There’s Been A Death In The Family
The name of this blog is Urban Crows; a name I picked for its obvious links to earth science. Ha ha.
Three years ago, as a distraction from work, I started blogging purely for my own enjoyment. Could I write? Did I have the discipline to write regularly? Could I write anything remotely engaging that anyone would read other than my mum?
I had the naive goal of churning out lots of fascinating essays about the crows that visit my urban back yard, pushing back the frontiers of corvid behavioural science along the way. What a compelling subject, thought I.
But despite my best efforts to keep the blog a geology-free zone, it was hijacked, tied up and unceremoniously thrown head first back into the familiar world of mining and exploration by a couple of pieces on the industry. Much to my amazement, the mining stuff gained me a lot of subscribers, so the crows were quickly banished back to the roost. Know your audience is a key rule; go where the readers are. So be it. From then on I wrote about mining and geology with the odd piece on my musical diversions.
Crow Poo
Having said that, it’s well past time for a crow update. Things have moved on. Crows have come and gone -although they’re all black, the same size and sound the same so I can’t really be sure that this statement holds water- but more recently a slow moving tragedy has played itself out on my garage roof.
My backyard crow family has done what wild beasts do best; mate and make babies. And they’re getting ready to do it again, picking up grass and leaves for their new nests. I originally had 2 adults, who last summer turned into 5.
Much to my wife’s annoyance, they also learned how to expertly shit nasty white blobs all over my back deck and our black plastic BBQ furniture: one of their less endearing traits. Crows are very intelligent birds, and ever hopeful, I left a small power washer out back with a nice green hose pipe and a sign saying “Use Me You Messy Bastards” as a huge hint to them to clean up. To date, they show no inclination to help out. Quite the opposite. They decided they liked the washer; a fresh perch which afforded them a jaunty new angle of attack to squit all over the back steps.
Keep Out
Crows are territorial and hang out in family social groups in their chosen hood. The ones you see around your house every day are likely members of the same family. Fledglings will even stick around to help rear the next year’s chicks, so they have a social conscience of sorts. My birds’ patch is a couple of residential blocks in size, which they jealously protect from interlopers. I’ve witnessed many a corvid dust up in my back yard as strangers have tried to flap their way in and take over the bird toilet on my back deck.
Crows also do their best to chase away other animals, like raccoons, that occupy the same ecological niche. Next time you see or hear your neighborhood crows going batshit crazy, screaming blue murder, it’s odds on there’s a raccoon somewhere in the bushes going about its daily business. Ravens and eagles provoke a similar reaction, although it’s a brave crow that takes on an eagle without back up from its posse.
My crows have an uneasy relationship with our pet dog, Hazel. She can’t catch them and they know it, but she doesn’t. They sit on the deck rail, squawking away to taunt her. When I open the back door she belts out onto the deck, jumping at them hopefully. But despite being part poodle and passably intelligent as dogs go, she’s yet to work out that they always manage to fly away.
It’s The Pox I Tell You, The Pox.
Last summer, I noticed that one of that year’s youngsters was looking pretty sorry for itself and was making more obnoxious squawking noises than the other crows. It was having trouble gripping on to overhead wires and tree branches and sat forelornely on the garage roof all the time. Some nasty looking boily things were starting to show on its claws, and something warty was protruding from under its right eye.
I spent half an hour on google typing in various search terms:
- nasty boils on crows feet (lots of photos of people’s feet and eyes with ugly warty things)
- warty things on bird feet (lots of photos of miserable looking chickens)
- ugly growths on crow feet (lots of photos of miseable looking crows + a few of people getting botox)
- Donald Trump & Ted Cruz boils and warts (one can but hope)
The internet verdict was clear: my crow was suffering from Avian Pox, which sounds like something Air Canada’s cabin crew get from cleaning airplane toilets. Another alternative was the Harry Potter-ish sounding Bumblefoot, which I’m sure is why my grandma wore support hose when I was a kid. But the more I read and the more I watched, the better Avian Pox explained the symptoms.
“Avian pox develops slowly in affected birds. The most common clinical sign of avian pox is the formation of wart-like growths on the skin, particularly on unfeathered parts of the body such as the legs, feet, eyelids, base of the beak, and the comb and wattles.” (WTF is a wattle?)
Pox is a highly infectious disease spread by mosquitos, a familiar scape goat for disease transmission. Sadly, unless they wise up and start sanitizing, it’s odds on the other birds will catch it too, because they use the same perches and the virus can linger. Various sources suggest the pox goes away if the bird is well fed and avoids infection, not a practical proposition for many wild animals. However, the boils usually get infected leading to broader sickness, and if enough of them grow around the eyes, the bird eventually goes blind (which would mean it wouldn’t be able to find my back porch to take its morning dump, so there’s a silver lining.)
Not A Nice Disease
As the year moved on, and winter took over, my sick crow reverted to immature behaviour. It was begging to be fed constantly, something its siblings had stopped doing months before. If mum or dad found food in our back yard, it would flutter down frantically beating its wings, adopt a submissive posture and squawk like a baby crow does when it’s still being fed by the parents. It was also unable to stand properly because of the boils, and it couldn’t grip anything. I often saw it standing on one leg, I’m guessing because its claws hurt if they touched anything.
I contacted various birdy organizations over Twitter to see if anything could be done for it. I also mulled over calling a friend of mine who has an air rifle with a view to shooting it and putting it out of its misery but I quickly ruled out the euthanasia approach. Firing off a high powered air rifle with kids either side of us on the block was a non starter; potentially fun but highly illegal. Plus it would traumatize my mid-70s vegan neighbour who lovingly fed the birds peanuts every day, bless her.
Was It Me?
Our neighbour had spotted the growths and called me in a fit of existential guilt to ask if I thought the boils were peanut shells stuck in its claws. I gave her the bad news. It wasn’t peanuts, it was Pox. The 2 options it faced were a slow natural death, or fast Ralph-induced death.
She asked instead if I could catch it in a box and take it to the SPCA for treatment. Feeling like the grim reaper, I gave her yet more bad news. No. I wasn’t going to chase around the garden with a cardboard box trying to snag a crow. Besides, if I caught it, I might be tempted to seek revenge for the rapidly expanding guano deposits on my deck and it wouldn’t make it to the SPCA; least not in one piece. But the SPCA also told me that nothing could be done even if I caught it. The best approach was to stop feeding them peanuts because that simple act of kindness put it in close physical contact with its family, potentially infecting them too.
We’d run out of options and I told her we had to let nature, red in tooth and claw, take its course.
It’s Gone.
In the last few weeks, I haven’t heard it crying. Even if I couldn’t see the bird, you could hear it all over the block; a regular, incessant complaining “caw”, all day long which I think was crow crying. The poor thing appears to finally be dead, killed off by an infection piggy backing on the pox, or the February cold snap. Nature has done what nature does best.
I feel incredibly sorry for the bird; its whole short life was blighted by a nasty, painful foot condition. Now I’m watching the remaining birds to see if any of them develop similar problems. They were around the infected bird for best part of a year, in close contact; feeding it, grooming it and teaching it to crap on my porch, so the chances of them catching it are high. Hopefully they avoid it.
Don’t Forget
If you can still put up with me after this depressing update, and you still haven’t subscribed yet, now’s your chance. Or as a crow might say: caw caw cawey caw caw. Please sign up via the poxy subscription box at the top of my home page. You never know, it could lead to a life long love of crow shit on your back deck. I’ll be sure to mail you corvid related updates, boils and all, at least once a decade.