There were a half-dozen of them, setting heavy on the powerlines above the sidewalk on our side of the street, filling the morning air with the percussion of their cawing.
They didn't seem to be arguing about anything, and I couldn't see any evidence of a nearby hawk or falcon that might have gotten them up in arms. They were just making a ruckus, all together. More crows arrived to join, and as the din grew louder, it took on a strangely contrapuntal rhythm, as if the gathering murder had split itself into different sections. KA-kaw, KA-kaw, KA-kaw, a dozen voices now, back and forth, half on one beat, half on the other, a stereophonic call and response.
Norm and I kept walking the sidewalk towards where they had thronged. It was fascinating, and a little hypnotic. When we grew close, the whole lot of them rose up at once. There was a rush of dozens of dark wings, which disappeared into the heavily needled canopies of a pair of pine trees across the street.
There, their chorus redoubled, the cadence quickening. It tightened and tightened, and for a moment, all voices were on the same beat, KA! KA! KA! KA!
That shared song...crows are intelligent songbirds, after all...pulsed from the branches of the twinned pines, the birds themselves invisible in the shadows, like the tree itself was shout-singing in a churning, pulsing tone.
Then the crow-decorated tannenbaum fell silent, all at once, as abruptly as if somewhere in the shadows their conductor had raised a stilling wing. The hush lingered for a moment, then another, then another.
As it began again, their gutteral avian baritones were suddenly joined by higher voices. From the nearby trees came fluttering a score of bluejays in their twos and threes, smaller corvid cousins adding a sweet alto chime to the blunt rhythm of their larger, hoarser relatives. It wasn't the sharp and angry annoyance/territorial display cry that I've heard so many times from jays, but was different, purer, and more pleasant to the ear. Or perhaps, feeling a little transported, I just heard it as such.
The pair of pines were now rounded about with the blues and whites of singing jays, and filled the shadows of singing crows, a corvus chorus, so to speak, and I listened with delight. They were roughly singing o'er the plain, their croaked alleluias filling the quiet morning.
It felt like something was being said between them in two languages I didn't understand, like listening to a carol in both Cherokee and Yoruba. I thought, for an instant, perhaps I should video this. But I did not. It wouldn't have captured the grey light of morning all around, the sharp cool wetness of the air before a coming winter rain, the fullness of strange music echoing from tree and rooftop.
Then, just as it had begun, there was rush of wings, and the song fell apart. The business was concluded, some of the crows flying off to the East, others sticking around and socializing. The jays fluttered to ground and nosed about in the grass.
Well, I thought. That was a lovely bit of magic.
Norm, of course, couldn't have cared less.