Crows

Crows have been mustering on the snow-covered lawn the whole time I've been house-sitting. They cluster in the trees, and then fly down en masse to attack the snow under the bird feeders (picking up the sunflower seeds there).  If I walk up to the picture window, or to the glass door onto the back deck -- even though I'm inside the house and mostly just a moving dark shadow to them -- they rise up in a scattering of black, cawing and crying and they return to the trees for a while.  They are wonderful.

When I took this photo, during a snowstorm last weekend, I found I had to keep recounting crows.  "1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. Nine crows... No, did that one move? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. Ten crows. But that one there, bobbing its head -- 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11. Yes, definitely eleven crows. Wait, what's that black spot--?" Ultimately, I decided there were 12. Or rather, I stopped recounting at 12.

Another day, this one sunny and melty, I let the Cat out the glass door onto the deck overlooking the bird feeders. A few minutes later, I wandered back to the door to check on him. As I approached, there was flapping and a surge of motion just outside. A red-tailed hawk winged up and off towards the horizon, starting not four feet away from me (beyond the glass door) -- dropping a black shadow with a light thump on the deck.  I had interrupted a kill, either just above the door (and falling to ground by the weight of the catch) or brought to the deck to eat.

For a heart-stopping moment, I thought the dark shadow lying on the deck, about a foot long and still as death, was Cat of. But the black angles sorted themselves through my panicked mind into feathers and a beak -- it was one of the crows.  I waited for a couple of hours (and consulted Son of, who is a bird expert) before concluding that the hawk was not going to come back to finish his lunch, and that the crow was really and truly dead.

Somewhat gruesomely, depending upon how much experience you have with collecting bird bodies (I have quite a bit, due  ahem  to the whole Cattus Dommus thing) -- I carefully wrapped the crow up in a black bag, marked it well, and thrust it to the very bottom of Bride's large freezer in the cellar.  Son of wants a crow skull, and now he can get one, perfectly preserved.  The great surprise, which shouldn't have been, was how light the corpse was. A creature that large should weigh more (cats do, for instance). But of course, cats don't fly.