusive, evasive? 

My Childhood Home

For many winters, I stayed at my father’s house while he was away in Mexico. This was my childhood home at the edge of a vast provincial park. I had always been a loner. This was why I lived so well in books and thoughts, alone among the trees. The forest was my sanctuary. I spent more time there than anywhere else.

So it made sense that one morning I was woken by a voice, when the sky was still and black. I got up and went into the woods. I was following a beautiful song, one I could not place, and I had to know who was singing. High at the top of a cedar tree was a solitary crow. I had never heard anything like it, a kind of water fluting sound, with harmonics and breathy notes, warbling. Who would believe that a crow could make such an achingly sweet song?

Mating dance

One gave the salute, crrr, craa, craa, then banked suddenly on the left, pulled in his wings hard, spiraled down like a spear, and at the last possible moment was caught on some cushion, rising swiftly on a current. The other crow followed, in her ode to the sky, a dance that lingered long after they were gone, over eternal forests, marshland, and valleys. 

The Norse god, Odin, had given an eye to the well of wisdom in his unending quest for deeper vision. His two ravens became his eyes and were sent out across the perilous space between the living and the dead. This is described in Grímnismál, a collection of anonymous Icelandic poems of the thirteenth century.

“Hugin and Munin fly each day over the spacious earth. I fear for Hugin that he come not back, yet more anxious am I for Munin.” Munin was memory and Hugin was thought and of the two Munin was most precious.

Every day the pair flew, wing to wing and one over the other, on each other’s backs, then the bottom one folded in his wings and dropped like a stone and the other one freefell. They made their harmonic half notes, hu hu, sonic water sounds, throat singing. They mated for life.

Flight

I began finding black feathers, traces of the passings of both crows and ravens. I had a collection of feathers, from both left and right wings, primary and secondary flight feathers, some covert feathers with tufts of white down, and a few long tail feathers. I kept them in a birch bowl made by my brother, among many other feathers from different birds, but the crow and raven feathers were my prized possessions.

Corvidae is their family name. Ravens are the larger birds with tufted collars, curved powerful beaks, and wedge tails, and they can outlive the crows by many years. It was said that ravens preferred the wild, while crows excelled in the city. But I had seen ravens and crows at home in both habitats. They were the same and they were different. I loved them both. Ravens flew across the open with pure confidence. They had few predators. They had loud and deep-throated voices. Their young sounded like a mob of monkeys. Crows were secretive and complex. Their nests were burrowed deep within the pine trees. Ravens made their beautiful bell and water sounds, which crows could also make but only, it seemed, in private. When the crows were ready to nest, they went quiet. They disappeared.

The apple trees bloomed and the raucous screeching of four raven fledglings echoed on the cliffs above the lake. I snuck up on them. Each time the wind came, they seemed to blow off the edge and disappear. Then they rose again. They didn’t seem to mind that I was there. They were testing their wings, swooping over me, turning their rudder tails, tilting and wavering. They went out over the lake and came back, using me as a landmark, a witness. I could hear the wind in their feathers. I felt their joy.

River Crows

Over the years, I lived off and on along the river. I walked for hours down the train tracks, in a place of pine trees, oaks, and sumac, meadow flowers and birds, goldfinches, sparrows, blue jays, and crows.

One day a woman came walking towards me, wondering why I was laughing.

“Crow babies, in the middle of that pine tree. See them? You can hear them a mile away.”

“Really?” She looked up at the trees, with a hand shielding her eyes. Maybe it had never occurred to her. The little black birds warbled and squawked like cartoons as the mother came to fill their beaks. They stumbled along the branches. One day they were in a pine, and next day they were in the golden tips of a small oak, fidgeting, picking at lichen, picking at their feet. I watched one trying to preen. He ruffled his feathers a little too hard and fell off his perch. He caught his fall on a lower branch. The other one was pulling little branches toward him, seeing how they sprung back.

A storm was blowing over and a reedy wavering voice was calling to the thunder and rush of rain and wind. I could hear the young crow through the screen door. In the storm’s wake came the sun and all the green glittering and the drone of bagpipes carrying from the boat club on the island. The music was tentative at first, and the crow went quiet. Then the piper found the surge and spirit, standing alone on a rock over the water. He was not alone. The adolescent crow was answering, singing along. 

Language Lessons

Aaw aaw aaw aaw aaw aaw aaw.

Silence.

Aaw aaw aaw aaw.

Silence.

Aaw aaw aaw aaw aaw aaw.

A second crow flew in and landed in the same tree. It said, Kaw kaw kaw kaw.

The first crow, in staccato, pronounced: Kaw-kaw-kaw-kaw-kaw.

The second crow, higher in pitch, called: Kaw kaw kaw kaw!

I quietly opened the door and came out.

A third crow voice sounded somewhere to the right: a deep throated kaaaw!

The first crow flew off, followed by the second one. The third crow flew in the other direction. Minutes later, I heard the clear whistle of a hawk.

They had a certain language with hawks and owls. I once found a great horned owl because six angry crows called my attention, swooping and screeching, leaping from branch to branch, having a tantrum. The great owl sat very still and quiet in their midst, staring with yellow eyes, swivelling his feather-tufted head.

The crows had sky battles amongst their kind. They had a language for dogs, humans, or unidentified objects. They made strange rattling and clicking sounds, tapping their perches with their beaks, or sliding their beaks side to side along a branch. Sometimes they were silent, flying elegantly through the forest, dipping under and over branches, never hitting their wings. Or one would balance on the very tip of a tree, swinging gently to and fro, and if I turned my head for only a moment, it would be gone as quietly as it came. But there was one sound I had never heard before, a kind of mewing or cooing. It happened with a mated pair I found. One was bowing its head, showing the white nictitating membrane of its eye, and the other was gently preening its head.

It didn’t take long for the crows to come. They’d been watching the blue jays taking peanuts from my balcony banister. I kept very still, peering through the window. They always knew I was there and they didn’t trust me. One was braver. He clutched the peanuts in his claw, and stuffed them one by one, as many as he could fit, into his open beak. A smaller one hovered on the edge, taking any peanuts that fell and flying away with them. One day, the bigger one was cooing on the banister. He did a dance, bowing his head, dipping his beak up and down. He made that sound, a soft mewing, begging sound, and flew to a nearby tree. I came quietly onto the balcony and sang the same wavering tones he had taught me. He looked at me, blinking his inner white eyelid. Would it disturb him or send him away? He bowed his head and cooed back from his perch. I felt the sound on my skin, resonating. It was the first time a crow answered me.

Molting

The crows floated with gaps and holes in their wings, losing their rags for something new. They swept the lawn in search of peanuts, blue jays in tow. They came down and sat on the backs of lawn chairs, or swung round and round on the feeder, with wings out for balance, filling their throat pouches with tiny seeds. One had a crippled foot, curled up like a fist. It never opened, even as he hobbled across the ground.

“You like crows?” the woman next door asked. 

She was gardening and there was a crow squawking loudly in the tree above at her dog on the road.

“I love them.” I smiled at the look on her face.

“Well, I don’t. Take them with you.”

“I wish I could, but they go where they like.”

They were a measure of moods, the way they appeared at certain times, calling into question where you were or what you were doing. 

The river was gray, mauve with mist and coming night as I walked along the train tracks. I could hear crows screeching down in the gully. Two flew out from the trees like they had been sent out or were escaping. I crept down the bank. I couldn’t see anything at first through the bush, but one crow was still in there, cursing up a storm. Then I found an opening in the leaves and saw a bat floating in sleepy circles, a flickering gray-blue, a trick of the eyes in the cave light. What was going on? I felt uncomfortable and backed away. Strangely, the bat followed, coming straight for me. I ducked and it swerved, flickering over my head and out onto the river. The crow came out next in the exact same place and almost flew into me. We both shrunk back. He tilted his wings sharply and sped away along the tracks.

Half the time I had no idea what they were doing or why. They watched me as much as I did them. They were composite creatures, clacking and chattering like parrots when annoyed, or waddling, striding in the grasses like chickens. They were cats making a soft mew, mew as I came along the tracks, what they used as endearments between themselves with bowed head, or when they were begging. Were they teasing? Was it for me? I always went quietly, trying not to stare too much or they would leave. It seemed to me that they were the shiest of birds, for ones with such a raucous reputation.

I was always looking for them, standing on some road, glued to my binoculars. People drove by with their windows down, slowly scanning the horizon, caught by the mystical air.

“What is it?” they whispered.

“Crows.”

They made a sound of disgust, a wave of a hand, dismissal. I was always hurt by this. The car sped away.

People saw the black feathers hanging from my car windshield mirror as a kind of armor or provocation, a leaning towards darkness. Crows were dirty, scavengers. They were ill omens, signs of death and battlefields. But this was a disassociation, a relegation of things either to darkness or light, night or day, when all things were equally part of the whole. 

Airplanes

Once I saw a crow watching a remote-controlled toy plane fly back and forth over a meadow. He was watching from the top of a pine tree and he stayed a long time in silence. I wondered what he thought. I had heard that crows were superstitious.

City Crows

I heard a crow talking to himself as he dipped his bread in a puddle. I smiled. He muttered and flew up to a low branch. 

Craaa. He had left his bread by the puddle.

Then he flew down so close I swear he wanted to brush my shoulder. I felt the wind of his passing.

Another time, I biked down a side street and a crow came out of the blue and rode along with me, on level with my shoulder. We looked each other in the eye and parted ways at the stop sign.

I began another experiment. I wanted to know if the crows could read my mind. Each day I biked down to the park and sat for hours on the bench by the river. Can you hear me? I asked three crows in a giant willow. Two flew off a branch and dove down through the trees, clucking and moaning, flitting to the river and back again. The third one came dancing towards me, cooing, swept past the park bench where I sat, not ten feet away, and banked over the river. It made my eyes water.

Then I understood: I had let them in. The black birds were my satellites; no matter where I was or where I travelled to, there they were. 

The Artist’s Crows

On a cold day in December, I was leaning against the building of the art gallery, smoking, waiting for people to come to my show, “Land of Blue Sky.” I had just finished hanging all my paintings of a land I had dreamed about since I was a child and finally reached. Across the pure blue sky, two crows danced above me. They made the honorable salute, closing their wings and opening them again, so that they dipped down and up, turning on a wing. Then they flew in slow revolutions, rising higher and higher into the atmosphere. Suddenly two hawks flew out from the heights of a golden building. There was a battle. The crows gave chase and all flew westwards, disappearing over the cityscape. One lone crow returned, golden light on his belly and wings, and when he was just above me he dropped a single white down feather that landed at my feet.

Crows of the Wild Bird Rehabilitation Centre

I don’t remember how I found this place. It was a little cabin in the forest on the outskirts of the city. It housed all kinds of birds: seagulls, geese, hawks, vultures, loons, owls, warblers, and starlings, birds that had been injured and needed repair before they were released back to the wild. I came as a volunteer.

The young woman I was learning from held a crow with cracked feet in a towel on her lap. The white rings in the black skin filled with pus and had to be dug out while they bled. The crow lay there, blinking her eye and the white nictitating membrane, occasionally whimpering, a claw clutching the towel.

“They live hard,” the woman said.

Another crow needed wing therapy. The woman grasped his legs so that she could stretch his wing, in and out, to rotate and work the muscles. He squawked softly. She let me touch the wing. I pulled it out gently and felt the feathers rasping. His strength, his fingers.

One was blind, three had broken wings, one had a crippled foot, two had bullet wounds. Then there were the baby crows, the ones that had fallen from their nests, or lost their parents. They were kept in the raptor room, alongside the cages of the owls and the hawks, in a giant screened-in enclosure. Seven little crows sat in a row on their branch perch that was level with my shoulder. They had blue eyes and they peered at me. Sometimes they hopped onto my shoulder, as naturally as if I were a tree. Little creatures with tufted tails and mangy feathers and beaks too big for their bodies. They had lost their mothers. I was not a mother, but I could sense the age-old pull to feed them, animal to animal.

Waah, waah, waah! went the deafening chorus.

I pushed the stick into their open red beaks and the meat slop went down their gullets with loud garbling sounds. One crow sidled down the perch to my shoulder, staring with translucent eyes almost blue. He picked at my sleeve. Then all went silent and when I turned again the crow babies were fast asleep.

The adult crows kept secrets and caches in the cracks in the walls, under the bedding. They concocted a powerful musk. I made up cages with fresh pine needles and thick branches from the forest. I had a turquoise towel to move them, but soon tossed it away. The one with the blue-bandaged wing kept unwrapping the towel from her head, her beak open, but never once did she bite me. She played dead, rolled over, and lay there until I turned her over like she was a turtle. The other one landed on my forearm. I carried him out slowly like a king on his throne. He weighed heavily on my arm. At the doorway he hopped off. When I tried to carry him off again the other one gave me a gentle beak nudge. Don’t take my friend. They were strange and distant. I couldn’t quite read them. Their silence was deafening. They left claw marks on my arms. They were sharper and stronger than they believed. That was why I loved them. They were like me.

How could they be linked together? The battle cries of the winged warriors to the silence of the captive ones? The freewheeling never-bow-to-human crows and these soft, still, fearful black dolls? They could not tolerate captivity. It made them fatalistic.

Some were freed and some were sacrificed, with bullets in their shoulders, or wings that never mended, put to the needle, to eternal sleep. The last one lay on her belly behind her perch, with head low, eyes still, quiet as a mouse.

I had touched a crow with my living hands. I had scratch marks on my arm and hands to prove it. I had carried a crow, soft as a dove, stroking her black silken back. But I was sad for them. They fluttered and flowed in my heart and bowed their silk blue heads. 

Animals were not mute, I thought. They were not arrogant or self-absorbed. They asked for our understanding everyday, building their nests on our peripheries. They greeted my house as they flew over. I was part of their territory.

The Roost

Thousands—it seemed there was no end to them—filled the sky, flying east over the grids and channels of the urban landscape. I had seen this many times. In a city of one million, did anyone look up? The sun was setting and the crows were lit with copper, glinting wings and bellies. Sky warriors.

Blue Cabin Crows

I once lived in a blue cabin in the woods. I used to serenade a crow from my door. I would sing and he would listen from a maple tree above me in the rain and cold. I felt the song gathered at my throat as if it were my own. Why would you ever, in your right mind, trade wings for an earthbound existence?

In the autumn I lay on a white stone in a strong wind. The sky was cloudy but the light made my eyes water. A crow was blowing in the wind currents above me like a beautiful black feathery leaf, scrolled and twirling, tilting, rotating. Now another one appeared and another one. Six crows hovered above me, dancing in the wind in perfect silence. The first one came down low and made slow swaying circles. Then they all blew away.

In the winter I was on the little mountain behind the swamp, following coyote tracks. I heard wind in wings. A raven alighted in a pine tree behind me. I went still. He croaked gently, tapped, went silent. Was he still there? I lay a long time on the snow with my eyes on the sky. Silence. The raven croaked again. Moments later he slipped away.

It was a period of my life I will not forget. I was so close to the black birds. I could drift on air currents and feel my way by the tilt in my wings, the pull of every feather, aligned in its proper way, every one lying one over the other.

I was the offering lying in the sun. I was the girl who spoke the strange language, half-crow, half-human. At the place where the sky opened up and the pines stood like kings, I made up prayers to bring them in. And just when I gave up, listening to silence, one would come floating up above the pines, so close I could see his under-feathers. A loner, croaking softly, followed by two flying wing to wing like a laughing couple on their way to the dance. I wanted to go with them. I wanted a mate and a tribe, to leave the earth in a rush of wind and share the sky with them.