Crow’s Company

And some poems

The Company of Crows by Marilyn Singer

This work for young children is an interesting one. A more modern book about crows would probably try to make the crows themselves not just the focus, but main characters. You’d have crows who are, like Peppa Pig’s family, like Bluey’s family, meant to be archetypes. Mummy Crow does this, while Daddy Crow does this. And Baby Crow (she’s just like you, reader, in a way!) is more like this.

You can imagine, I hope, how much of a disaster this could have been. But this book is not like that. Instead, it’s about people. A rarity in animal-themed media, these days. All the better for it.

Think of the people, living lives more like yours than the lives the crows live, and what they might think of corvids. Do they see them as omens, good and ill? Are they, for the poet, a sign of something? A vision?

The old man in the street. He may have grown up eating strange bird pies as a child. You never know. And he may have this or that intriguing superstition, crow-related. If he sees one crow alone, he must address it with ‘Evening, commander,’ even if it is in the morning and the sun is first putting its head through clouded curtains.

Think of the clever man who wants to learn what birds can think and do. He uses crows in his experiments; he has them learn to pick things up with tools, using their beaks. That man believes that crows are cleverer than most people know. He thinks they are fine birds, and a very good study.

And think of the farmer. The farmers must consider every animal they see. One upon a time, children, the leader of a country far away decided that sparrows destroyed crops; that they ate the seeds. And so he did not make a compact with the sparrows. No, he decided to wipe them out. As the sparrows were killed in large numbers, something else happened. Can you guess what happened, boys and girls?

The numbers of the things once eaten by the sparrows grew. It’s true. And the sparrows did not just eat the rice and the seeds. They ate bugs and parasites, the destroyers of crops in their own right. And as more and more sparrows were killed, these insects found there were fewer and fewer threats to what they were doing.

And they, the real eaters of crops, bred and bred and bred and, newly out of control because no one could eat them, they ate crop after crop, bushel after bushel, hectare after hectare. They ruined a country and made many people unhappy.

Is this not a lesson in finding unhappy consequences you did not at first expect?

See the farmer now. He knows his crows. He knows that they are harmless enough; what they eat they repay in other ways. And the farmer is up early even in the springtime. He is not woken by the calls of the crows; or the way they sometimes tap, tap, tap on the windows in houses, certain that their own reflection is another crow who wants to fight them, another crow who must be vanquished, pecked at, seen off.

But there are other people in this world of ours, boys and girls, and some of them do not like crows. They do not like their harsh, brutal calls. Some of us grew up not enjoying the calls of the crows, especially in their breeding season, when they wanted to attract mates and scare off rivals. And some of us who grew up in houses whose windows, in the springtime, in the summer, had an almost mirrored effect on their outsides. And we were irritated, and sometimes unhappily surprised, by the violence with which the crows used to strike those windows when they thought their own reflections were other crows in need of attack and warning off.

It’s true that, for all their interest, some people just don’t like crows. They see their colours, children, as dark and morbid. Like a plague doctor. Like a professional mourner. Like many unpleasant things. They have some grim associations. In films, when a prison or an island is grey and wind-lashed, or a cemetery is lonely and cruel and final, the editors may play the sound of a crow’s call over the pictures. Just to give an atmosphere of desolation and misery, or menace.

These things do happen, children. How things are made to sound to us matters a lot. Sound makes us like what we like and dislike what we don’t like. And how things look can have the same effect. As the coal-black crow knows to its own cost.

I, the writer of this review, am possibly more crow-negative than I am crow-positive. They’re interesting creatures, in the way that all birds are interesting. They have fascinating individual behaviours. Crows are more intelligent than they are given credit for. But so are many animals. And crows are loud, and annoying, and their behaviour in the springtime is not to my taste. They once spent their time, in the springs and summers of my own childhood, tapping away on the first floor windows of the house I grew up in. I may not forgive them for that. These memories are formed young.