Crow Planet

Lyanda Lynn Haupt

11 annotations • Jul 2023 – Aug 2023 • data

Introduction

Still, familiarity breeds naming, and I have been watching this crow every day for months, learning her individual needs, quirks, and habits. Without even thinking about it, I began calling her Charlotte, after the brilliant, self-effacing, fragile-but-brave Charlotte Brontë
But for some reason, the adult crows who dive-bombed me when I kidnapped Charlotte and again when I returned her to their care never bothered me again. Instead, they cared incessantly for the broken-legged fledgling. They kept her from harm, even though she was weak and broken and by all guesses a hopeless case; they hid her from cats, rats, and raccoons, and they continue to preen and coddle her. While I would expect them to avoid me, they bring Charlotte back to the scene of my crime almost every day and let me see how she's doing. I cannot help thinking that some communication has taken place, that it is somehow clear to the crows that my grievous offense was accomplished in good faith. We all experience such times—don't we—when our guarded separateness breaks down.
We are being called upon to act against a prevailing culture, to undermine our own entrenched tendency to accumulate and to consume, and to refuse to define our individuality by our presumed ability to do whatever we want
There are two Greek words for time. One is chronos, which refers to the usual, quantifiable sequential version of time by which we monitor and measure our days. The other word is kairos, which denotes an unusual period in human history when eternal time breaks in upon chronological time. Kairos is "the appointed time," an opportune moment, even a time of crisis, that creates an opportunity for, and in fact demands, a human response. It is a time brimming with meaning, a time more potent than "normal" time
In the environmental classic A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold proffered a touchstone by which to judge human activity, one that most first-year ecology students have memorized: "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise."
There are more crows now than there have ever been in the history of the earth. There are more people, too, and in fact, the crow-human ratio has remained fairly constant for the last several thousand years. But what has changed, for both species, is density and proximity
I have relinquished, over and over, my attachment to definitive universal answers. Time after time I find that I am misguided, mistaken, lazy, or lost. But I return anyway, to the questions and to the crows. Here, after all, is a bird very much like us—at home, yet not entirely at home in the urban habitat, gleaning what's here while remaining wild, showing us what's beautiful, what's ugly, and what's missing
I've noticed that whenever I refer to a crow as a she in conversation, I am invariably asked, "How do you know it's a female?" However, if I refer to a bird as a he, no one ever asks how I know it's a male—not ever. Our efforts to move toward inclusive language in our lives and literature seem to have stopped cold in our discussions of the natural history world, where all animals are still neutrally male unless we know better

Chapter 1

The minds of crows and ravens are also different. Though both species demonstrate remarkable intelligence, ravens generally appear to be able to problem-solve more quickly and at a higher level than crows, working one or two more steps into a multistep problem. Both crows and ravens play—another sign of rich intelligence—but raven games tend to be more complex and may involve a level of "rules" that crow games don't. Where crows will drop a stick in midair and swoop down to catch it, for example, ravens might pair up and take turns dropping the stick for each other.
Because crows live so gregariously, they may have more developed social norms than ravens—an organized respect for the dead, perhaps, and possibly even a basic system of crow justice.
In his essay Home Economics, agrarian writer Wendell Berry defines nature this way: "What we call nature is, in a sense, the sum of the changes made by all the various creatures and natural forces in their intricate actions and influences upon each other and their places." In other words, for humans, how we live where we live is what makes us part of a natural ecosystem. It is also the source of our most profound impact on the more-than-human world.