Growing Up Crow

As kids we had a wide assortment of animals we kept as pets.  4 or 5 dogs over the years, a metric ton of fish, hundreds of gerbils, hamsters, tiny little turtles all named Two Bits and a solitary crow named Tar Spot.  His name always reminds me of the hours my childhood mates and I spent lounging on the curb and popping the bubbles that formed in the tar.

Tar Spot came to us through my brother Duz, then a student at Xavier University.  He and two of his friends had gotten the tiny crow-lings.  It was my brother Skip who became both Mama and Daddy to the ever hungry baby.  He spent hours foraging for bugs and worms.  All of us soaking bread in milk and stuffing it into his always gawping mouth.  Honestly I don't know how crow parents do it.  For us it was a full time summer job keeping the crow fed.

Tar Spot lived in the unfinished basement and I'm sure my parents were less than thrilled to have the crow poop on the pool table.  We covered it until he fledged to save them excessive angst.  Tar Spot grew and grew and grew.  One day, my brother Duz decided it was time for Tar Spot to learn to fly.  He had been making flapping motions, training his flight muscles for weeks.  I don't know if Duz was impatient to have his charge take flight or if he had actually done the research about crow development to know he was of an age to do it.  I suspect the former.  He took Tar Spot outside and flung him into the air.  Tar Spot responded by opening his wings and gliding to a perfect ten point landing on the roof of the house.  Thing is, he had no idea how to get down.  He was not raised in a tree and did not understand gravity and how it would work to help him fly.  And his inaugural flight had been human assisted.  So there he sat cawing in his most pitiful voice, the one that made us jump to shove food in his gullet.  We waited hours, but the crow did not budge.  My mom called us from work to see how things were going and asked to talk to Duz who we calmly informed her was on the roof retrieving the crow.  She laughs about it now.

Eventually, Tar Spot figured out how to stop, start, land and fly all on his own with no further help from Duz (I'm not sure, but I think my mom had something to say about teaching the crow to fly that kept Duz out of it).  He spent his days happily foraging in the woods behind our house.  Eventually he lived outside all the time.  He was always a hungry bird and quickly learned which windows had people behind them.  He would perch on the sill in the morning and gently peck the window to wake us up when he was hungry.  Morning for a crow starts very early.  He was very insistent.  As the lightest sleeper, I suspect I was the favorite target.

Some mornings when I would go out, his breath would smell horrible.  My mom said he must have eaten wild onions in the woods which seemed odd since I never saw him eat plants ever.  The mystery persisted until one of the neighbors fessed that he had been pecking their window too and she had been feeding him the leftover garlic bread from the night before.

The thing most of us remember about him is that he would come if you called him (and sometimes even when you didn't).  His dark form would break away from a tree in the woods and he would swoop in looking for a place to land.  We ALL learned to give him a good perch by sticking up our forearm parallel to the ground.  Those who didn't, learned very quickly since he would use your head as a perch instead.  My brother Tom's favorite trick was to lure unsuspecting neighbor kids or cousins into the back yard and to wait for Tar Spot to come winging in.  At the last minute Tom would duck to tie his shoe and the crow would acquire an alternate target upon which to perch, generally the cousin or neighbor kid's head.  That of course scared the shit out of them.  Tom thought this was funny.  He still does some 40 years later.

Tar Spot stayed with us for about a year, until a neighbor called to complain about the crow eating the tomatoes in their garden.   No they hadn't seen the crow do it.  But Tar Spot was blamed nevertheless and he paid the ultimate price.   I still don't think he was the culprit and based on my own tomato thieves, I suspect that it was really those blasted little squirrels who did the damage.

Duz took Tar Spot to East Fork Lake which seemed the other side of the world to me then.  There he let him go and we all tried to believe that our friend would have a happy life in the wild there.  For the next few years, I would look wistfully at every crow and wonder 'Is that him?'  My brothers would go so far as to call his name, but there was never a response.  He was simply gone.

In the years since then, I have learned a lot about crows, ravens, corvids of all kinds.  Crows are social animals and each rookery speaks its own dialect, patterns of speech that crows learn from their parents.  As Tar Spots parents we had taught him none of this.  Crows that do not speak the local dialect are pecked to death or chased away.  East Fork Lake is the center of the largest crow rookery in our area.  Leaving him there was akin to dropping him behind enemy lines without a translator, this poor little crow who only spoke English and was more human than crow.  His life seems too steep a price for a few tomatoes both then and now.  How I wish my parents had handed those neighbors money to buy tomatoes and told them to go fuck themselves.

Tar Spot became part human because of his life with us.  His life did not go uncelebrated as we in turn became part crow.  We are his legacy.

And so it remains to this day.