Funny bird incident

Next to our building is an assisted living home for seniors. They have a large front lawn with two huge trees. On most days, about fifty crows sit in these two trees and squawk at anyone who walks by. If a car drives up the side road, all of the crows on the tree nearest the road fly, all at once, to the other tree. When the car has passed, they fly back. Or some of them fly back; I have no way of knowing if it is the same group. Today is hazy and it looks like it will rain, although it was sunny when I woke up. We had almost thirty-five straight days of rain before this. They thought we would set a record, but it stopped. It’s strange that records are set and broken for long periods of weather, as though long periods of rain or heat require months, maybe years of training. Maybe keeping a record of it makes us feel as though we’re in control of it. We can measure it; keep tabs; try to predict it using patterns previously established.

This hazy afternoon I happened to look out the window, and more crows than I have ever seen in one place were standing, not in the trees but on that front lawn. They walked with their noses to the grass, combing the area like police looking for signs of a struggle, or a recently dead body in a shallow grave. A car drove by one side of the lawn, and the crows jumped up, squawking, and hovered in the air, but they didn’t move, just flapped until the car passed and then settled back down, as though someone had lifted the corner of a blanket to look for something underneath, and then let it fall. What were they looking for? Materials to build nests? Worms that will be flushed out when it rains? I checked back twenty minutes later and they were gone. Only green grass where just a few minutes before the lawn had been black with feathers and poking beaks.