Chickadee Tracks and Sign
Chickadee tracks are left in the lightest of substrates—dust, soft mud, snow. They are classic small-bird tracks, difficult to distinguish from those of other birds. For a challenge, notice that the two inside toes form a unique straight line. The toes of finches, swallows, and warblers tend to splay farther apart, and finch tracks generally curve slightly inward.
Other signs of chickadee presence include cocoons that have been pecked and torn and small pecked holes in insect galls. Many bird species feed from cocoons and galls, but chickadees and their relatives the titmice have such small bills that the openings they make, instead of being clean round holes, are messier series of pecks and jabs. Chickadees are tenacious in this, as in all things.
Inside those pretty little feathered heads resides a highly developed hippocampus, the part of the brain that deals with spatial relations. Chickadees are one of many birds that cache food. When a chickadee comes to a feeder, it takes a moment to choose a seed, then flies away with it, rarely staying to eat it in place. The same is true when chickadees find seed-bearing plants. If you have a sunflower with a heap of shells beneath it, they were likely dropped there by a goldfinch, or squirrel, or other seed-loving creature—chickadees take their seeds away with them. Watch as the bird tilts its head to eye the seed pile. That pause at the moment of choosing is not random; studies reveal that a chickadee will select the nicest, biggest seed it can see in the heap. It takes the seed to a nearby branch and eats it, undisturbed by other birds, or it caches it for later eating. Chickadees have been observed relocating a cache without difficulty after twenty-eight days, and the temporal limit of their spatial memory beyond that is not known. They hide seeds, berries, and even insects under bark or dead leaves, among lichens, beneath clusters of conifer needles, and within other natural safekeeping crevices. We think they relocate their caches using visual cues from the landscape, memory, and orientation by sun-compass.
While we hand out Hallmark cards picturing chickadees alongside flowers, bunnies, and unfortunate examples of iambic pentameter, the chickadees themselves are hissing like snakes, mobbing owls a thousand times their weight, navigating by the sun, engaging in a whole language beyond our hearing. Scientific knowledge of the chickadee’s behavioral range is relatively recent, but many humans have long understood that the chickadee is filled with tiny depths and expansive truths. The Spearfinger legend from the Cherokee tradition is good and creepy, and full of insight into chickadee ways. Here is my telling of the myth:
Utlunta was an ogress who lived in the high hills. She loved the cloudy crests, where the edges of earthly truth were blurred and clouded. Her body was covered with a stony crust, and on her right hand there grew a terrible finger—long, pointed, hard as obsidian, and sharp as a blade. Her name, Utlunta, is translated in English as Spearfinger. Utlunta loved two things: she loved dancing on the rocks in the hills, hearing them crunch beneath her heavy feet, and she loved to hunt and eat her one and only food—the livers of children. “Liver, I eat it! Su’ sa’ sai’!” she would sing as she danced, brandishing her deadly finger.
Utlunta was a shape-shifter, and her favorite form to take was that of an old woman, a village crone that a child would easily mistake for a beloved auntie or grandmama. Her happiest days were those in autumn, when the Cherokee villagers would burn leaves of the lowland trees, forcing the chestnuts to the ground. The smoke aided Utlunta’s deception, and she would skip gaily down the mountain, anticipating her meal, and waving her deadly finger with glee. “Liver, I eat it! Su’ sa’ sai’!”
As she approached the village, she might pass an old woman and assume her face, her shape. Her dance would change to a hobble as she made her way undetected among the children gathering hot chestnuts in baskets. “Oh, my dear boy,” she would croon, as she slumped decrepitly onto a boulder, “can you spare a chestnut for a tired old granny? Come, child, sit on granny’s lap.” As the other children wandered among the smoke, happily filling their baskets, Utlunta, fast as a striking snake, would plunge her spearfinger into the child’s back, give it a horrible twist, and pull the fresh liver out. In this way, she would gather a whole bagful of livers to carry home and feast upon as the sun set. So quick was she in this operation that death by her hand was said to be painless. Sometimes a child would wander back to his home feeling a strange listlessness but not knowing that his life was draining away, and days later, Utlunta would hear the keening and wailing of the child’s parents rising to the mountain crest. At this, she would smile. Oh, these villagers are so stupid! So easy to fool!
Utlunta had a secret, and this too made her smile. She would gaze down at her fat wrist, bulging beneath her palm, and watch it pulse with life. Her heart! Utlunta’s heart was not in her breast, but in her wrist. This made her all but invincible to those stupid Cherokee warriors, always aiming their spears at an enemy’s chest. All the villagers finally resolved that their fear was too strong and their sorrow too deep, that too many children had been lost and they had to find a way to fight back. The warriors gathered with their spears and plotted how they might kill the ogress. The medicine people warned of her shape-shifting ways and told of her penchant for the form of an old woman. Together the villagers dug a deep pit, lined it with green wood branches carved into sharp spears, lit a fire to attract the deceptive Utlunta, and waited. As predicted, Utlunta was drawn by the smoke, and when the form of a humped, wrinkled auntie hobbled through the bushes, the warriors laughed. “You want us to kill a little old crone?” But when Utlunta walked fearlessly into the pit and was unharmed by the hundreds of spears, the warriors’ laughter changed to silent fright. They shot her repeatedly with their sharpest weapons, and Utlunta stood there, crushed spears that had broken when they hit her stony chest all around, and mocked them. The soldiers were alarmed—they were almost out of spears, and what would happen then? Utlunta could wander the village at will, killing them all. It was then that out of the highest skies a small bird appeared, a chickadee, with a tiny bill, a happy call, and a shining black cap. The chickadee flitted, as chickadees do, down into the pit, and it landed on Utlunta’s wrist. There it sat, looking at the warriors with its bright black eyes and at all the villagers, calling seet-seet-seet. The villagers wondered, but the warriors understood the chickadee’s message. Here! Seet-seet! Strike here! And so the village was saved by the message of the chickadee. The Cherokee people, who had always loved the chickadee, now revered her, and they gave her a new name: Truth-Teller. This chickadee from the highest heavens stayed with the humans until, after many generations, they behaved too cruelly to the earth for her presence. She flew skyward, and her shadow image remains in the chickadees we see every day.
What is the truth-telling of the chickadee? It resides in her knowing the location of the misplaced, the displaced heart, and in her willingness to tell us where this heart is kept. Certainly I fail the chickadee’s truth-telling, almost constantly. I fail this truth-telling by neglecting to bring my best intelligence to the observation of a common creature, preferring instead the distant, the showy, the seldom-seen. I fail this truth-telling by proclaiming that I long for wildness and yet refuse to see it daily, where it flits in front of my face. And when I do stop to watch the chickadee, I fail her truth-telling again by wanting to keep my wild nature just as this bird appears on the surface (pretty, simple, charming, and at a pleasant distance), rather than as she is in her depths (tangled, tenacious, audacious, startling, sacred, difficult, frail, intimate with death). With chickadee, we turn again to the common creatures, the wild community of home; we open to unflinching intimacy and relocate our own misplaced hearts.
Crow
A Storied Intelligence
We do not need scientific research to tell us that crows are smart—our own good, natural commonsense intelligence tells us that. We know crows are smart when we see them drop a nut or snail in the road and wait for a car to run over the treasure and crack its hard shell, a kind of large-scale tool
use. We know crows are smart when we see them play with falling flower petals, with found feathers of another bird, with sticks they drop to swoop and catch. We know it when they speak—in one of the hundreds of individually meaningful vocalizations making up crow language—to one another (I am here! Food! Predator! Assemble! Good night, my small chick…); to our cats and dogs (tormentingly, and probably disparagingly); to hawks, owls, raccoons, and even robins that approach their nests; and yes, to us (we all know the call that means Get away from my nest! or, if we have been regularly feeding crows, More food now!—with nary a please). We know crows are smart when we realize that they recognize a particular human, and when they scold and dive-bomb this person—only this person—whenever he passes, even picking him out of a crowd, sometimes for years on end. We know crows are smart when we come upon them observing their own dead, standing in utter silence over the bodies of family members.* We know crows are smart when we see them lined up on the electrical wires over our heads holding urban-planning meetings to which we are not invited, with subject matter to which we are not privy.
Crows are one of the most insistent animal presences in the urban bestiary, avian or non-. Their population growth in general mirrors human population growth; the upward-swinging graphed curve of human and crow numbers over time overlie each other almost perfectly. Many of the other birds—the house sparrows, pigeons, and starlings—that thrive alongside human habitations have been introduced to this country. Crows are native, wild. Yet they have shown a startling adaptability to human presence and ways, attracted to human towns once by our agriculture, and now by our refuse. We give crows plenty of roosts and nesting places in our gardens and street plantings, provide warmth in the heat sink of urban environments, and although crows (though they appear bold) are wary of humans and would prefer to avoid us, the easy food sources provided by urban and suburban ecologies are irresistible. We remove swaths of native trees and replace them with open, easy, wormy lawns. We leave our cat and dog food outside, and convenient water dishes beside it. We fill our trash cans with bones and pizza crusts and old pieces of berry pie, but we don’t fasten the lids. We toss fries and popcorn outside McDonald’s and Target. We attract smaller songbirds to our homes with food-filled feeders, and these birds’ nests provide eggs and—even better—moist nestlings to round out the urban crow’s diet. If it weren’t for us humans and our dogs and cars disturbing them (crows build their nests higher in urban trees than in rural ones, to keep away from us), these birds would find themselves in a veritable crow heaven.
Crows are a polarizing force in the urban wild. Some people love them, some fear them, some hate them. Some dream them, some keep them as pets, some know them as totems, and an astonishing number choose to permanently ink the crow’s image onto their bodies in soaring tattoos.* All agree that they are uncannily intelligent. I argued in my book Crow Planet that observing and learning to understand the crows among us is an ideal way to deepen our sense of place in the urban landscape. They show us the movements and behaviors of a fascinating bird species, yes, but also those of other creatures. A crow ruckus is the surest way to a wild story. When I opened the front door to gather mail the other day, there was a crow on the wire, scolding madly. Looking around, I spotted a nearby squirrel, but surely that wasn’t enough to upset a crow (they tend to have the upper hand with squirrels), and the squirrel was anxiously chattering too. Even a little Anna’s hummingbird perched near the crow was protesting. Finally I looked down to see a young raccoon just a few feet below me, at the bottom of my porch steps, exploring my front garden. “Hello,” I said, halfheartedly attempting to shoo him away. He just stood on his haunches staring at me with a nonchalant stillness, and I wondered how it had taken me so long to notice him. Crow, squirrel, hummingbird, human—clearly I am the dullest animal in the bunch. With practice, you can pick out crow alarm calls or the less urgent scolding calls from the baseline crow language. Always follow—they bring news of the universe. But the presence of crows cuts two ways. A planet on which urban crows are thriving in such numbers is a planet with too much concrete—a substrate to which very few nonhumans can adapt. It is a place where we can be informed by the wild creatures in our midst even as the rich diversity of wild animals is replaced by a few dominant, resourceful species. Crows render both wonder and warning.
Crow Tracks and Sign
Most urban passerines are too small and light to make tracks in anything but the lightest dust or snow. Crows are unique in that they are just heavy enough and just big-footed enough to make tracks in everyday substrates like garden soil or a bit of mud at the sidewalk’s edge. Their tracks will be the largest of the classic bird tracks you will find (gulls’ are bigger, but webbed). Notice the somewhat pronounced toe pads and the lightness in the center—the metatarsal, or middle of the track, barely registers. Next to a stubbier pigeon track, a crow’s track will appear longish and elegant.
Other indicators of crow presence and activity include:
Crow pellets. Owl pellets get all the glory, with their fur and tiny skeletons, but many other birds, including crows, also cast pellets. Crow pellets are full of grains, seeds, and sometimes bits of gravel. In season, they are berry red. They are not as tightly formed as raptor pellets and often fall apart when they hit the ground, amorphous—we are stepping over them all the time without knowing it. Watch for crow pellets beneath your neighborhood crows’ favorite perches.
Nutshells. Crows are expert at excavating the meat from acorns and other shells. A crow will wedge the nut into a crack on a log or some other crevice to keep it in place, or hold it tightly under one foot while pecking at it with its dexterous bill. Jays and some mammals will open acorns as well, but look for the crow’s large, jagged, messy holes. The punctures will often go through to the other side of the shell. If the crow is excavating an acorn weevil (a favored prize) instead of the nut meat, it is typically just the cap side of the shell, the opening to the top of the nut where the weevil resides, that is pecked.
Feathers. Many bird feathers become a mystery once separated from the bird, very hard to identify. But crow feathers are big and black and difficult to mistake. In autumn, after the young are fledged and the adults are finished with the energetic task of nesting, much of the population will molt, and over the course of a few evening walks around the neighborhood, you might find enough feathers to make a whole crow! We collect them and keep them on the table inside the front door during this season, picking out the primary and secondary wing feathers and arranging them in order.
Because of their size, crows are not thought of as songbirds, but they are in fact a large passerine in the corvid family, which includes jays, magpies, nutcrackers, the rooks and jackdaws of Europe, and ravens. It might appear on the surface that a crow is simply a smaller version of a raven. In addition to size, there are several other physical differences between crows and ravens. Ravens have bills that are proportionately larger than crows’, their bodies are bulkier, and the edges of their tails are diamond-shaped, whereas crows’ are more or less straight. In flight, ravens are “heavier,” not as winsome and agile as crows. All of this takes some experience to pick out in the field, but one big help is that in most of the places that humans densely congregate, the big black corvid we commonly see will in fact be a crow, not a raven. Crows live socially and in cities; ravens are more solitary, and in general more rural (there are exceptions, and as anyone who lives in Seward, Alaska, will tell you, there are towns where ravens gather in numbers).
But physical differences are just one part of the equation. For a long time, the common narrative ran that while both crows and ravens are intelligent birds, ravens have bigger brains and are smarter. It’s true that ravens can often problem-solve at a higher level, and even their play can be more complex. But the advanced social structure of crows has endowed them with a social intelligence that may in some ways surpass that of ravens. The vocalizations that crows use to communicate among themselves are more numerous and n
uanced, and crows appear to have a more refined awareness of the death of their kind (particularly of family members), and even a sort of “crow justice”—attacking or ousting crows that are physically or socially aberrant. Crow nesting is more intricately social, often involving a helper, typically young from a previous year that are not ready to breed (crows don’t nest until they are three or four—late among songbirds, most of which breed in their first year). If you are observing a neighborhood nest and regularly see three adult crows in attendance rather than two, the third bird is likely one of these helpers. The helper will function as a kind of crow nanny, keeping the nest in good repair, helping to guard and feed the female as she broods and later the young after they hatch. It was hypothesized that such helpers increased nesting success, but field studies proved otherwise—crow nests with or without helpers fledged the same number of young. What researchers did find was that crows that had been helpers fledged more young of their own when it came their turn to nest! Evidently the practice and observation makes them more successful parents. So yes, crows and ravens are similar and closely related species but also unique, exhibiting the wondrous capacities of corvid intelligence in their own lives and ways.
Recent scientific observations of captive corvids (and the YouTube videos accompanying them) have spurred our collective imagination. Betty, the New Caledonian crow who quickly fashioned a piece of wire into a hook with which to retrieve a small bucket of food in a deep plastic tube, is the most famous. New Caledonian crows have since demonstrated the use of meta-tools—they will use a small stick to retrieve a bigger stick that will allow them to reach a piece of food. And after the Betty sensation, scientists for the first time observed New Caledonian crows constructing tools in the wild (though presumably native Pacific islanders were well aware of the practice). The crow will carefully choose a stick, pull leaves and bark selectively off the end (in effect sharpening it), then use it to evict grubs and insects from their hiding places or to outright stab them. The tool-use tendency is strong in this species, and evidently heritable—New Caledonian crows hatched in captivity will choose to use tools to perform simple food-extraction tasks, sometimes even if they don’t need the tool to do it. English rooks in captivity have also learned to make wire hooks, and they can solve other complex problems, such as choosing exactly the right size stone among several options to drop down a plastic tube and force the release of a food morsel. Rooks do not appear to use tools in the wild. But as far as rocks go, I have seen a crow in my neighborhood constructing a tiny crow cairn, attempting to create a small stack of stones (it got only one stone to balance on another but tried for a third for over half an hour as I watched with binoculars, bemused, from my open study window). A friend of mine saw another crow doing the same thing, this one close to the Seattle Art Museum’s downtown sculpture park; perhaps the bird was inspired by the Claes Oldenburg. Captive magpies are the only nonprimates known to exhibit self-recognition when shown a mirror. When a yellow sticker is placed on the magpie’s feathers and it is shown its reflection, the bird will attempt to get the sticker off. Most animals, including those we consider to be the most brilliant (such as our own dogs), will not make this connection.
The Urban Bestiary Page 19