Crows

While getting my degree at Cornell I fell into the habit of working late and rising later and would oft supplement my sleep with a nap in the afternoon.  And oft, too, that nap would be disturbed by cawing crows, of which there were an abundance in Ithaca, and several in particular who seemed to spend most of their time perched outside my window, waiting for me to fall asleep.  The day came for me to leave, but, being petty by nature, I determined to have my revenge before I departed.  I decided to wake the crows.

In our backyard there grew an enormous pine tree, and in that pine tree, in winter months, there was to be found a quite sizable roost of crows.  The phenomenon of roosting, I am surprised to learn, is not thoroughly understood; my personal hypothesis is that crows come together in large numbers for the night because they are highly sociable creatures and because they like disturbing each others' sleep as much as they liked disturbing mine.  Certainly the process of settling down for the night was, for the roost, a long and drawn out one in which each individual crow among the hundreds bickered and fought its way to a suitable branch, discussed the experience with its near neighbors, discovered itself to be thoroughly incompatible with those neighbors, drove off some, was itself driven off, found a new spot, and began the process all over again before...well, suffice to say that going to bed took them all a good hour or more.

It was a cold winter's night when I left to catch the Lake Shore Limited out of Syracuse.  Bags packed, ready to go, I slipped out the back door and tiptoed to the crow's pine to say my wicked farewell.  In my hand I held a string of tiger crackers.  As per the instructions, I lay the string on the ground beneath the tree, lit the fuse, and retired quickly.

As the string began exploding I looked up and was gratified to see one of nature's lesser-known wonders:  hundreds of terrified crows erupting from a single tree, forming a terrific mass of smoke that obscured the starry night sky.  The noise, even without the firecrackers, was deafening and delightful.  Well satisfied with my cold revenge, I stepped into the waiting vehicle and left forever.

Since that day I have now and again joked that the crows are looking for me, spreading the word from colony to colony, and that eventually and surely when I least expect it they, too, will have their revenge.  You can imagine my discomfiture at reading, therefore, the following in the latest Science News:

Crows may have gotten cozier with people, but the birds don’t forget insults. Crows even appear to recognize and remember the faces of upsetting humans, Marzluff and his colleagues reported in Animal Behaviour in 2010. Marzluff and other experimenters trapped wild Seattle crows just once while wearing rubber masks sold on the Internet as caveman faces. More than two years after the incident, people of various genders and ages and with different body sizes and walking gaits attracted shrieking, dive-bombing crows when wearing the masks. Yet the same people could walk unmasked with hardly any attention from crows.

Crows can even learn grudges from other crows, the Marzluff team reported in June online in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Five years after the original trapping episode, crows that weren’t among the offended birds — and crows that weren’t even hatched at the time of trapping — now scold people wearing the masks. The tendency to mob someone wearing the dangerous face has become twice as common at some Seattle sites and spread at least a kilometer from the original study area, apparently via crow information networks.

"Crow information networks":  is there any more chilling phrase in the English language?  Not late at night, burdened with a guilty conscience, and facing another day at the playground which, whatever its many pluses, is absolutely infested with crows. Not late at night there isn't, and not when the crows know.