Tuesday, January 13, 2009

I've long considered crows a bit of a "totem animal" (my surname supposedly shares a root with the Latin name for "crow" or "raven," and supposedly the "family crest*" has ravens on it).

They're also supposedly very smart - this video shows one bending a wire into a hook (tool making!) in order to obtain some kind of food item trapped within a tube.

And one of the comments** claims that a crow will turn around and memorize the face of someone who throws a rock at it. No idea at all if that's true but it seems delightfully creepy to me. (I imagine, late one night, a scratchy knock on the person's front door. They open it, to find a huge murder*** of crows, one of which is holding up a sign written in a wavery hand: "You threw rock at Grawk. Now you pay.")

I have also heard of crows (or maybe it was rooks) sliding down a snowy hill on their backs, apparently purely for the fun of it.

(*If you believe such a thing. I kind of doubt my family was actually grand enough to have such a thing, and the one presented as the family "crest" was probably made up in the 1920s or something by an enterprising unemployed artist who thought he could sell to folks with a pretension to aristocracy)

(** I generally do not read the YouTube comments; they seem to be one of the many refuges of scoundrels on the Internet these days. And the comments are one reason of why I would never, ever post video of myself doing anything - even playing a piece with great accomplishment and skill on the piano - on there; there will invariably be someone who uses the word "suck" or who comments on the imagined pulchritude or lack thereof of the female in the video, or who makes fat jokes. It troubles me to see how uncivilized people can be sometimes.)

(*** I take a certain pedantic pride in knowing that that is the correct collective noun).

1 comment:

dragon knitter said...

i have a friend who considers the crow to kind of be her totem. except her tagline on her blog is "she wasn't like any of the other crows."

go figger