Maybe Crows Are Not So Bad After All

“Crows mate for life, have one brood a year, and the siblings help raise the crowlets. If a spouse dies, a nephew or niece helps out. During the spring mating season, the families live separately; but during fall and winter, the families all roost together. They begin congregating in the early evenings, pick a staging area, shift areas, and join other families, their numbers increasing logarithmically, hundreds and thousands of them, flying like a blizzard, and says a researcher, great confusion is evident. They somehow converge into a single roost, talking continually on into the night. The noise they make is three-dimensional.”
 — Over at The Last Word on Nothing, Awl Pal Anne Finkbeiner thinks twice about her hatred of crows, which she says look like “flying shreds of a medieval hell.” She ends up warming to them, for reasons of their familial bonding and resilience, quoting a Bukowski poem about their response to shotgun attack by human farmers: “And mourned their dead and elected new leaders/And then all at once flew home to fuck to fill the gap.” Similarly, I used to strongly dislike the rock band the Black Crowes. I’m more okay with them now.