Totem of a Storyteller: The Uncommon Crow

Crows in Geneva

I live in Central New York. An area known for our great quantity of snow every year but we also seem to have a great quantity of crows. Not just a lot of individual crows, gigantic murders of crows that can blot out an afternoon sky or fill a wood with their slightly ominous black forms. The carrion crow is long associated as a death portent in mythology, as the trickster god, and the bane of a farmers crops. Ironically, it is also a fantastic animal to represent the storyteller.

Giant murders of crows have plagued several Central New York cities. The City of Auburn earned some press over their corvid problem. There were bar sponsored 'crow shoots', fireworks to scare them off and a USDA truck that played crow distress calls to break up the large urban roost. The large murder was broken up and scattered. The crows were on the move from town to city across the Finger Lakes and out to the Mohawk Valley.

Oneida was one city that faced a crow invasion. A large murder would shift from north of the city to the south and fly right over my house. It was an amazing sight to see the sky thicken with wave after wave of black wings. The caw-cawing would shatter the late afternoon air and when it died out would leave the city quiet for several minutes. Sometimes, they would take a rest in the trees of my neighborhood. The tree branches would sag under the weight of so many crows and they would caw back and forth amiably to each other, like a crowd waiting for a bus. I developed a more than passing interest in the crows, who were so common that I had never really thought about them at all. 

Crows Come Home to Roost in Auburn



Crows mate for life and juveniles stay with their parents until they find their own mates and help raise their siblings. During winter months, crows will roost together with many 'families' to form gigantic murders for warmth and protection. When spring comes the large roost disperses to the smaller families, to raise a new generation, until the following fall.

It turns out that crows and their relatives (ravens, rooks, and jackdaws) are some of the most intelligent animals on earth. Their brains are in the same proportions to their bodies as chimpanzees. They learn from repeated exposure to problems and even develop tools to solve problems. They will even use food to bait fish. Anyone who has seen a crow perched on a scarecrow's shoulder knows that they decipher all manner of farmer and gardener tricks. The best part is that when a new trick is learned by a crow, it can express that trick to other crows. Crows don't just learn from repetition, they learn from each other.

There was a study at the University of Washington to discover crow's ability to recognize faces.

The scientists used masks to disguise themselves; one was a caveman mask that they wore to capture and tag crows. The crows remembered the caveman mask and would go wild when they saw it, shrieking and cawing to each other in warning. Months after the experiment, the number of crows reacting to the caveman mask was much larger than the number that had witnessed the capture and banding. The crows learned from their parents and their peers who the dangerous face was.

Crows are experiencing near exponential population growth. In a world where we talk about how many species are going extinct due to the incursion of man, crows are thriving. Crows and their cousins live within five miles of human settlements everywhere in the world other than the tip of South America and the arctic circle. They are intelligent problem-solvers who use and create tools. They seem to have a language and communicate what they have learned. Crows are humanity's dark shadow. A thriving, thinking animal who masters their environment and uses stories to teach.

So, now when I look out my window and see my trees filled with black birds, cawing back and forth like neighbors over a fence, I wonder what stories and traditions are they creating? They feature throughout the world mythologies, do we figure in theirs? Or is most of the cawing just facebook gossip? There is no better totem for this story blog than the Common Crow.