Normally, we have a dozen or so crows in the neighborhood, but every autumn, there’s a big crow family reunion up on Lloyd. Hundreds of crows.
This morning, the crows were all in the process of moving from the trees that line the field behind my house to the trees behind the houses closer to the Fontanel. They were all hollering at each other and a few of them were flying back to check on the stragglers.
One group of stragglers came with a whole army of grackles. It looked like two or three hundred grackles escorting ten crows. (We always have grackles in the neighborhood and it always seems like a lot, so I don’t know if this is more than usual or not.) Once the straggler group of crows got situated in the trees with the rest of the crows, the grackles flew back across the road and settled in the trees on the south side.
At first, I thought maybe the grackles were running the crows off? But then three or four crows flew over to the grackle tree, spent a second, and then flew back to the crows, and no one chased them off. They didn’t treat it like some kind of act of aggression.
So, I really do think those crows and the grackles are friends and hang out together frequently. Maybe those straggler crows were the locals that are here all the time so they know the local grackles? “Come, meet the whole family! It’ll be fine. They’ll love you. We love you. Just come.” But then the grackles got to the reunion and were like “Oh, oh, wow. That’s a lot of strangers. We’ll just stay in our own tree. But we support you! Don’t let Aunt Judith’s passive-aggressive comments sting.”
I don’t know.
At the end of our walk, too, Sonnyboy turned back to me with such a silly grin on his face and, for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what was so funny, but I was sorry to have missed it.
Tiny Cat Pants 