Murder most fowl

Dr. Scott Ferguson has problems with a murder. Oops. Best rephrase that. The popular Harrison urologist says he’s been inexplicably stalked over the past three months by a group of black-feathered stalkers formally known as a murder of crows.

And he has not a clue why this determined band has chosen him to pursue him daily.

“I come out to head for work each morning and sure enough they are waiting for me in the driveway,” he said, offering cell-phone photographs of crows strutting only a few yards from his front door.

“Then they follow me to work and wait all day in trees just outside the office,” again showing a photograph, this one showing them perched patiently in limbs just outside a window.

“When I leave for the day, they follow me back home and hang around until the next day when their determined routine continues,” he said. “I have no idea why this has gone on across all these weeks. I only know they have singled me out and keep up their pattern day after day. It’s actually gotten rather creepy.”

His experience sounded weird enough to share this morning, especially since I believe others can relate with their own mysterious bird experiences. This particular murder certainly appears from its actions to know something about Dr. Ferguson that isn’t readily apparent to anyone.

Considered among the smartest of fowls, crows are said to possess the average intelligence of a 7-year-old human. Who knows if they might also possess mystical abilities that stretch even into our psyches?

One article says crows have long been associated with both positive and negative symbolism. They can show up to inform one that things in life are always changing. The arrival of a crow could indicate a huge transformation for someone, according to the Power of Positivity website, raising questions such as: “Are you stopping your personal abundance (whether it be health, personal, or wealth) due to fear and anxiety?”

If so, the crow’s “mysticism and magic” can aid in one’s quest, the site says. “The crow’s medicine is a reminder that you are on the verge of manifesting whatever you have been creating in your mind. Allow those positive thoughts to guide you.”

As to possessing the intelligence to organize and follow Dr. Ferguson’s daily movements, an article on the ThoughtCo. website by noted science researcher Dr. Anne Marie Helmenstine, leaves no doubt that crows are in a class by themselves when it comes to fowl.

“They are so smart, we might find them a bit creepy,” she writes. “It doesn’t help that a group of crows is called a ‘murder,’ that they are viewed by some as harbingers of death or that the birds are clever enough to steal trinkets and food. A crow’s brain is only about the size of a human thumb, so how smart could they be?”

Helmenstine explains that, although a crow’s brain may appear small by comparison to a human’s, the question becomes the relation to the size of the animal. “Relative to its body, a crow’s brain and a primate brain are comparable,” Helmenstine writes. “According to Professor John Marzluff at the University of Washington’s Aviation Conservation Lab, a crow is essentially a flying monkey. Whether it’s a friendly monkey or more like a fiend from The Wizard of Oz depends a lot on what you’ve done to the crow (or any of its friends).”

But the good doctor insists he’s never harmed a feather on a single crow’s head.

While we might not be able to tell one crow from another, Helmenstine says a crow may be smarter than we are since it can identify individual human faces. “Marzluff’s team captured crows, tagged them, and released them. Members of the team wore different masks. Crows would dive-bomb and scold people wearing a mask, but only if the mask had been worn by someone who had messed with them,” Helmenstine writes.

She also says that should you think two crows watching you and cawing back and forth are talking about you, you’re likely correct. “In Marzluff’s study, even crows that were never captured attacked scientists. How did the crows describe their attackers to other crows? Crow communication is poorly understood. The intensity, rhythm, and duration of caws seems to form the basis of a possible language.”

Crows also can pass along grudges to offspring, including subsequent generations of crows harassed by masked scientists. Helmenstine writes, “Another case of crow memory comes from Chatham, Ontario. Around half a million crows would stop in Chatham on their migration route, posing a threat to the farming community’s crops. The mayor of the town declared war on crows and the hunt began. Since then, the crows have bypassed Chatham, flying high enough to avoid being shot. This had not, however, stopped them from leaving droppings all over the municipality.”

There’s lots more. While several animal species use tools in tasks, Helmenstine says, “crows are the only non-primates that make new tools. In addition to using sticks as spears and hooks, crows will bend wire to make tools, even if they have never encountered wire before.”

To test crows’ intelligence, scientists placed a floating treat deep within a tube. Crows being tested dropped dense objects into the water until the treat came into reach. In doing so, they didn’t select objects that would float, or ones too large for the container. “Human children gain this understanding of volume displacement around the ages of 5 to 7,” writes Helmenstine.

Crows also make plans for the future and reflect on how other crows are reasoning. For example, when a crow catches food, it checks to see if it’s being watched. If so, it will pretend to hide its catch but stash it in its feathers and fly off to find a new hiding place.

But if one crow sees another hiding its prize, it understands the game; it will follow that crow to find the new stash.

Crows have been seen dropping nuts in lanes to let vehicles crack them open. “They will even watch traffic lights, only retrieving the nut when the crosswalk sign is lit. This in itself probably makes the crow smarter than most pedestrians,” Helmenstine writes. “Crows have been known to memorize restaurant schedules and garbage days to take advantage of prime scavenging times.”

These birds even understand abstract concepts, like analogies. “Ed Wasserman and his Moscow-based team trained crows to match items that were the same as each other (same color, same shape, or same number). Next, the birds were tested to see if they could match objects that had the same relationship to each other. For example, a circle and a square would be analogous to red and green rather than to two oranges. The crows grasped the concept the first time, without any training in the concepts of ‘same and different,’” Helmenstine says.

All this considered, I can understand why Dr. Ferguson has been wondering just what these tenacious birds so capable of abstract reasoning, complex problem-solving and group decision-making are up to by so oddly attaching themselves to him for months. Strange indeed. It would surely be enough to set my own heart aflutter (sorry, couldn’t resist).

Now go out into the world and treat everyone you meet exactly like you want them to treat you.