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.