How I Was Befriended By Wild Crows

A few weeks ago I put an image on Notes of a crow on my head. It gained quite a bit of interest so I thought I’d post the back story of how I came to befriend a murder of wild crows. So here it is, I hope you enjoy.

1.

Those first few steps into the trees when the air turns to a fresh, green and pungent perfume are so wonderful. In the winter it’s that snow-laden silence that softens the world. The forest is a powerful place that awakens your soul. A place of ancient rhythms where you can journey into the deep interior of your own consciousness. The forest is essential, uncomplicated and true.

I’ve wandered the forests of Sweden for over twenty years, through the bursting plentitude of spring, through the orgy of summer’s luminous blooming, through autumn’s fungi explosion and through the oceans of gently tumbling snow falling in heavy waves for months on end in winter’s darkest night.

The forest is a place of extreme beauty and extreme peril. A place to feel alive and a place to feel the breath of death. A few year’s ago I lost my bearings as I wandered through the gloaming forest at a brutal and brittle -17°C. The sun dipped and the temperature dropped further and from the shadows I saw a terrible fate making its way toward me.

On that day it was a crow that saved me. He’d landed on a snow laden pine and began tilting his head from side to side the way a dog sometimes does. He was encouraging me to reach for a treat. When I dipped my hand into to my jacket he opened his wings and rose a little on his haunches, preparing to take flight. He knew the game. He was waiting for my signal. I realised this wasn’t any crow but one of the meadow crows. That was when I knew I was only a kilometre or so from the forest edge and from there it was just a short hike to the road. My fate retreated and I found my way home.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me get back to the story of how I befriended the meadow crows in the first place.

I’ve spent years surrounded by the creatures of the forest. Crows and Jays perpetually creating some kind of kerfuffle. Woodpeckers always banging their hard little beaks against bark generous with insects like heavy pennies dropping on steel. Great Grey Owls silently ghosting through the trees and White Tailed Eagles with their lion-like sovereignty over the skyways patrol high above the canopy. Blue tits and sparrows and blackbirds and jackdaws and starlings always busily heading somewhere.

I’m surrounded by roe deer that stare like supernatural beings with their black eyes pooling the spirit world. Regal and bewildered elk that look like they’ve just evaded some Late Pleistocene hunter. Foxes and beavers and red squirrels and wild boar and hares all peering from the trees or bolting across the meadow lands. All these creatures have one thing in common. They’d prefer to avoid me and they sure don’t want me to see them. They’ll stand statue still hoping I’ll walk right past without noticing them or they’ll run like their lives depend on it.

Even bears and wolves would rather vanish into the forest than cross my path. My terrible reputation precedes me. I am not a welcome fellow forest dweller. These creatures have become weary and suspicious of we humans. They do not trust us and they’d prefer we left them in peace Except one. Except the crow.

Crows are curious and playful creatures that do the opposite of nearly every other animal in the forest, they’ll approach and actively check out strangers. In fact, if they see an advantage, or just some fun, they’ll even hang around and play.

After watching crows for years I came to realise they were watching me as intently as I was watching them. They were evaluating my behaviour and considering my motives and paying attention to what I was up to just like I was doing with them. It was quite a beautiful realisation.

Eventually I decided to find out if a group of crows would accept me and take me under their wing. Who knew? Maybe they’d even forgive us for what we have done.

2.

I write fiction and essays so for much of the time I live in a world of narrative. In many ways I think everything is a story. I’m not surprised by the human tendency toward religious or spiritual thinking because I feel it brewing up in myself. I find myself giving character to things that don’t seem to have character at all, like events, or flows of time, or particular areas of the forest, or periods of the day, or the way light plays through the trees or across a lake. I think tree species have different personalities and that all animals have individual characters.

Doing this, personifying the world, or assuming soul and spirit, or animating the inanimate is to give meaning to the world. It’s to see the world in a narrative frame with characters and motivations and morals and it’s a deeply human and powerful way to embed oneself into the flow of life and make sense of the incomprehensible. Fables, folkloric myths, fairy tales and legends are story-maps of social meaning and guides to the real and imagined landscapes in which we live. They are an important and uniquely human ways of making sense of the world and guiding social and cultural behaviour. They are like little lighthouses with which we navigate through the Great Darkness.

So for me, watching the crows and watching myself watch the crows and thinking about the crows as characters and myself as a character in a flow of events was easy. Paying attention to and being grateful for “Mother Earth” for all her extraordinary complexity is easy. I can muster up gratitude for a crow “teaching” me something about the world because, in all honesty, the crows are making the world a richer place and that is teaching me something about the world and my place in it.

I’m not a religious person. There is no god or gods. I can see clearly from my own thinking and emotional processes how an evolving Homo Sapien species dreamed up meaning through stories. But I don’t discredit these stories as unimportant. I embrace them.

A world created through the human lens of storytelling and poetry-maps and instructive fables of social meaning isn’t less rich than one told though careful observation, rigorous skepticism and hypothesis testing. Part of the reason we’ve found ourselves in place where multiple Climate Crises are fast decimating life on earth is precisely because we have discredited the importance of the meaning created through ancient human narratives. We’ve limited the source of meaning to a very narrow spectrum and the results are clear to see.

I’d even go as far as to say that no matter how we convince ourselves that the rational mind can dismantle and reorder the universe to our liking, it’s actually stories told by the heart that give us true understanding of ourselves. You only need to look at the insane state of the world to see it’s the storytellers who are calling the shots.

I feel this viscerally and emotionally. When a wild crow chooses to engage with you and even land on your head there is a feeling of acceptance and inclusion into an ancient world now long forgotten. It is glorious and humbling because it has deep meaning through the stories I tell myself.

3.

To befriend crows you’ll need a few things. The first is motivation. The second is patience. They’re not great friends, motivation and patience, because the second whittles away at the first like a whining child on a boring car journey. Luckily I’m in a forest with the dog which are two never ending sources of pleasure that quieten the child in me.

Once or twice a week, for a few years, I’ve walked through a location where a clan of crows hang out. I’m pretty sure that some of them are the core group and some of them come and go. There are a few characters I recognise but it’s not easy to tell crows apart. One determining factor is their behaviour. Crows do have distinct personalities but on the wing they look pretty much the same.

For them though it’s whole other story. Crows have fantastic memories and they’ll remember individual people and how you’ve treated them. They can recognise the dog and I from kilometres away. Sometimes they’ll come sweeping in from behind and fly low over me and alight in my path to say hello when I didn’t even know they were there.

They are curious and observant and intelligent. I’ve watched crows chasing off eagles and their coordinated behaviour is amazing. Sometimes they’ll all rise from the ground or the canopy in one great murmuration and fly to a high altitude above an eagle. They form a gang that becomes like one creature. Then they’ll send out squadrons of four or five birds to buzz and dive at the eagle before returning to the main group as others drop down in a cycle of coordinated attacks.

It took about two years for these particular crows to trust me. First I had to catch their attention so I’d call to them in their own language. I’d noticed over time that crows used a single caw to mean I’ve arrived, like a hello or, I’m over here. They also use short repetitive calls to mean something like, Hey, look at this, or there’s something worth checking out over here. So I used their own language to get their attention.

Then I’d make a big deal about feeding the dog with treats, theatrically almost, hoping the crows might think, hey this guy is sharing something with that dog. And because crows are highly curious and always on the look out for something novel, or tasty, they’ll usually come over and check out what’s going on.

After a while (months and months) they would land in the trees near me, or land on the ground around me without me having to do anything. Crows are quite playful and do things for the sheer fun of it. After months they just thought, hey, there’s that weirdo with annoying dog, let’s go and see what their up to!

Once that happened I got to work initiating a game. I would raise both my arms (a bit like the gesture for getting people to stand up in an auditorium) and the crows would fly off the ground into the air, then I would throw a treat to one of them to catch on the wing. They would land and then I’d do it again. It took absolutely no time for them to get the gist of it and play along. I’d do it for maybe 10 times in a row, then I’d stop and hold out my palms to indicate the game was over, finished now, no more for you crows. Arms rising, launch yourself for treats. Palms out, game over.

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Sometimes they’d come and check me out and I’d hold out my empty palms out without offering treats as if to say, bad luck crows, nothing for you this time. My intention was to initiate a gestural communication they could understand. I wasn’t so good at cawing. I had a terribly thick accent and poor grammar. But I also wanted to see if they’d hang around without treats. Surprisingly they did.

They even initiated a game of their own: Dog Tag. They’ll fly in low and fast and just tap him on his back with their feet. They’d sit in a tree and take turns, all watching each other’s skill. And they all seemed to get one go each, no more. They took it quite seriously. I think there is an art to it. They seemed to prefer the low fast approach, a gentle tap then a sharp turn to escape. It seemed like a test of bravery. But of course I can’t possibly know that for sure. It’s just an intuition I had from watching the whole performance. The first few times the dog was annoyed but after a short time he didn’t even react at all, yeah, yeah, pesky crows.

I’m certain they have a theory of mind. I’m sure they attribute states of mind to each other and to other creatures, like the dog and I. They know we have mind states like intention, knowledge and desire. How do I know? As I mentioned they’ve learned that when I hold my open palms toward them it means the game is over. Quite often they’ll take this as instructive and just stop hanging about. I can be surrounded by twenty crows as I walk along, then I’ll hold out my palms to indicate game over and they’ll stop following me and just sort of head off to get on with their day.

But, some of them will keep an eye on me just to be sure. They’ll watch me from the trees for some distance in case I’m lying, or keeping some treats for the dog.

If I sink my hand into the treat pocket inevitably one or two of the crows will come swooping out of nowhere and land beside me with a look in their faces like, not so fast buddy, you can’t fool us so easily! They knew all along that my indication that the game was over didn’t mean I had run out of treats, just that I had had enough. They know I have an interior life with desire and intention.

Getting to know these crows, and for them to know me has been a long, slow process. I began by attracting their attention. I’ve been careful to never do anything unpredictable or scary or strange or threatening. I’ve initiated a set of communicative gestures that have meaning and can easily be interpreted by them. And in the end I’ve managed to weave myself into their experience and they’ve weaved themselves into mine. Neither of us need the other. It’s mostly just fun. Whether they’ve befriended me or I’ve befriended them I couldn’t really say with certainty. But I’m very grateful for them and their wonderful ways and they’ve certainly made my story map a lot richer in this strange thing called existence.

Especially when I remember it was one of the meadow crows that came to save the dog and I that day when I lost my way in a -17 frozen nightmare. Who knows, I may have come to my senses and found my way home. But it was my friendship with the meadow crows that guided me out of the forest that night and for that I am forever thankful.

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