Lyanda Lynn Haupt - Crow Planet: Essential Wisdom from the Urban Wilderness  

Copyright 2009 by Lyanda Lynn Haupt

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First eBook Edition: July 2009

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The excerpt from Crows is from New and Selected Poems by Mary Oliver, copyright 1992 by Mary Oliver. Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press, Boston.

ISBN: 978-0-316-05339-6

Pilgrim on the Great Bird Continent

Rare Encounters with Ordinary Birds

For my radiant daughter, Claire

a friend to slugs, spiders,
birds, and the wild earth

From a single grain they have multiplied.

When you look in the eyes of one

you have seen them all.

At the edges of highways

they pick at limp things.

They are anything but refined.

Or they fly out over the corn

like pellets of black fire,

like overlords.

Crow is crow, you say.

What else is there to say?

Drive down any road,

take a train or an airplane

across the world, leave

your old life behind,

die and be born again

wherever you arrive

theyll be there first,

glossy and rowdy

and indistinguishable.

The deep muscle of the world.

MARY OLIVER

AN INVOCATION

B y all rights, I should never see the crow who perches almost daily on the electrical wire just beyond my study window. Her story will be told in these pages, and it will become clear, first, that she should be dead and, further, that since she did not die after all, my wire should be the last place that she chooses to land. This young crow is immediately recognizable by her habit of roosting with her belly on the wire rather than perching properly upright, a habit shared by broken-legged crows, who cannot support their full weight or stand on a wire, balancing on just one good foot. I call her Charlotte. (Naming wild animals is problematic, inviting confusion between our relationships with wild and domestic animals, which must be qualitatively different. Still, familiarity breeds naming, and I have been watching this crow every day for months, learning her individual needs, quirks, and habits. Without even thinking about it, I began calling her Charlotte, after the brilliant, self-effacing, fragile-but-brave Charlotte Bront.)

When Charlotte was an injured fledgling, I gently kidnapped her and held her captive in my bathtub for an entire day, force-feeding her cat food and egg, and splinting her bent leg. Having worked as a wild bird rehabilitator, I possess an instinctual, if not always sensible, impulse to tend to injured birds. Her parent crowswho have continued to tend to the fragile Charlotte long after other adult birds have given off caring for their young of the year, and who often perch on my wire along with hershould, given my offense, take her somewhere else. They all recognize me, of that I am sure. A recent study by John Marzluff, corvid researcher at the University of Washington, confirms that crows can recognize individual human faces. Marzluff noticed that crows he had captured and banded would react negatively to his presence, cawing and dive-bombing whenever he approached. His students, who had also banded crows, experienced the same discrimination from crows in the campus study area. To test the idea that crows were recognizing faces in such instances, rather than clothes, gait, or some other identifying characteristic, Marzluff employed masks. A dangerous caveman mask was donned by students who trapped and banded seven campus crows. In the following months, volunteers wearing the caveman mask walked prescribed routes known to be frequented by these crows and their associates. The birds went wild, reading the crow riot act whenever the mask wearers passed. For control purposes, the same volunteers walked their routes wearing a Dick Cheney mask, which had not been worn by the trapper/banders, and the crows left them entirely alone. It appears that crows also learn to dislike individual humans through social learningif birds in a given group appear to loathe a particular person, other crows in the group will take up this aversion for themselves, uttering a vocal rebuke when the person is spotted or avoiding him entirely.

Many people dont need a study to tell them that crows can pick them out of a crowd. Anyone who has chased a crow, come too close to a crows active nest, or tried to approach a crows chick knows that the crows involved, and others watching, will harbor an unforgiving resentment toward the guilty party. For months, and sometimes for years, the perpetrator will be swooped and scolded on sight.

The people whom crows recognize most readily seem to be the ones who come overly near to their young, so actually picking a crow fledgling up and toting it home in broad daylight should be a radically punishable offense in the crow-human societal borderlands. But for some reason, the adult crows who dive-bombed me when I kidnapped Charlotte and again when I returned her to their care never bothered me again. Instead, they cared incessantly for the broken-legged fledgling. They kept her from harm, even though she was weak and broken and by all guesses a hopeless case; they hid her from cats, rats, and raccoons, and they continue to preen and coddle her. While I would expect them to avoid me, they bring Charlotte back to the scene of my crime almost every day and let me see how shes doing. I cannot help thinking that some communication has taken place, that it is somehow clear to the crows that my grievous offense was accomplished in good faith. We all experience such timesdont wewhen our guarded separateness breaks down.

Such a question is timelier now than it has ever been. We live on a changing earth where ecological degradation and global climate change threaten the most foundational biological processes. If the evolution of wild life is to continue in a meaningful way, humans must attain a changed habit of being, one that allows us to recognize and act upon a sense of ourselves as integral to the wider earth community. Fortunately, this will not normally involve the kidnapping of young crows, but it will mean some radical thinking and even more radical doing. In spite of the string of magazine covers announcing the contrary, we all know that ten simple things will not save the earth. There are, rather, three thousand impossible things that all of us must do, and changing our light bulbs, while necessary, is the barest beginning. We are being called upon to act against a prevailing culture, to undermine our own entrenched tendency to accumulate and to consume, and to refuse to define our individuality by our presumed ability to do whatever we want.

It is easy to become cynical about the fact that we as a species appear to have waited until the last possible momentthe moment in which we must radically change our way of living in order to forestall an unprecedented human-caused ecological collapseand even that, for many, seems not quite enough incentive. It is