The Carrion Crow is sly and cunning; courageous, but at the same time, cautious, and extraordinarily clever; it discriminates exactly between the farmer and the hunter, and allows the former to come quite close to him. Its sense of smell is very delicate; it scents carrion a mile away, under snow and earth. This bird is to the West what the Hooded Crow is to the East—from Austria onward through the whole of Germany and in Great Britain. It croaks hoarsely “Caw, caw, caw.”
The Carrion Crow follows the plough, and devours grubs and mice; it eats the insects in large quantities, and lies in wait for the mice about their holes. On the sea shore, it will seize a large muscle with its beak, fly up to a considerable height in the air, then drop the muscle on to a rock, so that the shell is broken to pieces, and the contents emptied out. The Carrion Crow steals and plunders the nests of the useful birds, spoils fruit and crops; but the great naturalist Naumann advises that these birds should not be too hastily destroyed, for they do mischief only for a short time, while during the rest of the year they make war on the numerous pests, and are of great service to the husbandman.
Since so much bird protection has been inculcated, these Crows are enjoying much more immunity from harm than heretofore. The result is that in some of our London suburbs the bold but handsome creature comes to feed with the small birds at our very doors in cold weather. I have often watched the ungainly yet cautious manœuvres of a Crow which has frequented my little lawn at Ealing. The letting of his heavy body down from over the ends of the outstretching bough of a great elm, which has its trunk on the other side of my fence, so as to quietly drop on to the grass on the feeding side of the fence—is very comical. He evidently wishes to do it as slyly and as quietly as possible. Caution and cunning are inherited traits with the once persecuted crow. I confess to a liking for him, but then I am not interested in the preservation of game. He pairs for life too, and is therefore a respectable character so far. And he too is useful as a scavenger, and takes also plenty of rats as well as insects and grubs. When the pair are on the hunt together, one watches whilst the other feeds. He greatly resembles his greater relative the Raven, in shape and plumage, and gamekeepers hate him even more than they do the latter bird, which country folks generally regard as the more ill-omened of the two.
Speaking of my own pet Crow, a new maid I had came to my bedside early the morning after her arrival, to inform me that she could not possibly stay in my house as a Crow had croaked about her bedroom window “something dreadful.”
In Thibet, we read, there is an evil city of Crows, and Hiawatha is said to have known of a land of dead crowmen. The Crow, according to the old Vedas, fell from Paradise, and in Norway there is “the Hill of Bad Spirits,” where the souls of the wicked fly about in the guise of crows. Happy the present generation who are taught more toleration for “all things both great and small.”
The Carrion Crow has always done good work as a scavenger, for which he has had small thanks. The poets have all combined in holding him up to execration.
“My roost is the creaking gibbet’s beam
Where the murderer’s bones swing bleaching;
Where the clattering chain rings back again
To the night-wind’s desolate screeching.”
It is good to believe that “sweetness and light” are gradually getting the upper hand; and the gibbet with its ghastly burden, and most of the cruel superstitions concerning some of the most useful of God’s feathered creatures are alike a thing of the past.
