Crow call
I love crows. They are attractive, clever, amusing, witty, caring, adventurous, and full of engaging play, flexible, with a thirst for knowledge, always testing out new things. They have close knit families that are exactly like Indian families where the father in law’s second cousin is considered as close a relative as the brother’s wife’s uncle’s mother. They love their children passionately — not just their own but all the young. I am not an envious person but if it has been one person who has made me jealous, it is a man in Delhi who feeds crows everyday. They sit on his shoulders and lap and circle round him and, long after they know the food has finished, they stay to chat.
My house is full of crows. They imitate other birds and animals and we keep running out when we hear a strange bird cry to see the new species only to find it is a crow making fun of us.
My son’s room overlooks the main family area of the crows. He interacts with them in strange ways. One day when he came out of his room, several crows circled overhead and one of them dropped its faeces on him. He thought it was a mistake — wrong place, wrong time. But for the next few days, every time he came out, the same thing would happen. He realised it had become a game. The fifth time it happened, he threw a stone loosely in the direction of the gamesters. It never happened again. Now he feeds them almonds and keeps a water bowl nearby.
While working in my office a few days ago, we all heard a clamour of crows. It was so loud that everyone came out to see what the matter was. A baby crow was stuck in the small bamboo fence that circles the vegetable garden. I took it out of the fence and left it on the ground. After a couple of minutes, the mother flew down and helped the baby fly up again to the nest. A few days later, I found a young crow with a crippled foot. Within minutes, the tribe was screaming for my head, ready to attack. I held the crow high up to the tribal elders to take if they wanted. They flew by and realised the crow was deformed and could not fly. Immediately they quietened down.
Everybody who has taken the trouble to study crows sees magic every day. The lady I stay with in Mumbai feeds crows with glucose biscuits everyday through her flat window. She has no regular timings and passes by the window all the time. But, if she takes a biscuit out of its tin on the far side of the room and then passes by the window, six crows land on the ledge and take it from her hands.
If intelligence can be measured by innovativeness or problem-solving, behaviour, memory, quick learning, imagination, the anticipation of possible future events and toolmaking, the crow is as advanced as the ape and very close to man.
Crows demonstrate a tool-making and tool using capability comparable to Palaeolithic man. The Clarke’s nutcracker, a type of North American crow, collects up to 30,000 pine seeds over three weeks in November, then carefully buries them for safe keeping across over an area of 200 square miles. Over the next eight months, it succeeds in retrieving over 90 percent of them, even when they are covered in feet of snow. Crows use memories to plan ahead. Those with past experience of pilfering food caches collected by other birds use this knowledge to protect their own caches. Meanwhile, “innocent” birds did not exhibit the same cunning. This also shows that the crow knows what another is thinking — an intellectual ability that only humans presume they have.
In Japan, crows wait patiently for cars to halt at a red light. As soon as the light changes the birds hop in front of the cars and place walnuts, which they picked from the adjoining trees, on the road. After the lights turn green again, the birds fly away and vehicles drive over the nuts, cracking them open. When the light turns to red again the crows pick up their meal. If the cars miss the nuts, the birds sometimes hop back and put them somewhere else on the road. The crows in Japan have been cracking nuts this way since about 1990. They have since been seen doing it in California.
Crows have a sense of humour and play. Watch them playing catch with twigs, sliding down rocks on their backs, provoking much larger animals and sometimes humans by antics such as tail-pulling and dive-bombs. A researcher gives an incident about a man who often shot at them with little success (crows have an elaborate team protection system). So, one day he came up with the plan to scare them by placing large mirrors on the ground, so that the crows would see their reflection, and thus be scared by their image. The curious birds checked out the mirror. Then one by one, made a pass over them dropping excretions covering the entire surfaces. They proceeded to go to the near-by roost and crowed like mad, seemingly in mockery.
Norse mythology depicted the wisest of the gods as having two ravens, one sitting on each shoulder. These ravens’ names were Hugin, meaning Thought, and Munin, meaning Memory. They would fly each day throughout the world and tell Odin of everything that men do. In Native American mythology that Crow was considered a separate human being, an adviser and the keeper of the Law.
Only very ignorant people dislike crows and want to hurt them. This bird is meant to be befriended, learnt from and enjoyed. People have been told they are vermin or dirty because they eat everything. You need to start talking about them, their social lives, that they are more like people. You need to point out that crows are not evil. That they are very shy of people but will make friends if you give them half a chance.
How can you make friend with crows? Feed them in a particular place at the same time, don’t look at them, don’t throw things. Once they associate you with kindness they will follow you around and bring you wisdom and luck.
gandhim@nic.in
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