Romancing The Crows

(I'm on holidays at the moment and I don't have my crow-notes with me. I only have limited access to the internet. I'm pretty sure everything below is accurate but I will add references and links in the first week of October.)


Crows are Cinderellas. They are also Grubby Packages.
In fairy-tales, magic often comes in small, grubby packages. JK Rowling's Philosopher's Stone first appears as one, and the squirming what-you-may-call-its upon which James' Giant Peach grows fat, are delivered in a dirty paper bag. Cinderella is another kind of grubby package, related to all the other at-first-glance-unexceptional, exceptional beauties of lore. We seem to really like this story of something precious wrapped up to look drab.
I think this is due to the idea that we have discovered a secret, and we feel special for knowing about it. Crows are a secret in plain view. If you look at them but you don't really see them, or you see them but you're not really looking, they're just big noisy grabby black birds. If you know about them, they change. They have beautiful feathers. To everyone else: black. To you: shimmering with blue, green and purple. When they fly their wings often end in a kind of curl that looks like the finishing stroke of a calligrapher's pen.
Once you know they mate for life you notice they do always seem to be in pairs. So the saying 'one for sorrow, two for joy' is apt as far as the first two lines go. There are some nice variations on that rhyme, one ending with 'and seven's the devil his own self', although I still like the mysterious 'seven's a secret never to be told'.
Crows aren't unusual for being monogamous. 90% of birds are - but only 3% of mammals, humans being prim members of a scallywag crowd. Corvids have elaborate mating rituals, involving gymnastics and aerobatics that make it easy to understand the longevity of their marriages. The husbands tend to start off each year by presenting their wives with a bit of nest-building material. Ravens add to their nests each year and some end up with six-foot edifices, so it's nice to know there are animals besides us who would sacrifice their Sundays to trundling around DIY shops.
Funnily enough the most elaborate householders of all the birds aren't on for relationships at all. I think Laurence Llewellyn-Bowen is happily married but if you can imagine him, crossed with a bird, crossed with say, Hugh Grant's capacity for fidelity, you've got a bower bird.
Crow love probably isn't hugely different from our own. The same neurochemicals are at work, although it seems that birds are more likely to stay in the 'romantic' stage of love than we are. I'm not using 'romantic' as a euphemism for lust, by the way; neuroscientists have identified 'lust', 'romantic love' and 'longterm attachment'. Romantic attachment is the bit where you think about someone all the time and you are convinced it is because you are soul-mates, and of course it is, it's just that it's also because their proximity causes your brain to give itself lots of dopamine, which is similar to but not quite as harmful as cocaine. In people this eases off and the dominant neurotransmitter in longterm attachment is oxytocin, which also gives you the good warm feeling you get from family and friends. Birds have oxytocin too, but it seems that they are affected by dopamine more, or for longer, than we are.
I always thought that it was just as well for romantics, song-writers and film-makers that Romeo and Juliet died because they didn't strike me as a couple who would make it. Romeo was a wee bit stupid and I think after the passion died down Juliet would have seen that and spent most of her life sniping at him. And he would probably have had a fling with Rosalind. If they had been crows though, they would have been fine. Which raises an interesting point: considering how muddled-up romantic love can make you (neurochemically it can be similar to obsessive-compulsive disorder) - shouldn't we be glad that eventually our heads clear and we can actually see who we are with? To go back to Shakespeare, dopamine is a bit like Puck's potion, and if it overwhelmed us all our lives, as some people would like, any of us could end up like Titania, blissfully in love with a donkey-head.
I hope crows aren't quite so steeped in emotion as that. But tipping a little bit towards the fairytale idea of romance fits a bird ostensibly drab but really fairly shimmery - an invisible, ubiquitous, Cinderella.

(don't) Stone The Crows!

'I love rooks,' said the Wart. 'It is funny, but I think they are my favourite birds.'
'Why?' asked Archimedes.
'Well, I like them. I like their sauce.'

(The Once and Future King by T.H. White)

I like crows too. They can be sombre and dignified - plodding along the roadside dressed in undertaker black, with their hands behind their backs, they could be searching the ground for worms or for specimens for their fossil collection. They can also be 'larky mobs' as Wart says; in Tramore one stormy summer evening, we watched a group of them surfing on the air currents at the shore.

I'm working on a project about crows, which I hope will result in a small cafe-type exhibition, and maybe some cards and other stationery. I am going to keep this blog updated with my progress.

This morning I went to the Phoenix Park to take some photos. Crows are extremely wary, something I never noticed about them until I tried to study them. As soon as you show interest in a crow, it flaps away. However, they can be tamed to some degree. They are very good at recognising people, which means you can build up a relationship with individuals over time. My plan is to find one small group and offer them food fairly regularly.

It was surprisingly hard to find any crows, and at first I only saw jackdaws. I eventually came across three hooded crows. When I approached them, they flew over to a hawthorn tree and watched me from there. I threw some peanuts on the ground but, as I already knew by that stage, they weren't going to come near me to eat them. One crow flew over behind me and the other got a higher look-out from a nearby goal post. Why not draw pigeons? They'll toddle right up to anyone, just on the off-chance that you might drop a crumb.

To make it absolutely clear that the food came from me, I put a piece of white paper on the ground, secured it with some mown grass, and placed a few peanuts in the centre. It felt a bit like making an offering. Do you think people used altars to attract the attention of gods - sort of a 'Hey! Here's your food!' - or to make it really clear what was being offered, and what wasn't - i.e. 'Here's yours, now leave mine alone'?

The three crows formed a large triangle with the paper at the centre. They flew low around it, and passed low over it a few times. Obviously satisfied with their findings, they closed in and ate the peanuts. They still scarpered when I walked back over to collect the paper.

I'll be checking back at the tree in the next few days. Although I was hoping to find black crows, I'm happy to have found these three. 'Hooded crow' is such a satisfyingly dramatic name, fit for a villain. The fact that there are three of them resonates with the traditional ballad, 'The Three Ravens', which I especially like at the moment because it in turn reminds me of a spine-tingling Wild Beasts' song, 'His Grinning Skull'

I went to the tea rooms next, partly for tea and partly because I know jackdaws tend to loiter there. When I got there, there was one single bird, who flew off when I photographed him. I rolled a peanut on the ground beside the table and he reappeared. Jackdaws seem to respond more quickly to bribery with food, but it could have been that I was sitting down, and there was a fence to perch on and hide behind. Whatever the reason, within five or ten minutes and with an outlay of about ten peanuts, I had five jackdaws staring meaningfully at my bag. I put one peanut on the table to see if any of them would take it. It was there maybe three minutes when one bird, from his perch on the fence, swooped over the table, rested for half a second, and grabbed it before continuing on to the ground on the far side of the table.

I got a good few photos of greedy-looking birds. Jackdaws, like other corvids, have beautiful iridescent colours in their plumage. They look a bit like they have shawls draped over their shoulders, and if you think of them in this way, the darker fringe around the end of the shawl gleams a dark metallic blue. The grey feathers above this can have a soft bloom of purple. These colours don't come from pigments, they are caused by the refraction of light; corvid feathers are structured in such a way that they act a bit like prisms. This is the same reason a kingfisher looks blue.

If you are going to invite birds over to your table you should be prepared to clean up the resulting poo. Which was, in the case of today's jackdaws, an intriguing lilac colour.