PAGE 12
CROWS IN OUR HANDS
ingly to her cage at night, but during the day she had full run of
the workshop adjacent to our house.
The most impressive single thing about baby Crow was
her big mouth, which always seemed to be open and from which
came a very loud and insistent squawking, which ceased only
when her belly was full. Crow had a big voice for such a tiny
creature.
I fed her with chopsticks. Tricia preferred to feed her by
hand, pushing the food down her throat as a mother crow would.
It seemed to make little difference to the crow. She was more
than eager to get the food either way. We fed her the most
nutritious things we could think of, it was hard to find anything
she didn't like, but nothing satisfied her for more than an hour.
Her caw was unignorable; we could hear it throughout the house.
We fed her in shifts. It was demanding, but never a chore. It was
a delight. It was fun and it was impossible not to smile the whole
time. She was almost always hungry if it had been more than an
hour since we'd fed her, and she did not hesitate to let us know.
She was as demanding of our time as any infant — but we
didn't' have to change diapers, only the box, frequently. Baby
crows poop a lot and very often. However, unlike human babies,
crows are silent from dusk to dawn.
Mercifully.
BY JOHN PAUL BARRETT
Sometimes when I'm washing the dishes I seem to
perceive a dark flash at the edge of my sight It's always on the
right side, just beyond the window with a view of my workshop.
It's as though a crow was flying around in there, but there isn't.
Not anymore.
This sensation of a shadowy flutter (which I know comes
from within, and is only a visual trick of my memory) neverthe
less often brings forth a small inward sigh, a faint smile maybe.
There HAVE been crows flying around out there, lots of them.
Before the first crow's arrival neither Tricia nor I had
paid much attention to crows. Our lives had included many
animals — but no crows.
I saw and heard about crows when I was growing up in
Texas. I knew they were considered crop-eating pests by most
farmers, and were destroyed as vermin by the thousands, by a
wide variety of methods. I always liked them, perhaps fortheir
outlaw reputation.
We live a few miles outside Astoria, Oregon, a fairly
remote little town up by the mouth of the Columbia River.
(I've heard it said this isn't the end of the earth, but you can
see it from here; I think they’re talking about Washington State,
just across the river.)
I was just returning home from a two-hour trip south to
Cannon Beach, where I had sold — and been paid for — about
$350 worth of my hand-bound books.* I could hardly wait to
show Tricia the checks. It’s a great feeling to sell one’s own
books. My head was full of happy thoughts when I pulled into our
driveway. The money had long been earmarked, but at least I
could feel it pass through my hands momentarily. I was smiling.
It was a beautiful day.
But Tricia didn't look happy. I can always tell. It looked
bad She was sitting on the bench by the little fishpond-fountain
in our front yard. And something was definitely wrong.
“Hi, Babe," I said, hoping my cheery tone might lift her
spirits. Not a chance. It was bad.
I gave her a hug. “What's wrong?"
“Phone bill." Her voice was very soft and even. It was
bad.
“Well, how bad can it be?”
“Go look at it," she said flatly. This was really serious.
I steeled myself. I took some comfort in the checks in
my pocket, my “armor" against just such a thing. I was sure I
would be able to make everything okay again.
The phone bill was $326 and neither of us had called
anyone.
However, I had recently acquired my first computer and
had just got hooked up to the internet. I didn't know it yet, but
the fly-by-night thief who sold the computer to me and installed
it had also hooked me up to a fly-by-night thief (now defunct)
internet service provider (ISP). The first thief had told me the
per-minute charge for my online use would be 3 to 6 cents. It
turned out to be 12 to 18 cents per minute instead. I’d been
expecting a large phone bill of about $125, since I'd spent lots
of time on the net at first, but this bill nearly buckled me at the
knees.
I took a deep breath. Quick math. $326 was less than
$350. The daydreams I'd enjoyed on the drive home were, after
all, only daydreams. I rushed over to Tricia. I had the power to
make this awful bummer go away for her. A run of medical
problems and pain had given her far more than enough to deal
with. She didn’t need this.
“Babe, it’s okay,” I said, drawing the checks from my
shirt pocket and wagging them out for her to see. “I’ll deposit
these and I’ll just pay it. Problem solved.” (I did not allude to any
of the other things for which the money had been allocated.)
I thought I saw a change in her demeanor. The problem
was solved. We’d figure out what happened later. I was certain
there’d been some mistake, that the bill had io be in error, but it
was covered. Just a piece of bad luck and a lucky streak quirkily
occurring simultaneously to cancel one another out.
I sat down next to her. “Okay?” (I hate it when she’s
bummed out).
She gave me a faint smile. I breathed a sigh It was
going to be all right.
“Hey, you guys. Look what I’ve got!"
It was Mike, our neighbor. He was carrying a cardboard
box.
Since Tricia works at an animal clinic it's not unusual for
people to bring pets to her for advice, but when Mike opened the
MARITIME MUSEUM
VISIT THE MUSEUM SHOP
IN ASTORIA, OREGON
PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBERT LANGHAM III
box we were both surprised to see what looked at first to me like
a fuzzy, scrawny little gray-black chicken.
“It’s a crow,” Mike said, “Must’ve fallen outta the nest.
The cat was about to get him. I figured you guys would know
what to do with him.”
Mike had been doing some yardwork for a friend in a
nearby town when he found them. There had been two, and this
was the survivor.
We took the little creature inside and carefully looked
him over. He was so tiny, so vulnerable-looking. We wondered
if we’d be able to feed him, and what little crows needed to eat.
We’d fed the young pigeons bread softened in water, and
scrambled eggs, so we tried that. The crow accepted it eagerly,
simultaneously emitting the most endearing “gobbling baby"
noise we’d ever heard. It was just the first of many pleasant
sounds this crow would make for us.
We both fell in love with the little crow almost instantly,
and he began to occupy a significant portion of our lives, our
conversations with each other and our friends.
It was a lot like having a human child.
At the beginning Tricia and I agreed the crow would be a
wild creature; that when it could fly well enough to evade danger
and fend for itself outside, we would have to give it the option
of freedom The pigeons we’d raised and released had all come
back to us for months before finally making the transition to
completely wild — that is, with no human contact at all. There
fore, we felt we had some reason to expect the crow might
choose to hang out around us (and the food source) for a while
longer We didn't know what to expect, but we knew we had no
intention of making a pet out of a wild creature. We did not want
a pet, trained or tame crow. We just wanted to give this little
rook the chance to live a crow’s life, and to enjoy its company
for awhile.
One night in bed we were discussing the ethics of what
we were doing with the crow. Was it illegal to keep a crow? We
decided that technically it probably was illegal, but we weren't
keeping the crow as a pet, and were raising and releasing it into
the wild
Oregon has a crow hunting season which begins in
October. No bag limit. How could it be illegal to save a crow’s
life, but legal to kill it? We decided our moral imperative took
precedence over the law in this particular case.
“But maybe we re interfering with the crow’s destiny?
Maybe it wasn’t supposed to survive,” I said.
Tricia told me it was surely and obviously the crow’s
destiny to come to us, as well as ours to receive it, and how
could I disagree with such irrefutable logic? (Tricia has this way
of cutting to the essence and making perfect sense of almost
any concept in one brief sentence and making me feel like a
complete idiot.)
We called the crow — all of them — “Crow." No human
names for a wild bird.
For a variety of reasons, some of which I’ll explain later,
we were convinced the first crow was female and began to refer
to her as such.
The little thing could barely stand, but she made it quite
clear what she wanted: food. She seemed to be half-beak, a tiny
rather scrawny-looking body, a baby dinosaur with this huge,
open mouth, squawking loudly. We fed her, and fed her, and...
etc. She was insatiable, and it only took her a few minutes to run
whatever she’d just eaten through her little system and pump it
out with great regularity: a little poop machine. We didn’t mind.
We put her in a box of cedar chips, with a towel, a bowl
of water, and another bowl into which we mindlessly placed
everything we could think of a little hungry crow might possibly
want to eat But it didn’t take long for us to realize that little
crows require hand-feeding. There could be no doubt what was
wanted and where it was supposed to go. She ate almost every
thing we gave her, even a couple of fat, wriggly worms once,
just once. She eventually seemed to prefer things such as the
most expensive canned dog food available.
Although Crow was destined to be free, at this point she
was still a baby, and needed to be fed and protected. We had a
good cage, which I’d designed and built for the pigeons several
years before. It was made of 2x2s and chickenwire, about 2%
feet wide by about 2 feet tall and deep; plenty of room for a little
crow.
We placed her on the perch, but she wasn’t quite ready
for perching, so we lowered the perch to within her reach, and let
her just sit in the cedar at the bottom. Within a few days she had
learned how to gain and hold the perch and that's where she
stayed most of the time . for the next few days anyway; it soon
became clear that the crow did not like being confined in the
cage all the time. She would beat her wings against the sides,
demanding freedom, refusing to be confined, until we opened
the door. After that the crow was into everything She went will
The crow thrived and was soon able to fly about at will.
We had no idea how to determine the sex of a crow, but we had
a strong feeling this one was female. I can’t quite explain this
rationally, but it was “confirmed” by an independent source of
unquestionable purity: my then 3 year old niece, Lara. When I
asked her if she thought the crow was a boy or a girl, she said
without hesitation and in a slightly dismissive tone, “It's a girl,"
as though it should be obvious to everyone.
We figured, given the factors of feminine intuition and
the innocence of a child, there was much better than an even
chance that little Lara was probably right on the money. All
of which explains why, though I can offer neither concrete nor
logical reason for it, I refer to the first crow as “she.” There was
just something feminine about her. I learned later that there is
really no certain method by which crows may be sexed in the
wild, and in captivity mostly by comparison.
According to internationally recognized corvid expert
Dr. Kevin J. McGowan, Associate Curator of Birds & Mammals
at Cornell University, male crows are slightly longer than
females. In answer to my question: “Is there a way to easily
determine the sex of a mature crow?" he said: “No, not easily.
Males tend to be larger than females, but there is much overlap
in all the characters. In my population tail length is the highest
loader into the discriminant function I have developed (100%
accuracy, at least so far). I cannot, however, distinguish the
sexes by tail length in the field Bill length is the second biggest
difference, and I can accurately distinguish some crows using
this. The biggest males and the smallest females can be picked
out, but the middle bunch (most of the population?) are not
distinguishable.”
Sounds like a Professor, doesn’t he?
I also asked: “What is your best estimate of a crow’s
normal life span?”
His reply: “Hard to say exactly, but the oldest known wild
crow was just shy of 30 years old. Most probably live 10 years.
I’ve still got 6 year old crows at home with their parents, so they
must live a good long time."
I then inquired about books on crows, and was a little
surprised at his comment: “...there is little to no good inform
ation available on crows in books at this moment."
Hmmm.
•John Paul Barrett is the author of Sea Stones I & II
(Of Dolphins & Dead Sailors; Sungods & Sundogs) and has
just published his newest book, Crows in Our Hands, from which
this has been excerpted. He is the founder of Gaff Press, which
publishes his books. As with every other book of his, he has
personally prepared Crows for publication through every process
of desktop publishing The book is for sale at $20 at local coastal
bookstores.
Chip y
Imp&vt&cbBeer cnx/Tccp
#1 orv 2 ncL Street
Ait&ricu* 325-OO33