My Neighbor’s Dead Crow
Is he trying to tell me something?
I don’t know how to put this, exactly. If you’re faint of heart, turn back now. But one afternoon, about a month ago, I came home from a run, walked into my house, and came face to face with a dead crow.
OK, not right inside, but directly in sight from my front door. It was impossible to miss: Just over my back fence there it was, tied up by its tail feathers, hanging off a wire hook attached to the top of a makeshift wooden tripod.
A few things to note:
*Because of backfilling, my yard is several feet higher than my neighbor’s. It takes effort to make things from his side appear above my fence, at my eye-level. That is not a natural height for anything to exist besides a roof or maybe the hair of an NBA player.
*My neighbor is a good dude. He is kind and quiet and leaves a tin of butter cookies on our doorstep every holiday season.
*I am not a quick emotional reactor. Because of this, I am a very good to have around in an emergency situation. In the moment, I am calm and helpful. I will then mull over whatever happened in vivid detail for the rest of my life.
I looked at the crow, and had three thoughts:
1. Tom is a Wiccan
2. We have dropped too many tiny basketballs in Tom’s yard
3. Tom has it out for some crows
Because this is the 21st century, I could immediately whip out my pocket computer to investigate my hypotheses. A 7-year old /Wicca reddit thread quickly assured me that Wiccans believe (only?) in alive crows as omens, and that odd numbers of them are good while even numbers are bad. I axed the first hypothesis.
I stood in my backyard and made some noise. If Tom were out, he’d know I was also out and could yell over the fence to tell me to keep my balls where they belong. He did not. I did not rule out hypothesis number two, but given other evidence regarding Tom’s behavior over the past decade (see: butter cookies), it seemed unlikely this is how he’d solve a neighbor dispute. But the pandemic broke people, so I placed hypothesis #2 on the back burner as a minute but possible choice.
I stared at the crow, slowly spinning below its hook. There was something fat about it. Something not desiccated enough. Its legs were perhaps rubbery. I jumped on Amazon to find a crow just like it being sold, with a twin, for $35.99. It had 3.5 stars with reviews like, “keeps the nasty crows away from ripping up the grass, and “We placed it on a birdbath. A crow saw it and screamed.”
Tom surely had gotten into it with some crows. I wondered what he’d done to piss them off. I’ve heard crows are pretty savvy. If you hurt one, its family will avenge it. If you’re kind, they’ll leave you trinkets from their adventures. I suddenly wanted a crow to bring me things. I contemplated leaving out an offering of whatever crows value so one would become my friend.
But befriending them would entice them to return, likely undoing all the progress Tom had made in hanging the crow. From a crow’s perspective, our yards are but one tiny plot of earth. They do not understand the American concept of land ownership and property lines. Or do they? They’ve never bothered me.
One Amazon commenter said you need to move around your faux crow, or “they will figure it out. They aren’t gone for good, you need to place it occasionally.”
A couple of weeks passed. Still the crow hanged. Same spot, right at eye-level. My best friend came over and asked what we’d done to Tom.
I left my house to go for a run. There, sitting on my car parked on the street, was a crow. It looked hurt. It did not move. I ran for an hour. When I returned, the crow was still on my car. I walked to get the kids from school. When we all got home, we stared at the crow, still there some four hours after I’d first seen it.
We went inside to get it some water and placed the plastic tub on top of the car. Neighbors gathered. An old woman who lives a few houses down from Tom told me to call the fire department because they’d call animal control who would rescue and rehabilitate our broken crow. I don’t know if this is true, because right when I pulled out my phone, the crow freaked out at the enclosing crowd and tried to flee.
It appeared to be injured just under its left wing, and didn’t get much lift. Just enough to get to the other side of the street and bonk into another neighbor’s house before falling into her yard. This neighbor is an animal lover, everyone knows, always hosting rescue dogs and cats. She’ll help it, we all told ourselves, and we dispersed. I secretly wondered if Tom had hurt it.
As we were lying in bed that night, my husband decided to tell me a story. This is not typical, so I figured it must be sort of important. He had taken Issa, our golden retriever, to Walgreens with our daughters a few weeks earlier. He’d stopped to talk to someone in the parking lot, and while nobody was watching her, Issa put her mouth around what hubs described as a “derpy crow” because it let her do that.
When he noticed, he yoinked Issa away, and the crow didn’t immediately flee. But when it did, it bopped into several parked car tires before rejoining its family to, I’m sure, squawk, “OMG I JUST SAW DEATH AND IT SMELLS LIKE DOG BREATH!”
I am now convinced my family is the reason for Tom’s crow problem. But because crows are, in the end, animals, and land division is, again, a human endeavor no crow would understand (or can they?), they’ve gone after his yard. A larger yard, with trees.
And I believe that’s why, going on a month now, every day when I walk through my front door, I’m face to face with a dead rubber crow.
