Tag: birds

Time and Flight

Hello, Holidailies!

I know more folks do Holidailies than Horrordailies, so perhaps I should just give a little run-down of 2023 so far. This way we can get it over with and move on to better things because friends, unfortunately, this year has been hands-down the most painful year of my life. To review:

In February I witnessed gun violence.

In March Inigo and I said goodbye.

Also in March I was nearly killed by a drunk driver.

In April I popped three discs in my back and was incapacitated to the point of needing a walker, a steroid shot in my back, and a couple of months of physical therapy.

In October I had a massive heart attack, which meant I had to cancel two trips in November, one to England and one to Finland.

And just this week they cut 21 positions at my workplace.

The one amazingly bright moment in the year was a trip to Warsaw with a friend, where I met more friends and got to see my favorite band, Poets of the Fall. The trips to England and Finland would have been more of that friendly and musical goodness, but yeah, no, not just a few weeks out from a heart attack.

But other than that, 2023 was horrible, so I’m ready to kick it right on out the door. Thank goodness for friends and birds.

Speaking of birds, I have a rocking Birdie Balcony Café going on. Birds come and go all day long, from dawn past sundown. I can never seem to get decent photos of them because they get spooked if they see me, but here are a few Mourning Doves, AKA MoDos. They didn’t have a reservation for the table, but okay. Things here are first come, first served.

Three doves on a table.
Three little birds: Every little thing gonna be all right.

There are usually anywhere from three to eight MoDos sitting on the windowsill, table, and balcony railing when I wake up in the morning. They eat with a flock of Sparrows that come for breakfast, then everyone flies off until about 10:30.

And lemme tellya, they all stalk me.

When I went out on the balcony this morning, Sparrows, Northern Mockingbirds and a male Northern Cardinal were in the tree outside my living room window waiting for their mid-morning feeding. They usually come back again around 2:00, bringing the MoDos with them. The Sparrows and MoDos come back around 4:30, and then the MoDos come alone around 6:00, after it gets dark, for dinner. Sometimes the Cardinal also comes by during twilight.

They’re ravenous, too. I just bought a five-pound bag of birdseed last week and it’s almost half gone. Same for a 1.5-pound bag of peanuts. I put crushed, shelled peanuts on the windowsill and the Mockingbirds know that if the Peanut Lady isn’t in her living room, they can tap on the metal part of the windowsill and she’ll appear. While they’re simultaneously eyeballing me and chowing down, I throw whole peanuts in the shell down for the Blue Jays, Crows, and squirrels. It’s like a second job for me, heh.

They keep me company, and for that I’m grateful. I have a huge apartment and it’s kind of cavernous without Inigo. I miss the little guy tremendously, but he has left his imprint on this place and although he has moved on to other things, occasionally I do still feel his presence here. He comes to visit at random times, just to say hello and leave a warm spot on his little bed in his house, which is still in the living room with the door open. When I’m super low, he comes to comfort, landing on my back and spreading his wings over my shoulders in a hug. Sometimes Jimmy the Green Cheek comes with him and lands on my shoulder. Sounds crazy, but I don’t care.

I remember thinking last Christmas that it would be Inigo’s last one. Now this is really strange, but last night the thought came into my head that had he not hurt his leg and needed release from pain, that the day of my heart attack would have been his own day to pass. I don’t know where that thought came from.

Have you ever seen the German TV series Dark? It involves time travel, but not in a hokey Back the the Future kind of way. (You know, because it’s dark.) It’s all about the nature of time, destiny, whether actions are free will or ordained to happen because there is more than one reality and you take the same actions over and over again in each one. There might be minor differences between timelines and realities, but your general story arc produces the same results.

Maybe watching that series had something to do with my thoughts. I don’t really understand quantum physics, time-bending, or things like Schrödinger’s cat, but if there is more than one reality, maybe that heart attack was the pain of Inigo’s passing in an another one. Heaven knows when we said goodbye in this reality, it physically felt like a kick in the chest.

Really, they ought to drum me out of science writing, with theories like that. But who knows? I don’t believe in any gods, but plenty of prominent scientists talk about things like time, other universes, and other realities. If there is science to the concept of multiple realities, I’m all for it.

Henlo, Hooded Crow

Ya know, I just like Łukasz Rawa’s photography. Go check out his page on Unsplash. He has some truly stunning images of birds, like this one.

A black and gray Hooded Crow.
Image: Łukasz Rawa

I saw a few Hooded Crows like this at Powązki Cemetery in Warsaw last month, but I couldn’t get close enough to them to get a good picture, especially on my phone. It was the first time I saw one of these in person, in the wild. We don’t have these in North America, so it was special for me to see them hopping around and nibbling at random bits on the graves as though they were doing some maintenance cleaning. Like all Corvids, they have extraordinarily intelligent eyes, and there was a moment when I felt weighed and measured, but ultimately they had better things to do than worry about tourists and they went about their business.

I’ll be in England and Finland next month. I wonder what birds I’ll have the joy to see there. In the meantime, I’ll learn more about these gorgeous creatures.

Crows Know

I’ve always been a fan of Crows. Their dark beauty, their intelligence, and their sociability draw me to them. Unfortunately, Crows get a bad rap. Some people see them as omens, warnings, a sign that evil or death is near, or a menace, and whenever they appear in movies you know something bad is about to happen.

I don’t think that’s fair, because they’re some of the most brilliant and just creatures on earth. Scientists have known for years that Crows remember faces and how they feel about you. If they like you, cherish that. They may even bring you gifts. But if they dislike you, you might as well move to another part of the country—before they run you out.

One day a few years back I ran into these two on my way to the Department of Motor Vehicles to renew my license.

An adult Crow with a juvenile Crow standing on top of a bus stop shelter.

They were so close I could reach up and touch them. As I took the photo, more Crows landed nearby, and I thought, “They either like me or they’re here to escort me to the nearby coven for chastisement.” Fortunately they appeared to approve of me, as evidenced by a lack of danger calls and berating statements. I am grateful for it, too, because not only do they remember you and their character assessment of you, they teach their young accordingly, as the adult (left) may have been doing with this “teenager.”

The Crow below landed on the balcony of Hellscape while I was working at the dining room table.

A Crow perched on a ledge, facing away, as seen through the slats of some blinds.

We were about 10 feet apart. The Crow saw me, so I said, “Hello, beautiful bird.” It studied me for a moment, adjusted its feathers, shifted its weight from one foot to the other in a little half-turn, then cawed.

At the time I sensed it was curious, maybe even confused, like “wait, what, a human?” and perhaps wanted to tell its companions something.  But now I wonder if it was just put off by the vibes of the place and told its flockmates to stay away because no other Crows ever came to visit.

Not like here. Here I have all kinds of birdie visitors to my balcony, including a family of Crows led by one I think of as Octavi, short for either Octavian or Octavia as I don’t know the bird’s sex. Octavi would come to my balcony alone for the first few months after I moved in, attracted by peanuts I put on the railing. Then one day there were two. (Octavi is on the right.)

Two Crows on a railing. One is eating a peanut, the other is looking toward the camera.

It turns out that Octavi has a family on the property, for not long after that, there were three, all adults, who would come to the balcony. Then I noticed their nest in a tree across the grounds. It might seem that the threesome was some sort of love triangle, but sometimes the adult offspring of a Crow couple will stick around and help raise babies. Other times, adults in the extended family like aunts, uncles, or cousins stay with a Crow couple to help out, too.

This year, it appears that the family has grown to seven: Octavi, spouse, the other adult, and four new additions who are now fully grown but still hang around the tree.

Crow family life fascinates me. Each family keeps to itself until after the breeding season. Then, once the juveniles are fledged and able to forage on their own, Crows often convene in giant flocks in the evening to introduce their families to one another and mingle. I’m fortunate enough to live just a couple of miles from one of the biggest gathering spots in Arlington, and if I time my evening walks correctly, I’ll see thousands of them fly in from all directions to one spot, and sometimes I will stand on a corner greeting them. Yet some families convene in smaller flocks, while others, like Octavi’s, don’t seem to go very far at all. I don’t know why they do this, but perhaps they’re not so different from people in a way, where some are super social and like a big raucous gathering and others are more insular and introverted. Or maybe Octavi’s family know a good thing when they have it, because they love to forage and play tag with each other in the grass by their tree.

A lot has been said about “Crow funerals,” where Crows gather around their dead and appear to mourn, but now scientists think that part of the ritual involves learning what happened to their fallen one, the better to avoid the same fate. I tend to side with the scientists on that. A couple of years ago, I was forever finding Crows that had been struck and killed by cars in one particular dip in the road near where the huge flock convenes in the evening. This year, I only saw one, a poor fledgling not much bigger than my fist, flattened so that I couldn’t get it off the road. Another night I did find a recently deceased Crow in some grass by the road as well, but that one that didn’t appear to have any car-related injuries, and I was able to lay it to rest in some nearby bushes. They’re magnificent even in death, their feathers a dark prism of pinks, yellows, blues, and greens.

Are Crows mystical and attached to the Great Beyond, like so many myths and legends would have us believe? Maybe.

One sleepless night, not long after Inigo and I said goodbye, I went out onto the balcony at roughly 2:00 a.m. to get some air and try to find some peace in the cold stillness of the early March air. The trees were still bare, and when I looked up, a Crow was up in the branches of the maple in front of my apartment. I could only see the shape of the bird, but I sensed it was looking at me, and rather intently at that. It was actually kind of unnerving, the one time I’ve ever been unsettled by a bird. The Crow extended a wing and shook out its feathers. We stood there for several minutes, me looking at the Crow, the Crow seeming to look at me.

“Octavi?”

The Crow shook out its feathers once more, flapped its wings, then swooped down from the tree, descended toward me for a split second, then turned and flew off, leaving only the sound of its beating wings.

I still don’t know if it was Octavi, but whoever it was, I felt like that particular bird was there that night on purpose. This Crow had a reason to be in that tree, alone, facing my balcony and bedroom window, almost like it was waiting for me to give up on sleep and step outside. Maybe it was a messenger. Maybe it was standing guard. Maybe it wanted me to know it was there.  I suppose I’ll never know.

But I do know this: Crows are part of this world, and they have things to teach us.

Abstract artwork painted by a Crow.
“A Study of Riddles,” painted by Apollo the Crow of Diva Crows Wildlife Rehabilitation Center.