There Goes the Neighbourhood
They are the loud neighbours that can be heard all over the block every morning. When they moved into my yard, I honestly thought about murder…murder of crows that is. I have been entertained by crows and their intelligent antics for years. I even dreamed about having a pet crow once but when the neighbourhood murder of crows expanded and moved into one of my trees for this springs nesting I couldn’t decide if it was a good thing or bad. Good for the nearness of entertainment and sharing the land with Mother Nature, but bad for the noise and the raiding and claiming my garden as their own.
I have tried to reason with the crows. At one point, I believed I was actually communicating with them with my near perfect imitation of their cackling caws but something might have been lost in the translation because, instead of them moving down the road to the next block as I had asked (in crow), they seemed to feel comfortable in my back yard. In fact, they seemed to be so comfortable in my back yard they were holding crow meetings and daily briefings at 4:40 every morning and would only end their crow meeting when I would appear in the yard. The nest in our tree was a busy place and even though one crow generally looks like the next crow, there seemed to be more than two parents feeding the three chicks, which means a lot of aunts and uncles. I felt sorry for the clan of crows when I found 2 of the 3 chicks, dead, at the bottom of the tree. They seemed to have some flight feathers and may have fallen while fledging…or was it murder! Crowicide! Did the surviving chick “nudge” his nest mates over the edge of the nest? If only I could speak crow I would investigate.
Sadly, the death of 2 chicks in the crow community did not stop them from having their daily 4:40 AM meetings and some of the neighbours began some random anti-crow campaigns, usually at 4: 41 AM, which entailed them yelling through their bedroom windows for the crows to “Shut the %&#$up”. More than a few times those yelling neighbours were encouraged by other neighbours to “shut the &%$# up” themselves, and that only seemed to encourage the crows to take part in the entire bedroom window debates.
I was inspired by the early morning debates and began to build a scare-crow to frighten and hopefully terrify the murder of crows in my yard. The arms and legs were foam pool noodles with some thick house wiring stuck though for pose-ability and with a pair of long-johns and a hockey jersey the only thing missing were hands (gloves), feet (boots) and a head…hmm. Where would I find a head? I went to the thrift store looking for a head shaped object ready to paint as a head and when I found 2 old beauty shop training heads for a twoony each, I knew this was going to be a fun project. With my hockey jerseyed, long-john wearing newly headed scarecrow, which was enhanced with sunglasses and a ball-cap, posed sitting in an old lawn chair holding a hockey stick he was indeed…scary and realistic.
In fact, he was so scary and lifelike he frightened the cat, startled Mrs. B a few times, gave me a few starts and when our old neighbour next door was holding a conversation with him, I knew he was realistic, but the crows had a different idea. The evidence was the crow poop on the scarecrow’s ball cap. Message received and the battle continues.