Week 10Winter Week 10
Glossy and rowdy / and indistinguishable. / The deep muscle of the world.
—Mary Oliver, “Crows”
Even in late February, many of the most interesting creatures are still asleep. The cheery chipmunks are bundled into their tunnels beneath my house. The queen bumblebees are curled into their chambers in the soil. Somewhere nearby, the resident rat snake is also underground, and at the park the snapping turtles and bullfrogs are tucked into the mud at the bottom of the lake. The overwintering butterfly chrysalids are sleeping in the garden, and the monarch butterflies are sleeping in their Mexican wintering grounds. Everything is waiting for the world to wake. My flower beds are nothing but a jumble of dried stems and matted clumps, a collection of dead vegetation. Even remembering the purpose behind this untidiness, I take no comfort from my garden in February.
I miss the singing most of all. During winter we do have songbirds in Middle Tennessee, some of them yearlong residents and some of them visitors passing time in this warmer climate until they can return to their nesting grounds up north. The fussy chickadees will call out to defend their claim on the bird feeders. And the Carolina wrens who sometimes nest in the hanging pots under our eaves will stand on a fence post and chirrup their irritation into the gray sky. But none of this is singing. It’s not the same as waking into a morning full of birdsong.
And yet.
Winter can be the best time of year for backyard bird-watching. The mockingbirds are finally interested in the suet balls they disdained all summer, and the gorgeous blue jays, their bright colors even bluer against the sepia backdrop of winter, carry away the unshelled nuts I set along the deck railing. The dark-eyed juncos who spent all summer in the far north are here now, hopping around in the leaf litter, picking up the safflower seeds the tufted titmice push out of the feeder in their search for the sunflower seeds they prefer.
Now the downy woodpeckers, with their striped wings, come and go from the peanut feeder, not nearly so cautious in my presence as in the days of summertime plenty. They swoop to their feast with the characteristic undulating flight of their kind. In the years when I get around to hanging Christmas garland, I always try to arrange it in a way that mimics the arc of their flight.
On especially cold mornings, every songbird in Middle Tennessee, it seems, comes to my back deck to enjoy the heated birdbath. There can be six or eight bluebirds gathered in a ring around the edge of it, dipping their beaks into the bowl over and over again while the air above the warm water puffs into fog in the cold.
In winter the red-tailed hawk sits unmoving in the bare branches of trees, a perch where she is invisible to me at any other time of year. Now I can see even the claws on her great yellow feet extending beyond the fluffed feathers she has drawn around them. The crows know very well that she is there, and they have a few furious words for her as she waits, calmly surveying them as they swoop around her head, close but not too close.
Of all the backyard birds, the corvids—the crows and the blue jays—are most familiar to me. They don’t nest in plain view as the bluebirds do, or stand on the fence posts and sing like the mockingbirds. They don’t conduct daring aerial exploits before my very eyes, close enough to touch, as the hummingbirds do in summer. I love the crows not because they are exotic but because they are kindred creatures. I see in them my own kind.
Corvids are uncannily like us in unexpected ways. Ravens have been known to windsurf at the beach, holding a bit of driftwood in their feet for ballast. Crows will ride down snowy roofs on flat objects they put to use as sleds. Again and again, they haul their toy to the roofline and toboggan down the slope in what looks for all the world like playing.
After they quarrel, crows take care to make up with one another, but they can recognize human faces and will hold a grudge against someone who frightens them or causes them harm. They can even teach their children to maintain the grudge, the corvid equivalent of the Hatfields and McCoys. When a crow dies, other crows gather around its body. To mourn? To bid their friend farewell? We don’t know, but they are our nearest avian kin, living together in families, creating tools, and solving problems—even, in a way, making art out of found objects. They stalk along the ground as though they own the place, like certain people I know.
Despite their legendary intelligence, I have the same issues with corvids that I have with raptors. I love them, but love is sometimes a struggle, especially during the breeding season, when they poach the young from songbird nests to feed to their own young. During migration seasons, crows will devour the exhausted songbirds themselves. Nothing is harder to love about the natural world—or the human world—than its ceaseless brutality.
But in winter, crows become my favorites again. They are perfectly designed for this season, black against a gray sky, a three-dimensional silhouette. Unlike other birds, who grow quiet in winter, crows continue to speak to one another even on the coldest days. American crows remain together as a family through the seasons, with parents and young from several nesting years working together to find food and fend off predators. I watch them grooming one another in the high branches: one crow will nibble at another crow’s head or neck, and the other crow will tilt its face this way and that, presenting the itchy places for attention, one by one. I remember the way my mother, when I crawled into the big bed between her and Dad, would run her fingers lightly down my arm, the way Dad would scratch my back. I think of the way I wiggled, the way I, too, twisted this way and that, to make sure they reached every inch of skin.
Crow families always recall to me my grandparents, who lost their home to fire when their family was very young and had to move into my great-grandparents’ house just down the road. There must have been a time when my grandparents considered moving back out, but they never did. Maybe they came to understand the practicality of a multigenerational household, the way there was always someone home to help with the children or, later, after my great-grandparents grew frail, with the older generation. Maybe they simply couldn’t imagine living apart by then. Maybe they just loved living together, all three generations in the same small house.
Those days are gone. Even during the pandemic, when the multigenerational household became more common than it had been for generations, my sons seemed to feel something almost like shame about coming home, as though home were by definition a place a child grows up to escape. How do you meet a life partner, or even just a date, if you have to admit you live with your parents?
This situation does not recall to them the stories they have heard of my grandparents, of my mother and my uncle, of Papa Doc and Mama Alice, gathered on the porch of a mild winter evening, while light streaked the sky and oak limbs creaked in the wind. How they sat together and talked. Or maybe just listened.
I am trying to listen.
Sometimes the neighborhood crows sit in the branches and call out, one to another, a talk that continues even as they fly toward their roost in the last light of these short days. The crow’s Caw! is recognizable to the human ear, but the birds actually have more than twenty different calls, not even counting the “subsong” sounds they make: clacking and cooing and rattling and clicking. I don’t know what the crows are saying to the other crows, but I like to listen in. It’s a gift to watch them living their intricate lives so visibly while the trees are bare. This is their world, but I have no trouble understanding what they are saying to the red-tailed hawk: Away! Go away! It may be their message for me as well.