Crow wears a band of silver

W&N watercolour on Amedeo 200gsm 

With thanks to John from "Midmarsh Jottings" for the use of his beautiful photograph. 

Crow wears a band of silver on his ankle, holds it out to watch it glint in the sun like cool creek water. It is noon. He is the only one out. All others have sought shelter under the canopy of live oak, the leaves beneath the chaparral, Crow the only one among them unafraid to cast a shadow. He is a black body to absorb the sun’s heat, and yet unheated.

He's silver studded with stones, turquoise to match the cloudless sky. He stretches out his leg again, watches sky and water glisten on his ankle.

 He flexes claws and brings his foot beneath him again, stretches out his other, naked foot for balance. His feet are beautiful, furrowed skin like charcoal scales, sharp and onyx claws. As flexible as hands, good for grasping new-hatched thrushes or pulling gate hooks from eye bolts, and sleek. The humans see crow’s feet in the faces of their most seasoned elders, the scars of a learned life spent laughing. Crows’ feet, the mark of craft and cunning, crow’s feet a sense of humor made skin and sinew.

 He swings down on the branch, holds himself upside down and swinging, the silver falling down around his upper leg as he barks in delight. Sky below his feet and swaying, silver pools above his head. The world so beautifully inverted, he cannot keep from laughing. This is beauty: the world turned upside down. You can keep your lithe ingénues, your florid sunsets and cloying sentiment: beauty is all that cleft in two, a cunning spark suspended by crow’s feet, a fall from a deadly height and then the swoop of wing, the thickening of the air beneath splayed feathers. Seeing air rising within air and climbing on it, sun glinting blue-black as night sky off your feathers? Night colours blazing brilliant from your feathers? Beauty is day turned to night and night to day.

Heart beats furious beneath that dark breast, mind burns in onyx eyes. Beauty a glint of laughter in a bottomless dark eye. He barks again.

Sun above live oak, a thousand suns refracted on the earth below. Grasshoppers leap into the air clicking. Wild oats, tawn in the summer heat, lean eastward with the breeze, and a wall of fog on the ocean twenty miles west.

All this beauty: all this.

Story from "Coyote Crossing"

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Domino, the Pied Crow

A photograph of Domino on a textured back-ground. 

Location : Tarlton, Gauteng, South Africa. 

Camera : Fuji FinePix 2800Zoom 

This is Domino, a Pied Crow (Corvus albus) I was blessed enough to have in my life for a few years. I found him on the ground under a huge Blue gum tree, newly fledged and starving and weak. As it was impossible to return him to his nest, I took him home, prepared a basket with a hot water bottle, gave him a good feeding and waited. It wasn’t long before he was asking for food every hour and within a week he was happily hopping around the house, investigating an exciting new world. 

Crows are renowned for their curiosity, and Domino was no exception. Nothing escaped his watchful eye and his greatest pleasure was ‘stealing’ spoons and anything shiny and then hiding it all over the garden. 

We spent two beautiful years together until, one morning, I found his remains up in the tree in which he slept – he had fallen prey to a Serval (African Wild Cat Caracal serval), one I had been having trouble with for several weeks, catching my chickens at night. My heart was broken, but I am thankful that I have many wonderful memories from our time spent together. 

The Pied Crow is a Southern African bird that belongs to the Corvidae bird family group which includes birds such as Crows, Ravens and is absent only from areas of Somalia and Ethiopia, as well as much of eastern Botswana, the Northern Cape and western Namibia. It has become prolific, as its numbers and range are expanding especially in the Karoo. It often occupies savanna woodland and bushy shrub land, but it is becoming more and more common in farmland, urban and suburban areas.

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The Way of the Crow

"If men had wings and bore black feathers, few of them would be clever enough to be crows." 

-Rev. Henry Ward Beecher mid 1800's 

Coco on a rock in my garden - watercolour on Visual 200gsm - Maree©

There is little wonder that crows are very often the subjects of legends, folktales, and storytelling traditions around the world, all of which is very deep-seated and arising from myth and folklore thousands of years old. Anyone that has ever spent time with a crow will know how absurd these myths are and that Crows are no more 'evil' or 'dark' as depicted in these legends than a canary in a cage. 

 I make those remarks in light of the life I shared with Coco, a Black Crow (Corvus capensis), over a span of twenty years. She was keen of sight and hearing, and her other senses were no less acute. As was her sense of humour! She loved to mimic men laughing, producing the exact deep resonance of the male voice. She would also have a conversation with herself, changing voices as she went along, which she reproduced from the garden staff talking to one another. 

Another favourite of hers was hooting like a car, getting everyone in the household to go outside to see who has arrived. She would also call someone by their name at the top of her voice, also getting that person rushing outside to see who was calling, then uttering a long, low laugh, as if enjoying the havoc she's causing. 

She loved to play tag, pretending to peck your foot, getting you to chase her around the garden. And of course, one 'myth' that is absolutely true, is a Crow's love for shiny stuff. No tea tray was safe unattended outside, as all the spoons would disappear and any jewellery lying around the house was at great risk! 

A valuable lesson we could all learn from a crow is that they never "stuff" themselves with food. She would only eat until she was satisfied and then take the rest and hide it all over the garden, ready to be picked up at a later stage. 

 It is this kind of sensitivity that makes crows and other corvids legendary birds. 

Coco passed away at the age of 27 after a stroke and I can honestly say no other animal enriched my life like she did. 

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Crows

Coco

I had a Black Crow as a pet for 20 years (Coco was 27 when she died after having a stroke) and I absolutely love these endearing and highly intelligent birds.

Something we can all learn from animals - when I used to take food out to feed her (she ate almost anything under the sun, with a staple diet of minced meat), she would eat her fill, but carry on taking food from me after she was satisfied and dig holes and hide it, to be searched for and dug up later when she was hungry again.

She absolutely loved gardening with me, following in my tracks and plucking out seedlings as fast as I could plant them, leaving a trail behind her, to be discovered by me as I returned to water them all. Her favourite was finding bugs as I dug up the garden, especially cutworms.

She had built up quite a vocabulary and to friends' and visitors' delight, they would be greeted at the front gate with a very convincing Queens English "Hello. Come in" followed by bellowing laughter. She provided hours of entertainment and it was a great loss for me when she died.

The Cape Crow or Black Crow (Corvus capensis) is slightly larger (48-50 cm in length) than the Carrion Crow and is completely black with a slight gloss of purple in the feathers. It has proportionately longer legs, wings and tail too and has a much longer, slimmer bill that seems to be designed for probing into the ground for invertebrates. The head feathers have a coppery-purple gloss and the throat feathers are quite long and fluffed out in some calls and displays.

A group of crows is called a "murder," though this term usually appears in poetry or similar literature rather than ordinary usage.


"Coco" my Black Crow - She used to take this stance and make a ka-ka-ka sound, like the horn of a car. It must be a natural sound of theirs, because I've heard crows in the wild doing the same thing.


Cape Crow (Black Crow)


Common Ravens on the grounds of the Tower of London


Crow in flight


Hooded Crow


Daurian Jackdaws