A Murder of Crows and Fight Club Magpies

Another day, another cleaning frenzy.  Prospective clients due out this Thursday...hopefully...there have been three cancellations, well two cancels and one mixed communication.  Taking a break from mopping/dusty/tidying.  Richard dances to the rhythmic sweep of the broom as he cleans all the walkways.

Know I get a bit (a bit!) anal about the cleaning thing, cleaning areas that will never been seen by anyone but me but it helps to dispense with nervous energy.

Not sure what I saw yesterday while riding.  Do magpies have Fight Clubs or Boxing Tournaments?  Always see magpies in family groups, usually three birds; mom, dad and juvenile.  Don't see them flock like PeeWees or even occasionally willie wagtails.  Yesterday however, was riding up  Zig Zag Hill prior to crossing the Muffin Top.  In a cleared area, only cleared because the grass hadn't grown  high, were a dozen or more maggies surrounding two fighting birds.    Naturally they all erupted and flew away, all dozen or more of them, when Balthazar and I crashed through the long grass.

So why were they congregated to watch the fighting?  How many family groups? Were they all males or mixed.   Mysterious.  Like so many things.

Like the gathering of crows.  A hundred or more crows will gather in one spot, squawking and squarking seemingly without rhyme or reason.  Periodically they will all lift into the sky as one entity, rising on a crescendo of screaming only to descend again, still shouting at the top of their lungs.

What do they talk about?  How do they know there is to be a gathering?  How far do they come?  Who decides the meeting has ended?  Just one more mystery in a universe of mysteries.

Crows and other things

Reading Janet Frame's An Angel at My Table.  Have ordered Faces in the Water, a fictionalized account of her time in mental institutions (she was in more than one).  Her book shows how strong the human spirit is - even when she sabotages her own happiness, even when she's weak, even when she allows herself to be thistledown blown by the whims of others.  And her books make me ashamed.  I who have so much and do so little with it.

     Even now with Richard away, the perfect excuse to stay inside and create (a large blue band of rain is crawling across the weather map toward us) and this page before me for the first time since June, I am finding it difficult to settle and concentrate.  

     Often when I am walking I compose things in my head.  Observations to be recorded, thoughts to be considered but I do none of those things.  People write novels while working full time and raising a family.  What excuse do I have?  None, except when I look at the sites saved on this computer, even the blogs written by others, they are all about art, none about writing.  

     Isn't it odd how adept we are at beating ourselves up?  And how certain we are that we need to be beaten up?  So rather than carry on with the same old crap I'll write about crows.

     Crows.  I've been entranced by them for quite awhile.  They are so common they've become invisible.  We revile them because their song is more like dragging rusty car bodies across stones than anything resembling music.  Among other things they feed on carrion.  Although their black feathers are glossy we see them as dusty harbingers of decay.

      But they lead lives of mystery.  Each afternoon when I walk the dogs I watch them.  Sometimes they all seem to be heading north, the next day south, the next west, and finally east.  Flying in twos and threes (so as not to attract attention?) they make their way to what?  I have no idea but I am certain this casual gathering is deliberate.

      One day I watched two crows flying overhead.  They squawked and squarked while they flew a large irregular circle.  Soon they were joined by another pair of crows.  The four of them flew another circle.  Then two more and finally, two more after that.  The eight of them winged around this aerial circle and then, after a few turns, they drifted apart until two were left.  The original two?  I don't know.  Finally they too drifted away. 

     What was the purpose of that?  Was it a corvid version of afternoon smoko?  Was it a family gathering?  Friends catching up?  Neighbourhood Watch?  

     Yesterday I rode up the road.  On the way back I allowed Balthazar to graze while I crow-watched.  A 'murder' of crows had gathered in a tree halfway up Mt. Whitestone.  *Murders* are common around here.  They seem drawn to the flanks of Mt. Whitestone, or any good sized hill.  The gatherings are another mystery.  The crows all talk at once and at the top of their voice.  

     Trying to understand them as a human I cannot help but put a human interpretation on them.  If people got together to discuss something and all of them shouted continuously no one would understand anything and nothing would get done.  But understanding crows I would need to be a crow.  Maybe they gather to shout with the joyousness of being alive.  Maybe it's choir rehearsal.  Or a contest.  Whatever it is, it is meaningful.