Coming up the sidewalk towards my house, the sound of their cawing filled the morning air.
Hearing them, I'd assumed the local murder was rousting a hawk or an owl, driving away the threat to their chicks and their territory. But they weren't in flight. There were a dozen of them, perched on the branches of a large poplar, or standing as dark smudges upon the light grey shingle of our roof. And all of them were shouting together, piercing the quiet after dawn with their percussive ruckus.
I peered into the trees, expecting to see the brown wings of a harried raptor. But there was no evidence that my eyes could discern. Just crows, yelling at the world and at one another. I watched the trees for a few more moments, but my dog wanted to go into the house where treats awaited, and so we did, leaving the din behind.
I gave the boy his requisite treat, for he had been a good boy, then settled in to do some writing. My phone rang shortly thereafter, an old friend calling to chat and talk about a visit. It was still early, and the house was still asleep, and so I stepped out into the warming air of that summer morning to pace about the front yard and talk.
The crows were still there, although a little quieter now. As I walked and talked, I paused for a moment.
There, on the ground by one of my four by four raised beds, was the corpse of a crow.
It lay ragdolled in the grass, wings cupped around its head, as if in its last act it had hidden from the world in a tent of dark feathers. I came closer. There was no evident injury, not that I've got the eye to discern such a thing. Peering down at the glossy black body, I saw that the flies and the ants had already found it.
I would need to dispose of it. As I had that thought, the remaining crows gathered and flew overhead and to the east, singing their gutteral song of lament.
A few minutes later, when the call was done, I got a lavender-scented garbage bag and a garden spade. Burying the crow in the back yard wouldn't have worked. My curious dog is a remarkably able digger, and I didn't want us to be on the enemies list of the local murder.
I scooped up the remains as gently as I could, bagged them, and tied it tight.
Afterwards, I looked up crow mourning rituals.
"Scientists believe," purred back the AI generated reply, "that this only looks like grief, but actually is just a learned response and adaptive behavior to avoid harm and assess danger." Digging deeper, I found some of the research that led to that assessment, in which...in a test of the mechanisms of empathy...scientists captured a wild crow, restrained it, showed it images of dead crows, and then tranked it and ran a brain scan to look for signs of frontal lobe activity associated with grief.
This, to explore another living creature's capacity for empathy? Oy gevalt. Maybe you should test your own understanding of "irony," Science.
Later that day, as I attended the celebration of life for a friend who'd been taken by cancer, I found myself coming back to those crows.
Corvids are highly intelligent and social creatures. They're aware of loss, aware of the absence of a member of their tribe, aware that death is an eventuality to be marked. They're not homo sapiens sapiens, to be sure, but grief and the rituals of loss are not just a human thing. They are part of what it is to be mortal and sentient.
Not just crows and humans, but dolphins and elephants and primates and every bright creature that realizes what it is, and has a flickering sense of its fleeting moment in the great flow of time.
We that live lament those who do so no longer. We grieve their absence. We miss the presence of those who have passed on, borne away by Death on great dark wings.
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