SOCIALLY UNATTRACTIVE
“STEADILY WINGING THEIR WAY
TO THE CHOSEN SPOT”
CHAPTER IV
THE CROWS
OF all the wild life among the dunes, the crow is the most active and conspicuous. He is ever present in the daytime, and his black form seems to be intimately associated with nearly every mass and contour in the landscape.
The artists and the poets can love him, but the hand of the prosaic and the philistine is against him. His enemies are numberless, and his life is one of constant combat and elusion. The owls seek him at night, and during the day he meets antagonism in many forms. Some ornithologists have tried to find justification for the crow, but the weight of the testimony is against him. He pilfers the eggs and nestlings of the songsters, invades the newly planted cornfields, and apparently abuses every confidence reposed in him.
He has been known to take his family into fields of sprouting potatoes and, when the plants were hardly out of the ground, feed its members on the soft tubers which were used as seed. Even very young chickens and ducks enter into his economies. He is an inveterate mischiefmaker, and by those who fail to see the attractive sides of his character, is looked upon as a general nuisance.
He cannot be considered valuable from a utilitarian point of view, but as a picturesque element he possesses many charms. Notwithstanding the sins laid at his door, this bird is of absorbing interest. His genteel insolence, his ability to cope with the wiles of his persecutors, and his complete self-assurance may well challenge our admiration.