Last Friday I received an e-mail from some neighbors that live about five blocks from me.  I’d never met them, but one of Leucy’s favorite perches was right in front of their house.  On the day of Seattle’s new heat record (over 103 degrees), they found her body on the parking strip.  They were heartbroken at the loss of “Brownie,” and were writing to ask if there was anything they could have done to help her, which of course there wasn’t.  I hated to foist my morbid tendencies on this super-nice couple, but this was such an amazing bird–I had to ask, “Did you by any chance save her body?  Maybe pop her in the freezer?”  They hadn’t.  She’d been wrapped in plastic in the garbage for the last three hot days.  Still, after receiving my question, they intrepidly dug her out and put her in the freezer.  I was a touch worried.  But the frozen body is actually in pretty good shape, now in my own freezer, next to the popsicles.  She’s worthy of further study.

All who observed Leucy agree that she was a particularly fabulous bird, both in terms of plumage and personality.  In her uniqueness, she invited people to look closely at the common birdlife around them.  It was her color that drew the initial observation, but her general wild wonderfulness that kept people watching–something shared by all crows, and the rest of the wild life that surrounds us.

Thank you, lovely Leucy, and RIP.

PS: Based on a couple of requests, my husband Tom posted this and another photo of “Leucy” on Flickr.com under a Creative Commons license, meaning you are free to repost them, print them, etc – basically do anything you wish with the images short of profiting from them.  They are at high enough resolution for a 5X7 print (unlike the image above in the blog post). Leucy photo 1, Leucy photo 2.

This is the season that everyone starts calling to ask why crows are dive-bombing their heads.  They are, of course, protecting their nests, eggs, and soon their fledglings.  It’s a seasonal behavior, and will cease as the chicks grow into sturdy young adults.  Dive-bombing makes crows seem aggressive, or even “mean.”  I’m not a crow apologist, but I do think we need to remember that because they are so large, and they have such big nests, crows don’t have the advantage of quiet, hidden chick-rearing that many birds do.  They resort to cawing and swooping only in order to protect their young.  If you are scolded by a crow this time of year, just try to avoid it–cross the street, and act uninterested.

All the beautiful Crow Planet prints are available for sale.  Contact artist Dan Cautrell through his Fusion Press Studio website.

Crow-bill hole in the pea patch

As soon as I finished planting and was putting my tools away in the shed, a swirl of three crows flew into the cherry tree, cawing loudly.  I laughed to myself, “They’re calling their friends to say, ‘She’s finished!  Come eat!’”  But I thought I was kidding.  Later I found perfect crow-bill-sized holes in the pea-patch!

In his wonderful book, Living With Wildlife in the Pacific Northwest (which offers a great deal of insight no matter what your geographic region), Russell Link writes, “We love wild animals, or we hate them, depending on what they’re doing.”  Our hearts lift at the robin’s spring song, then in the summer they eat our strawberries.

One morning there was a Cooper’s Hawk perched on the corner of our fence.  So close!  Such beautiful yellow legs, and deep orange eyes!  I rushed to get my binoculars, my first impulse as a bird nerd.  But in the next breath I realized, oh my lord, that bird was eying my six-week-old baby chickens!  Cooper’s Hawks are bird-eaters.  I ran out there like Ma Ingalls, barefoot in the wet grass, my pink flannel pajamas dragging around my feet, waving my arms and yelling “Shoo!”  The hawk looked at me coolly before lifting over the garage roof, and I brought my feathered girls in the kitchen for the day.  I’ve always been critical of farmers that bait “vermin” such as coyotes, wolves, and cougars because they are a perceived threat to livestock, and I still am.  But my thoughts are more nuanced since the hawk incident.  What if I really was Ma Ingalls?  What if those chickens were not my hobby, but my family’s livelihood?  My children’s sustenance?  What if all that were true, and I had a shotgun hanging over the door?

Missing pea plants after crow nibbling

I don’t have any brilliant how-tos for preventing crows from eating your peas.  But I love the reminder that there is no clear line we can draw between our households, our lives, our habits, and the wider, natural world.  Our homey thresholds are flimsy and marginal–they represent the point from which we cross into nature, and wild nature–distressingly sometimes–crosses back.  Such a recognition of our constant, inevitable continuity with the more-than-human world is, I believe, exhilirating, enlivening, and beautiful.

Meanwhile, we protect our chickens, net our strawberries, and wave our arms at waiting crows.  I tossed some  new pea seeds into the holes the crows had made, and they’re beginning to fill in nicely.