The Crowby Geoffrey Norman
photography by Hubert Schriebl
If people had wings and
bore black feathers,
few of them would be clever enough to be crows.
It was one of those mornings in mountains. No wind, with the temperature in the twenties and the sun coming up out of a flawlessly clear sky. The stillness was so complete that the world felt fragile. Take a wrong step, speak above a whisper, and the whole thing might shatter like glass.
I was on a trail that led around a beaver pond up in the Lye Brook wilderness. There was some fresh snow on the ground so I could walk without disturbing the vast silence. Even so, the soft crush of my feet on the snow sounded like thunder in my ears.
After one of those steps, I stopped for a few minutes and stood in one spot long enough that the silence began to seem natural. I could hear the beating of my own heart and no other sound.
Finally, I took another step and the universe exploded in noise. The sound was abrupt and jarring and plainly meant to get my attention which it did. My pulse doubled and I had to sit on a blowdown for a minute to pull myself back together.
Meanwhile, the raven kept giving me the business. The calls were loud and rude and plainly meant to put me in my place.
“All right,” I finally said. “I’m sorry. Now give it a rest.”
In truth, even though it had startled me almost entirely out of my skin, I liked the sound. You would never call it ‘comforting,” the way you might when describing the music of songbirds. Nor was it soulful and mysterious, like the howl of coyotes. No, the racket that crows—and their larger cousins, the ravens—make is a kind of background noise. Not beautiful or musical, but … necessary. Just as the city would be incomplete without traffic sounds, most rural scenes require the occasional raucous calling of crows. In the valleys of Vermont, we expect that sound, and are so accustomed to it that we are sometimes unaware we are hearing it. Up in the higher, more remote altitudes, the raven supplies the theme music. Same family, slightly different bird. Both of them compelling.
Perhaps because they are ubiquitous and impossible to mistake for anything else, crows tend to be taken for granted. Other forms of wildlife seem so much more exotic in comparison. People will pull off the highway to look at a moose. They will report their first season’s sighting of a Baltimore oriole to friends and build boxes in hopes of attracting bluebirds to the meadow in back of the house.
Crows? Well, they are always around. Always making a fuss. Big black bird with a big, ugly mouth. What’s to like? For people who admire birds in a sort of notional way—for their pretty colors and melodic calls—the crow is an easy bird to dismiss. Even if you don’t know much about fish, you can love trout—strictly for their beauty—but it takes some effort to feel much affection for a carp. Aesthetically, crows are losers.
