THE CURSES OF YOUNG CROW

Anybody who still believes that crows don’t swear was definitely not in bed with me this morning. I was there, though, savoring the peaceful ambiance of a morning dream until it was shattered by a long, loud repetition of America’s most popular curse word, coming from a high branch of the chestnut tree. It's a term not much used out here in the Japanese countryside; it's mostly used in the big cities, where it has far more utility. I recognized the word at once, even though it was in Crow.

It had to be Young Crow. He probably picked the word up while strutting in the chestnut tree waiting for his mother to feed him, while I was down below, splitting knotty oak. (It has to be knotty to get a good swearstream going.) Crows are excellent mimics; they also use tools, and words are tools, so need I say more. Come to think of it, Young Crow must be the only crow in Japan that really nails the rhythmic and tonal niceties of the term. Lacking lips, he can’t quite get the F, but the enunciation is close enough to be effective, especially at that volume.

And in a bird so young! Until recently he'd been a big mama’s boy, strutting local summits like the chestnut tree, complaining about his hunger and lengthy solitude, calling over and over to his mama for more more more food, which she fetched to him as quickly as she could, back and forth from the vast larder that is my garden and its neighborhood, while she - much smaller than chubbyboy - got thinner and thinner as her tubby darling scarfed the general vicinity. Now he was grown enough to finally be on his own, and he was not pleased with the new arrangement.

On and on and on he went, cursing at all the ground around, much as my boss and later my drill sergeant used to do, and with nearly the same sharp and steady rhythm. I’d never heard any crow do this before, no matter what age or mood. It was damn impressive, I must say. And in a bird so young!  Just confirms my long-held belief that cursing is an elemental drive.

Young crow has got his own life to live now, in any case, and should be given the chance to tarnish it a bit, just as we humans do, take some of the glare off. As the more experienced party, though, I'd advise the lad to spend more time on his delivery and, over the years, be sure add a bit more salt.

Life does have its needs.

REALLY LOCAL NEWS 

• Wild pig invades property, ravages nothing in particular: “Just for fun of it” 

• Leaves filling culvert and accumulating on roadside await attention 

• Hornets nearly the size of  your hand invade carpenter bee nest in front eave; aftermath recalls Punic Wars 

• Crow stops using chestnut tree outside upstairs bedroom window for nationwide dawn announcements 

• Garden growing feral, organizing; home committee shorthanded, indecisive 

• Deer enjoys nightly snack of beautiful pumpkin leaves growing in all directions from compost pit outside garden fence; “succulent blossoms a special treat” 

• Fall of deceased oak awaited, chestnut going piece by piece 

• Green wheelbarrow with yellow handles full of broken garden pots; mental committee allegedly forming 

• Cherry limb that should have been trimmed a long time ago now popular woodpecker resort 

• Uncleaned rain gutter bitches and moans even in light rain 

• Brady hears loudest thunder in his life, in clear midday, right outside house; suspects unilateral attempt at stimulus 

• Mushroom logs confused by weather have no idea where they are 

• Anonymous midsized bird begins enjoying Brady cucumbers 

• Water pressure falls unexpectedly one morning for no reason 

• Generous village neighbor leaves some of her surplus sweet onions beside our door 

• Local farmers visit upmountain paddies now and then  

• All calm as rice grows 

Crow Hates it When I Do Stuff

Out this afternoon in the clear cold mountain air, after a morning of uncertain rain that happy-ended with another of those perfect mountain-to-lake rainbows in full dayglow color that spoil us rotten out here-- another typical day in the mountains.

I was out in such a day with the big bamboo rake, intending to pull the tattered fragments of temporary firewood-cover plastic sheeting that had been blown off, stomped on, torn to tatters and tossed up into the plum tree by one of those the histrionic winds we get up here, that stormed through around dusk yesterday while I was in a big city office with no rainbow.

As soon as I opened the door to the deck I sensed that Crow had been waiting for me on his perch in the top of the big cedar out front, where he hangs out when he's got issues. Which is always. Sure enough, he was mumbling up there already, starting off on a grumbly string of tirades as soon as I came out and grabbed the big rake from where it was leaning against the deck rail, a procedure that clearly meant action on my part.

Crow hates action on my part. He's on my case whenever I start doing something outside, where he always lives and thinks he owns. When I began to walk down the steps from the deck, clearly with some intent or other - doesn't matter what - he started in, loud enough to make me think of earplugs, saying things like: "What the hell ya doin now, walker?" "Where ya goin down there?" "And what's with that rake, you gonna fix somethin?" "You think you own this place?" (jumping up and down on his branch) "You got no rights here, pal, I own all this!!" (I'm paraphrasing and editing here, for brevity and cultural clarity.)

The irony of Crow talking about rights was not lost on me. As I walked over onto the adjoining property (that really gets his darkness going), over which extended the plum tree branches that had caught most of the wind's plastic vandalism, Crow flapped all huffy over to the top of the utility pole right on the roadside there so he could be closer to whatever I was doing to his stuff, get a better look from an open platform, big beak yakkin the while. "Hey what are you doin over here, this ain't yer property either, it's mine! What the hell you up to now? You can't fool me, walker! I got my eye on you!" (Still paraphrasing; not that much nuance in Caw.)

As I reached up with the rake and began to pull down the nastily entangled ugly plastic fragments from the branches, i.e., actually doing something to achieve an objective, Crow hit the ceiling, so to speak. In an attempt to drown him out even just a bit, I started talking back (I often look like I'm talking to myself, but sometimes I'm not): "I only used this sheeting in a pinch, to cover the firewood; originally, I got it to make garden tunnels for early planting, but the monkeys made a mess of it (no real need to paraphrase here, this is pretty much word-for-word), so it's been sitting unused in the shed, and I--" "Hey, why am I explaining to you, Crow? You don't give a damn about plastic or monkeys!" "You don't own this property anyway! I own that property there, and I own this plum tree too; you don't, you're just full of caws!"

As I went on talking loudly, wrestling down the plastic and getting all the fragments into a bundle, something I said must've hit a nerve 'cause Crow took off in a big dark huff and flapped on down toward the Lake, I could hear him yelling for a long way; folks in the village were gonna get an earful.

It's a lot quieter up here now without a crow, and the plum tree looks a lot better without that plastic sheeting all up in it.

My plum tree.

On my property.

I do stuff here.

You Talkinna Me??

This morning I was out doing the usual early Saturday round of little chores that build up during the week. I'd earlier scattered the kitchen refuse atop the compost pile - now nearbelow the cherry tree - and was bucketing the last of the wood stove ash from the ash heap to scatter along the feet of the biwa (loquat) and natsume (jujube) trees, the blueberry bushes and the mountain azaleas that line the inner road, then to sprinkle the last of it all atop this morning's compost. 

The bucket was heavy with damp ash; I was just passing head down beneath the cherry tree when a blast of raucous sound from above made me look up. There in the branchy shadows blustered Mr. Crow, who owns this turf. Japanese crows can be uncomfortably loud even from a hundred meters away, but Mr. Crow was right there, yawping in my face. He wasn't flying away, as he normally would have done from this sudden proximity; he was staying put, hopping mad on a low branch: I had entered his dark presence just as he was planning his daily breakfast selection from the compost buffet, freshly laid out for him below. There was beaksome orange peel, onion skins,  tomato trimmings, cabbage core, tea leaves, broccoli stems, eggshells, you name it, all interlayered for Crow delight, what a feast it would be-- then I blundered into the picture and he became the essence of umbrage.  

I just stood there staring at him; he just hopped there, flaring and glaring. Then he raised his head and let out another blast, whoa loud under that canopy of leaves. Crow had never confronted me directly in this way, or this close up; only a couple of meters separated us. This was a bit too near even for my taste. I stared at him some more. He tilted his head and fixed me with his blackest eye: was I gonna get the hell out of his face or what.

For me, the next move was clear. I'd been waiting a long time-- about 35 years, actually. "You talkinna me??" I said, in my best Nooyawkese. He looked dumbfounded. "You talkinna me??" louder this time, more ominous, more threatening, half a step forward, just like De Niro, except this was for real. The big crow beak hung open in dark disbelief, like he could not believe his ears; like he'd seen that movie too! And I was using that very trope, out here in the -- semiwild, which was Crow's alone! What was Crow culture, then, if this was also an element of the human... whatever?

I seemed to sense a deep rift in the crow cosmos; a psychic shock wave passed through me. Crow looked here and there to his heavens for affirmation, as though he'd just read all of Nietzsche or its corvine equivalent. He gave a little croak upward. Forget about the select breakfast buffet. Human and Crow had just had a cultural exchange. We had crossed a line; there had been a merging of artistic elements. If this got out, things would ever be the same. 

The question now was, would Crow tell the others, or would he keep this bright secret for his own? Mumbling to himself, he flew off into the upmountain forest, likely to a distant higher branch of contemplation where he could be most alone-- as though he had to think about it. I'm sure he'll keep it all to himself, like that whole thick slice of bread he got not long ago. He'll never share this historic experience with another crow; crows don't do such things. 

But humans do.     

HARDBOILED WITH FLOWERS

I was outside around dusk tending to an old potted flower as my good botanical deed for the day when I heard the noise: an odd, seemingly random, yet somehow intentional noise, an attention-getting noise, an insistent rustling in the duff among the cedar trees just upmountain--

Normally such sounds are naturally irregular, like a thrush hunting for bugs among the leaves, the hopping, leaf-scattering noise varying in incidence and intensity with the hunting action, like the wind. This noise had a slow, scattery but rhythmic incidence and always the same loudness. That never happens naturally, except perhaps with water. But this was animal. Attention getting. Huh? I kept looking to see what it was; it sounded kind of large; then on the third or fourth try I saw between the trees that it wasn't a bear or a fox or a deer or a wild pig,which don't make noises to attract humans anyway; it was only crafty Crow. Who...doesn’t... make... noise to attract humans either...

He wasn't doing anything specific, he was "as though" just sort of randomly shuffling along in the leaves, not stopping to feed as a thrush or other hardworking bird might do, no: I could read him like a dark book, he was making all that noise to see if I moved, and if it was really me, because I was near where he wanted to go, i.e., the compost pile, his favorite dining emporium in these parts, like Capone had in Chicago. Here, though you can get fruit peels and other impossible luxuries, you name it-- pineapple crowns, even, and if it was me Crow would have to wait, and who knew how long; Crow does not like waiting (Al didn’t either), let alone abandoning his reservation to another crow.

Anyway, when I turned my head and stood a bit, the better to see him, he had achieved his immediate purpose: it was me and I was there. With no longer any need to move, Crow just stood still in dark impatience. He knew it was me now, and I now knew it was him (we have our history): he was The Mighty Titan. He knew it, I knew it, he knew I knew it and so on down through the infinite maze of crow/human intermentation. So as he stared at me darkly, mulling over the fact that I had moved and so was real, I said to him in the deepening silence - in a voice to scare a crow and so gain the psychological upper hand - if there is such a thing with winged creatures - that I knew he’d done the plastic bag job and was The Mighty Titan the authorities are looking for; he should come clean, he'd feel better.

From out of the darkling forest came that icy look, you know that look, you’ve seen it a thousand times after dinner in any of the smoke-stained questioning rooms on any of that relentless crime show that replicates with all those different titles, where at some point you’re expecting repentance on the stony face of some non-beaked thug across the table from a hard-boiled detective not holding an old potted flower at twilight and saying that if the thug just confessed the detective would do his best to try for a minimal sentence, maybe just one of those electronic monitoring bracelets or something, but instead he gets that look, that icepick look that says: "You can’t hold me, you ain't got nothin'!"

And Crow was right, I had nothin. Purely circumstantial. He flew away in recidivist disdain and I went into the house with some lettuce I picked instead. As I was rinsing the leaves in the sink, Crow and his moll flew into Chez Compost for dinner, selected a nice long golden apple peel and wafted it to their reserved loveseat in the cherry tree, where they shared and squawked sweet nothings like all the innocence in the world. 

There are countless crime stories in nature too, where justice takes care of its own.

CROW ADMIRES THE DAFFODILS

Crow comes gallumphing in over the garden, settles on the telephone wire that runs along the road up the mountain, turns his big beaky head this way and that like he's admiring all the exquisite natural objects that would delight any tasteful individual, any connoisseur of the lovely-- like the cherry blossoms up there, say, but there aren't any yet, the con doesn't work from the start.

So he looks down as though to admire the bright new daffodils there by the oak, but he’s really checking out my shallots. I happen to have observed that he flopwinged in from the north, yet is sitting on the wire facing north; he turned around after landing, who does he think he's kidding, does he really think I'm still new at this? He's checking out my garden while pretending to be a nonchalant dilettante of the sylvan environs, what a poseur; makes me laugh like a crow, and he does not like that, no, he is not pleased, fixes me with a dark gaze over a stern beak.

He's a big one for sure, eats well, he's probably the Baby Huey I posted about a few years ago, couldn't stop caaawing for his mama to come back and bring him some food, he was so alone and starving, the big baby, his weight bending the chestnut branch, he was bigger than his mother and kept her on the wing I tell you, now he's like a lounge lizard in a tux looking for an easy mark, but he must know me somewhat by now, which is maybe why he's putting on this act...

He raves over those lovely daffodils, all white and yellow, great fragrance, yeah sure, I can see his beady eye counting my beans, they're those snap kind he likes, but they're covered with netting drat, because I know about crows, he likes my shallots too, but also netted and also drat, the chard is uncovered but he hates chard and this access is a disappointment. The shiny onyx eye beading at me seems to cloud over, but he's remembering for later, I can tell; he enters corvine calculating mode, forgets where he is, that I'm staring at him, getting his number.

He's thinking that the netting may very well come off those foody beans in a couple weeks, leaving them ripe for the taking on Thursdays and Fridays - when I’m in the office - and those spring onions too; then there are those promising young strawberry leaves over there, with no netting either, puts that in his potential summer dessert column; plus that's a likely spot for tomatoes right there, melons over there, zucchini, hmmmm... All going into his dark memory maw, the way crows operate but he has no idea I know this.

He concludes unhappily for now that there are NO bean sprouts NO strawberries NO naked beans or beakable young onions - What food then is this moment? What nourishment, this empty frame of time? He gets carried away with the drama part sometimes. But the mask of discrete connoisseurship soon falls away and he starts looking further afield: is that another garden over there? Now he's flopping across the air to act nonchalant for some other gardener, hopefully a novice with little crow experience...

Better keep the nets over everything till I've eaten it all...

WHY GOOD CROWS GO BAD

This morning as I was making tea in the silence that verges a clear-sky sunrise - it was still rather dusky - out of the corner of my sensitive tea-making eye I noticed a large, dark shape shoot by outside just above the deck, where large, dark shapes rarely shoot by at any time of day.

I looked out the big window into the garden to see what it had been, and who was it but Dr. Crow. He was flying hard, had taken a brave and unprecedented shortcut right over the deck, which had always been a Dr. Crow no-no, since one of those featherless biped conundrums could pop right out of a doorway and grab him, teach him to say "Nevermore" or something.

Why did he break his rule and fly over the deck I wondered, why is he flying so hard when nothing's chasing him and there's nothing much going on? Then when he flashed by a second time I realized he was searching for a secure location, because gripped in his beak was an entire slice of bread, the equivalent of a week's salary for a crow, even a doctor.

Right away I wondered where he'd gotten a whole slice of bread up here on the mountain, but then I thought: he's a crow; of course he can get a whole slice of bread up on a mountain. He landed in the meadow across the road, then immediately flew back, straight across the deck, empty-beaked; he had hidden the bread in the grass!!

A moment later he was whizzing by again, straight as the crow flies, with another slice-- you could practically hear him panting, he was flying so hard in his hurry to get the heist all stashed, but this time he headed in a slightly different direction, off through the trees; he would hide this portion of his treasure in another place he knew about.

It was a haul; he had hit it bigtime, and was stashing it here and there in his version of the Cayman Islands. Soon he'll be seen in only the finest trees, smoking big cigars, a sultry crowette on each wing and no apparent source of income, used to work for Goldcrow-Sachs.

KARMIC DEPUTY

Given my former lifestyle and its related Karma, having made it to this age I'm familiar enough with the receiving end of the Big K in its many forms, and with the volatility of the Karmic Exchange. This morning though, was something new for me.

As I was freewheeling through the village down to the train station, I approached the little Shinto shrine that sits right by the roadside midvillage and always has, probably a shrine there 1000 years ago. It's tended mostly by the elder ladies of the village, who keep it clean, put flowers there in season, come up the mountain past our house to cut sakaki branches for it in winter, put some sake there, and a rice ball or some mochi, with incense on special days. Like every religious structure, it's about a lot more than religion; it embodies the local spirit, reflects the care of the community. The tenets of religion are actually the least of it by now - the whetherness of gods and so on - it's the collective face of the village that is kept clean and presentable to all who pass by, a symbol of their unity. To let it slip into dilapidation would be unthinkable. To violate the shrine or its trappings would be unhuman.

A description that fits Crow perfectly, but he of the darkness couldn't care less about such folderol, it being morning, he being hungry and lord of it all anyway. He always knows where the food is. Monkeys do too, but Crow, an early riser with wings, was there first, filching a big fresh rice ball from the shrine altar. He was just digging in, on the very altar itself, when yours truly, a spontaneously deputized agent of the Karmic Division, came quietly freewheeling down the road.

Crow's dark eye spotted my approach; he stopped beaking rice long enough to grab the rice ball with both taloned feet and take off fast, but fast was no longer an option, given the dead weight that is a rice ball. High was no longer an option either, so crow had to fly low, and in only one possible direction away: i.e., across the road right in the path of Karmic Agent Brady, who was quickly drawing nearer with weighty retribution, leaving but one heartbreaking way to escape the impending karma: by lessening the overall weight. So crow did the unthinkable, what is pretty near crowly impossible: he let go of the rice ball in mid-air, let it fall into the road where somebeast else could get it, in order to gain the speed and height he needed to avoid the jaganath that was speeding toward him, me atop the hell on wheels watching the whole show with amazement that Karma was using me as an agent... Apparently I had turned a spiritual corner of some kind, which is news to me.

It's probably not cool to complain after being Karmically deputized, but I wish the crow had been a monkey...

I KNOW YOU'RE IN THERE

While working on words upstairs, I heard an unusually loud call from Crow, the one who loves pineapple and hangs close around here a lot、 in hopes of more. He was so loud in fact that I thought he must be close above me on the roof; then not long after I heard a hard rapping on the thick glass of one of the big living room doors downstairs (visitors from up mountain who come by the inner road sometimes knock there).

I got up, went over to the loft railing and looked down to see who it was, and there was Crow, pecking at the glass! BOOM! BOOM! He pecked a few more times and, rumblecawing the while like a mafia wingman, tilted his head to look through the window and examine the inside of the house (he knew there was an inside!) as though to see if anyone was there, then he crowed again. To me, peering down from upstairs, the tone of it sounded a lot like "I know you're in there, where's my pineapple? I saw it in the kitchen window! I know you're in there... Fork the fruit over if you know what's good for you! I know where you live!" etc.

Then he hopped up onto the table by the door to get a higher look inside - I don't think he spotted me up there peeking over the railing - then one of his goodfellas called and he flew off, rumblecawing intimations of his return.

I guess I better peel that pineapple if I know what's good for me.

CROW DOES PINEAPPLE

Crow has a mad passion for pineapple. Bet you never thought you'd read that anytime soon, but veracity comes in strange forms. I wouldn't have mentioned it at all -- because, like you, I'd never even put crows and pineapple together in the same thought, and likely never would have -- except that a couple of days ago, after peeling a tasty pineapple, I put the strips of peel in with the kitchen garbage, which I then took out to the compost pile where the next day it would be covered with ashes from the woodstove.

Yesterday, on my way to dump the ashes, as I passed a nicely secluded area near the compost pile but behind the shiitake logs beneath the cherry tree, I spotted a couple of pineapple skin strips the flesh side of which had been burnished to a leathery sheen by must have been thousands of beak pecks. Every little nook and cranny (and there are many on the back of a pineapple skin, if you've ever looked carefully after a crow has been at it) had been stripped of every possible fiber of pineapple flesh until there was nothing there but the shiny ripply back of the pineapple skin, a sight rarely seen. Although I tried my best, I could not help but remark that the skin was absolutely impeckable. Certain sights have odd effects upon the solitary mind.

When I went out later to stack some wood I disturbed Crow, who had been alone with his treasure and now burst from that same spot, bearing in his beak against the afternoon sun what looked very much like a golden strip of fleshy pineapple skin. Seems he'd stashed them somewhere around there, where they wouldn't get firewood ash on them, and wanted to be alone with this prize beyond all prizes.

I thought he'd seemed a little giddy lately.

Coming home down the evening mountain, tired from heavy labors, in the dim light by the roadside I see a bareleafed persimmon tree, laden with bright orange globes like a year of morning suns-- Atop the toppest moves a silhouette of black crow, long beak dipping into soft orange lusciousness-- Ah, the food that colors are...

Crow in cedar
beside open window
diggin' Stan Getz

DIALOG WITH CORVINUS MAXIMUS

I was out making kindling in the late afternoon today when Corvinus Maximus, with the classic Roman beak, stopped by on his branch of the chestnut tree and began to harangue me at high volume, cawing on at length about how uncooperatively I've been handling the kitchen garbage these days when I dump it on the compost pile or something, he's non-stop with the complaints - I've been dumping woodstove ash at the same time and right on top of the kitchen garbage - how is he supposed to make a living, how can he find anything there amid all those leaves, let alone eat it, am I trying to poison him or interfere with his livelihood, meager as it is, not to mention scaring him and his friends the other day by the way, and even worse, putting nets over my garden with all those delectations there, did I know how hungry his mother is, and not only that and on he went, he has so many woes, his life is as dark as his outlook and no one treats him right, no job, reduced to scavenging etc.

He could go on forever and I'd never finish the kindling, so I just gave him a dose of his own medicine and started complaining loudly back, more eloquently and less selfishly I hope - though he didn't want to hear a word of it - about how he had upset that stuff on the deck just the other day, and broken into a trash bag out front, and eaten all my soybean sprouts that time, and crapped on my new car, I too went on at length, I have a lot of complaints against Corvinus Maximus and we have no other mutual court of justice so I just laid it out there on the air for all the world to hear, even though it was just he and I-- but like all crows, though Maximus can dish it out he can't take it. He flew off in the embodiment of huff, shoulders hunched, yelling complaints, his black toga trailing behind. But he'll be back.

CROW GETS CHUFFED

I was out there this fine early evening finishing up with splitting firewood (what else? actually, I also earlier transplanted about 500 onion sandwiches worth of red and white onions) when I heard Dr. Crow up there atop his pole, where he likes to make random stops during the day to gather key information on general Brady activities (such as onion planting) and where at evening he always makes his final stop to survey his vast realms, make sure everything is buttoned down for the night just the way he likes it, before winging off to his forest penthouse.

But the sound I was hearing from the good doctor was not his usual raucous yet commanding note; it was more like a caHOINK, caHOINK, caHOINK, caHOINK, ongoing at regular deep-breath intervals. Finally I looked up and shouted to the dark silhouette up there: “Whadda you, been hangin’ around with pigs or sumthin?” (We’re completely informal amongst ourselves up here on the mountain.) But then my eyes focused and it wasn’t Crow I was talking to, it was a much bigger silhouette, in fact it was a huge pinecone of feathers up there like I’d never seen, going caHOINK, caHOINK, caHOINK, then my eyes focused more and I saw the scimitar beak: it was Master Hawk, standing austerely silent in his humungifying pineconeness. So where were all the caHOINKs coming from?

Then I saw Hawk turn and look down like a king at a peasant, and out from behind the pole, hopping mad on the wires below Hawk, came Crow, caHOINKing up at the usurper of his rightful place, trying to be annoying enough to get Hawk to take wing, because then Crow would have the advantage and could chase him away. Hard to believe, but in airborne tangles, floppy-flying Crow is more agile; but when sitting there like that in Crow’s fave spot (and right at Realm surveying time, no less!) Hawk had the upper wing-- all he had to do was put on his impressive featherbristle show to double his size, and it was working.

Crow would be just about to attack but then think better of it, honing his razor beak overandover on the wire and mumbling Ok, Ok, this time I really mean it, you better watch out, and then a little bit of a Crow feint and those huge bristly wings up there would instantly spread their WHOA! shadow and Crow would have second thoughts a fourth time and then a tenth (birds have lots of time for this kind of stuff). Finally Crow cawed The Hell with This and flew away with a huffy wingbeat yelling an angry hacking sound you could tell he was really pissed, he never flies that straight or with that intensity, grumbling all the way to his penthouse.

Hawk savored his victory, remaining proudly bristly as he surveyed HIS realm, which interestingly included one strange featherless biped, engaged in an odd activity involving what appeared to be segments of trees.

THE BIRDS

There are a lot of interesting birds around here. I don't mean interesting species, but interesting birds. Individuals. Real characters. Some of them are complete mysteries. When you live where this great a variety of birds actually do their thing, you get to see that they have character, for example the manic warbler, and the crazy bird I’ve never spotted that shouts "What the hell?" over and over at every Spring sunrise, then there's Dr. Crow of course, couldn't go without mentioning mister dark wisdom himself, much referenced in these ethereal pages-- or the hawks, the swallows, the pheasant in lust or the ducks in love--

For recent example - this afternoon in fact - there's a certain bird, the screaming blur that hangs around here and is highly secretive about his true identity (I suspect it may be a brown-eared bulbul, but I've never spotted him in well-lit stillness), he blends in so well with the gray lower branches of the cedars where he mainly seems to hang out cloaked in the darkling invisibility he prefers, all in perfect keeping with his gothic mood, because although he's very territorial, he's also extremely paranoid at all times of year (which for a bird is really extreme), so whenever I go outside in this leafless time and that bird is within 50 yards of the house he spots my sinister movement and screams "Look out everybirdy! The monster just came out of that unnatural structure there and it's coming for us, it's moving this way with giant claws, it has two legs but no feathers! Fly for your lives! FLYY! FLYYYY! FLYYYYY!" And he keeps that racket up until everybirdy within 100 yards has flown to safety in fear of their lives, he himself taking off at the last minute, still screaming for all he's worth, leaving behind only a dancing branch just before I can grab him with my long giant claws and devour him whole. Interesting bird. Don't really know him; just a gray blur streaking off screaming into the dusk of the trees.

Then there are the frantic tiny feeders who come by once or twice a year in large numbers and scour every inch of every tree for insects and whatever they can find in the way of avian fast food. Some weeks ago Echo put up a pretty realistic sort of 3D sticker butterfly high up on the big glass doors by the weeping cherry for when the grandgirls came over the holidays, and when a few days ago those birds arrived to scour the tree, every five minutes during bird-party time one of them would spot the delectable butterfly hovering right there midair in delicious stillness (talk about out-of-season but who cares, it's like caviar in NYC) and dive for it before any other bird could get it, hit the glass BONG!, flutter stunned to the deck below and stand there wobbly for a few minutes looking up, trying to figure out the meaning of glass and what the hell was that butterfly, then it would fly back to the tree and give another of its fellows a crack at the inviting delicacy.

This went on for a goodly time (Bong! Bong!) until a couple dozen birds had gone for the big bright snack and hit the deck, by which time I suspect some of them were sitting there in the cherry tree chuckling to each other, chirping "Psst: There goes Harry: Look: He spotted the 'butterfly.' Go for it, Harry, Grab that baby! Go get it, Harry, it's all yours! HA HA HAA!"

There's also the thrush that collided once with our big kitchen windowpane, and no thrush ever since has done so.

Like I said, when you get to be really neighbors with them, not watchers or hunters or simply-passing-byers and whatnot, bird personalities can be pretty surprising, anthropomorphically speaking. No doubt just as surprising as I am to them, aviomorphically speaking.

CROW REMEMBERS

Hurricane now gone by, trailing a heavily clouded sky. The big wind was called Man-yi or number 4, depending on whether it was Korean or Japanese - they both claimed it, had different predictions for the big windy spiral, neither of which panned out - the Korean weatherpeople expected it to plow up the center of their peninsula, the Japanese ditto expected it to roil its way up the center of their archipelago, posing a serious wind and rain threat to every major city, indeed, every village and house in the country, but they didn't give regular updates on tv as one in a focused world would expect.

Surf the tv channels urgently for the latest and all you got was it the usual celebrities cooking and eating, the usual celebrities in silly quizzes and the usual celebrities in hot tubs, they just carried on with the the always startling vacuousness of regular programming - such as that is - in the hours after warning the nation of imminent weather disaster. Which approach would have been disastrous had the hurricane performed as the weatherpeople predicted-- there would have been no time to batten down, evacuate, whatever; just thank the big wind (the weather-p as wrong as they so often are), that it pivoted slightly at a crucial point and just broadshouldered its way along the side of the country, with pretty strong winds and heavy rain...

Yesterday afternoon, after the rain had stopped, out in the stormedge, the sky was empty of life except for a crow, of all birds. As I watched him way up there quietly doing his thing, it came to me that back in the way-ancient days, when the animals made their early tradeoffs, the crows traded aerodynamic skills for the kind of lowdown savvy that enabled them to survive yet be lazy, a quality that over the eons of crow-cunning evolution has led to the uniquely non-aerodynamics that crows exhibit today, such as understanding the nature of trash bags and the potential value of shiny objects. But apparently they've never forgotten what they gave up in exchange, as I saw in the sky.

You know how crows have always flown since the big tradeoff, all wingknuckles, gawk and bentfeathers when it comes to serious aerodynamics, outflown and pestered all the time even by sparrows. Well that crow was recalling what joys his kind had once embodied, he was ecstatic at being able to fly so fast, even moreso that the hurricane was doing all the work. He wasn't about to go sit down in a safe tree like every other bird, including the hawks-- he kept gawkily climbing, spreading those big black wings and speed-spiraling in wide circles alone, now and then gliding straight then diving swiftly even as a hawk: he was remembering the ancient but alien feeling of speed and elegance, wanted to do so for as long as it lasted.

I kept expecting maybe a YIHAAA! or corvine equivalent, but being savvy he wasn't reckless. He was silent with a kindred to the concentration one summons in zen archery, after a target unknown but remembered, a black bundle of nostalgia in a darkening sky.

As for me watching - and you too, I hope - may we so savor own hurricanes...

GRUB GRUB

Last summer in my hurry before leaving for the states I sectioned and stacked a half-cord of oak where it was most convenient at the time, beneath the plum tree, and obverse to the prevailing wind. As a result the wood couldn't dry adequately, so the wood beetles and fungus-cultivating ants renovated it into an insectivoral Beverly Hills Grand Hotel. In further consequence, this morning I was out early continuing the task of stripping the damp bark off the sections under the watchful eyes of butterflies, dragonflies, a frog in his niche in the deck joinery, and Dr. Crow, who was up in the chestnut tree burbling over the prospect. He knows that whenever I do this I uncover handfuls of fat white wood-beetle larvae, some the size of Wichetty grubs, that dine on the oak cambium layer and into the wood itself, and when exposed just fall to the ground and lay there invitingly, like crow antipasto.

When I first started splitting oak around here, splitting trunks 2 feet in diameter at the time, a villager stopped by to watch and commented that if I found any of those big white oak grubs, they're really delicious, a traditional local delicacy, like Osuzumebachi (giant hornet) larvae. I passed on it at the time and have since continued to do so, though the grubs are as big as shrimp, and I'm sure that in a time of no food they'd make quite a tasty (and organic) gumbo. Anyway the Crow family has known all this stuff for eons, and he couldn't wait for me to leave his restaurant.

As I was working I kept hearing the acorns fall on my upmountain neighbor's ceramic tile roof, causing me to recall that unfortunately for my neighbor he hadn't thought, before he built his log house, to cut down the big oak or at least the branches that right overgrow the roof; and for a number of weeks this time of year, the crafty old tree releases its thousands of acorns one by one (like a machine gun if it's windy); the hard nuts strike the roof here and there like bullets, rebound all over the deck and against the glass doors, making a nutty racket 24 hours a day, waking my neighbor up at night. And of course the pattern of acorn ballistics is completely random, which is much worse; he lies there waiting...

Our chestnut is now also doing the same thing - something to be careful of when you walk under the tree - and its spiky missiles are much larger, thudding on the deck and rebounding off the big glass doors on two sides of our house, which can be startling in the dead silence of evening, but very considerately the chestnut does this only for a few days, and not during the night. Or maybe I sleep too soundly...

Enough of these musings; getting hot as we near noon, time to have lunch and let the good Doctor enjoy his antipasto.

O, WOE IS CROW

This morning in the early dawn drowse (did I mention the rain?) I heard right outside my window on a branch of the cherry tree - and then looked out and saw - a solo kid crow (think Baby Huey in black) grumbling and griping and murmuring about the cruel fate of his life, how poor and hungry, destitute, helpless and orphaned he was, boohoo sobsob mumblereumble, and how unfair this world was to such a worthily beautiful and deserving yet innocent unfortunate as he, abandoned, starving, unfed, moangroan, oh so hungry sobwail, all in a roiling guttural lament that went on and on until his much smaller, clearly undernourished mother came flying out of the rain with a big beakful of gourmet quality crow breakfast and shoved it down Huey's suddenly silent wide-open throat, he the while gurgling "mmm-mmm-boy that's good, delish, smack, chomp, slurp, more, more" and so on until Mama had given him all she had, when she flew off into the downpour to get more food for her very special, wonderfully helpless Baby Huey, who after preening his Ferrari body to a suitable sleekness returned to his endless rumble-bumbling lament, not going so far as to actually pull his feathers out in anguish, or fix up a nice strong noose on a higher branch, yet despairing at length over his foodless fate, chokesob, and how he could be abandoned here so very -gasp- hungry, while keeping a careful dark eye out for his chow-laden Mama, who would be back any minute with the next delicious serving he so eminently deserved. Adolescents don't differ all that much among the species.