Attending a Crow Funeral

I heard them before I saw them.

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.

Enduring Fury

I was turning ash from the fireplace into the soil of one of my raised beds when I was suddenly distracted by a ruckus.  A crow, one of the neighborhood murder, flew low and fast across the asphalt of the road, screeching with a clearly panicked harshness.  I've seen that particular crow around, an old bird with one missing tailfeather and a matching missing flight-feather on its right wing.  Gapfeather was not having a good day, because behind it, right in and tight, was a hawk.  It was fractionally larger than the crow, from size and coloration possibly a red-shouldered hawk, not that I would know that if I hadn't looked it up afterwards.

The raptor was laser-focused, with evident and violent intent.  Gapfeather was fleeing and crying out for help, diving into the denser underbrush under the tall trees on the other side of the street.  This was odd thing to see, because smaller hawks don't mess with crows, typically.  Crows are large and sharp of beak, after all.  If anything, the reverse is true, as the more-intelligent and social crows will gather in large numbers to mob, harass, and drive hawks away. 

The chase continued, the desperate crow retreating tactically, flying from branch to branch, trying to put tree trunk between itself and its pursuer, all the while shrieking out that high pitched caw for aid.  The hawk just kept coming.  Other crows began to gather, but weren't yet intervening, hopping around on the bony-finger branches of dead chestnut oaks and observing cautiously.

Finally, Old Gapfeather bolted back in the direction from which it came, the hawk right on its tail, as merciless as Javert.  I listened to the panicked corvid's screams fade into the distance.

Something must have happened between them, something that wasn't about hunter and hunted.  Perhaps, given the season, it was that the crow had attempted some high-risk egg stealing, and the hawk was enraged and had slaughter on its mind.  It would not relent or give quarter.  It had gone to war.

Which, of course, got me to musing on our own primate predilection for violent conflict.  What is the purpose of war?

If one is a pacifist, and radically committed to nonviolence, then war can have no good purpose.  There is no legitimate end that can be served by brute force and harm inflicted on another, as the means define the ends.

This is the clearest and most self-evident reading of the teachings of Jesus.  It is also wildly inconvenient for any society that is predominantly Christian, as nation-states that are morally averse to conflict have a tendency to be devoured by those with no compunctions about war.  That, in part, was why the early church in the Christianized Roman Empire struggled so mightily to justify Christian participation in martial endeavor.

Just War theory, which rose first from St. Augustine's writing, casts boundaries around war, and as refined over centuries attempts to ensure that peace is always the goal of war.  Meaning, not just but also integrated into the prosecution of war itself.  Making efforts to avoid killing noncombatants, showing mercy to those who have been rendered helpless, and...most importantly...acting from right intent.  War cannot be just if it is motivated by vengeance, greed, or hatred.

Then, of course, there is the idea that war has only one rule: victory.  The goal is nothing more and nothing less than the destruction of an opponent and/or the seizing of their lands and property, by any means necessary.   From this perspective, concepts like honor, decency, or mercy only weaken martial endeavor, as they place undue bounds around the capacity to project power.  The rules of engagement are that there are no rules.  Do whatever you must to win, period.

Across this moral continuum, humankind has struggled to find a way, still bound to primal subsentient conflicts over territory and resource, to mobbing intruders with black wing and beak, to turning sharp talon and blind rage against those who trespass against us.