Yesterday I saw a crow perched on the edge of our birdbath. He was facing away from the water, looking southeast, perhaps at one of the neighborhood cats. I was surprised at how big he was.
In the early 1990s, crows were very common in the Washington area. I saw many in Wheaton, where we then lived. A stand of trees near Rockville Pike and Randolph Road, a few miles away, was said to house 500,000 of them. The number looked implausible on paper, but if you happened to be in that area about sunset, and see the dense stream of crows approaching it, you could believe it. Then about 2000 West Nile virus arrived, and devastated the crows. It was at least ten years before I started to see them again.
At some point in the late 1800s, John Hay wrote the poem "Crows at Washington", which includes the lines
The dim, deep air, the level ray
Of dying sunlight on their plumes,
Give them a beauty not their own;
Their hoarse notes fail and faint away;
A rustling murmur floating down
Blends sweetly with the thickening glooms;
They touch with grace the fading day,
Slow flying over Washington.
As far as I know, John Hay and John Quincy Adams were the only men ever to publish their poems and serve as U.S. Secretary of State. Of Adams's verses I have seen little, and that satirical. I was not impressed by what I have seen of Hay's Pike County Ballads, which achieved some fame. Yet the University of Toronto's Representative Poetry Online site quotes a story saying that George Eliot found one of them deeply moving.
Do your crows make the same raucous plaintive sound that our Little Ravens (crow family) do? If so 500,000 would send me mad. Hay says "hoarse" cries, but is generally positive!
ReplyDeleteI may not see quickly see your response to this due to the vagaries of blogger but I'll try to check back.
I think they must sound like the Little Ravens, though Wikipedia's article doesn't have a sound clip. My recollections of the crows heading for the stands near Rockville Pike are all from winter, when our car windows were closed, I guess because it was generally then we were out that way near sunset.
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