Crows Read Free

performing aerial stunts off the tops of tall buildings. But house crows are also found on the burning grounds, where the dead are laid on their funeral pyres for cremation.
    Common raven, as pictured by Rev. F.O. Morris in his A History of British Birds, 1851.
    DEMON BIRD

    D uring the witch craze in Western Europe, ravens and crows were sometimes feared as demons. In Strathnaver, Scotland, for example, in the seventeenth century, an entire congregation of prayerful souls was seized with dread when they sensed a spectral raven in the house with them. Evil emanated from this shadowy presence, and the people were paralyzed with fear. A day passed and then another, and the group decided to sacrifice the householder’s son to the bird spirit. And so they would have done had it not been for the intervention of a servant. Eventually, neighbors rallied to tear the roof off the house, and the raven’s dire spell was broken.

    Mrs. Stene-Tu and her son, members of the Tlingit Raven Clan in southeastern Alaska, were photographed in their potlatch dancing costumes around 1900.
    As an intimate presence in both life and death, the crow is revered in India as an evocation of the ancestors and is respectfully fed both at times of bereavement and during an annual period of remembrance called Shraadh.
    What if it is true that the crows hopping around on the boulevard embody the memory of the beloved dead? Or more portentous yet, what if in their dark shining they represent the mystery at the very heart of existence?
    In Native communities around the Northern Hemisphere (particularly the northwest coast of North America and eastern Siberia), people cherish the living tradition of a spirit Raven, or sometimes a spirit Crow, which imparted its irreverent and ribald spirit to the world. A rapscallion of the first order, with no regard for decorum or sentiment, this great Raven created humans and then, more or less whimsically, condemned them to death. According to a tradition of the Tlingit people, recorded in writing in Wrangell, Alaska, in 1909, Raven made two attempts to produce humans, once out of rock, a project he abandoned because it was too slow, and once from a leaf, an easy-to-use material that suited him better. “You see this leaf,” he said to his new creations. “You are to be like it. When it falls off the branch and rots, there is nothing left of it.” That is why people die, the elders said, because
Raven had made them from leaves that perish. According to the Australian Aborigines, by comparison, the great Crow created death because he wanted to have his fun with the widowed women.
    But if Raven was opportunistic and often thoughtless, he was not malicious. He did the best he could for his new creations. Through trickery, theft, and seduction, he provided his people with everything they needed for survival: daylight, fire, rivers full of salmon and eulachon—even the knowledge of how to make love. The lusty Raven was only too happy to provide a demonstration. His spirit was so much like a person’s that he could transform himself into a human whenever he wished and pass himself off as a baby or a member of the opposite sex, usually with dire and twisted consequences. When Raven was on the scene, loved ones died under questionable circumstances, and precious possessions disappeared. And if his misdeeds were often wryly hilarious, his frailties were also unsparingly recognizable. But perhaps it is not surprising that the Raven and his people had so much in common, since each had created the other in his own image.

REVOLUTIONS IN EVOLUTION
    Seen with the transforming eye of the imagination, the crows and ravens of mythology resemble people in fancy dress, a noisy and good-naturedly venal tribe of avian superheroes. But what happens when we consider the genus Corvus with the cold, hard gaze of science? Is there any factual basis for positing a special kinship between crows and humans?

    At first glance, the evolutionary