I love crows and their corvid cousins, ravens.
They are not cute. They grow plentiful around battlefields and garbage dumps. If I fell in the woods or fields, they would eat me and spread the word “Here we feast!” They are omnivorous and will gobble down baby birds.
Beautiful and smart, the brightest of the birds, they are tool users and capable of recognizing individual human faces, capable of mourning and probably able to reflect upon their lives. Think of that. More than anything, it is their mystery I love, their presence. They possess gravity and seriousness as if they sheltered an inner life. I think the “as if” in that sentence is too constricting.
They live in extended family groups and go secret and quiet around their big nests. The whole family helps feed the young. One usually keeps to a tree as a guard when the others are on the ground.
The families will walk, stiff legged, in horizontal rows gleaning cut fields for food and individuals will hop at times from stone to stone on walls to search crevices.
They often play in gales, and once I saw a pair engaged in what looked like tag, tumbling and sweeping, turning upside down, calling back and forth, overtaking and falling behind. I felt joyous watching them. I’d like to think they did too.
Out late one night with a sick dog, I heard crows passing over us, calling. Stopping, going quiet, both of us raised our heads and listened until their voices faded out.
This past winter, two ravens have visited our trees several times and dropped down for feed. Each time we see them, my wife and I gasp, call to the other to come see, come see. Tell me they are not emissaries.
Standing at the very edge of the unfenced Grand Canyon, miles away from tourist sites, my eyes fixed on the undulations and chasms of miles and miles, a single silent raven rose directly in front of me riding a thermal, only 7 or 8 feet away, and for a few seconds, kept himself even with me, looking over, making eye contact, and then he turned into the wind and rode it well out above that abyss. When he (?) disappeared, I felt restful inside and perhaps understood, briefly, how such a visitation might become a catalyst for seeing the wild world as crowded with omens and gods.
