Coco on the fencepost

W&N watercolour on Bockingford 300gsm 

Black Crow/Cape Crow (Corvus capensis) - Endemic to Africa

Coco, my Black Crow’s favourite vantage point on top of an old abandoned fencepost.

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The way of the crow

“If men had wings and bore black feathers, few of them would be clever enough to be crows.”

-Rev. Henry Ward Beecher mid 1800’s

W&N watercolour on Bockingford 300gsm 

Black Crow (Corvus capensis) 

There is little wonder that crows are very often the subjects of legends, folk-tales, and storytelling traditions around the world, all of which is very deep-seated and arising from myth and folklore thousands of years old. Anyone that has ever spent time with a crow will know how absurd these myths are and that Crows are no more ‘evil’ or ‘dark’ as depicted in these legends than a canary in a cage.

I make those remarks in light of the life I shared with Coco, a Black Crow (Corvus capensis), over the span of twenty years. She was keen of sight and hearing, and her other senses were no less acute. As was her sense of humour! She loved to mimic men laughing, producing the exact deep resonance of the male voice. She would also have a conversation with herself, changing voices as she went along, which she reproduced from the garden staff talking to one another. Another favourite of hers was hooting like a car, getting everyone in the household to go outside to see who has arrived. She would also call someone by their name at the top of her voice, also getting that person rushing outside to see who was calling, then uttering a long, low laugh, as if enjoying the havoc she’s causing.

She loved to play tag, pretending to peck your foot, getting you to chase her around the garden. And of course, one ‘myth’ that is absolutely true, is a Crow’s love for shiny stuff. No tea tray was safe unattended outside, as all the spoons would disappear and any jewellery lying around the house was at great risk!

A valuable lesson we could all learn from a crow is that they never “stuff” themselves with food. She would only eat until she was satisfied and then take the rest and hide it all over the garden, ready to be picked up at a later stage.

It is this kind of sensitivity that makes crows and other corvids legendary birds.

Coco passed away at the age of 27 in my garden (Tarlton, south Africa) after a stroke and I can honestly say no other animal enriched my life like she did.

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Crow wears a silver band

W&N watercolour on Amedeo 200gsm
Cape or Black Crow (Corvus capensis) – endemic to Africa
With thanks to John from Midmarsh Jottings for the use of his beautiful photograph.

Crow wears a band of silver on his ankle, holds it out to watch it glint in the sun like cool creek water. It is noon. He is the only one out. All others have sought shelter under the canopy of live oak, the leaves beneath the chaparral, Crow, the only one among them unafraid to cast a shadow. He is a black body to absorb the sun’s heat, and yet unheated.

He’s silver studded with stones, turquoise to match the cloudless sky. He stretches out his leg again, watches sky and water glisten on his ankle.

He flexes claws and brings his foot beneath him again, stretches out his other, naked foot for balance. His feet are beautiful, furrowed skin like charcoal scales, sharp and onyx claws. As flexible as hands, good for grasping new-hatched thrushes or pulling gate hooks from eye bolts, and sleek. The humans see crow’s feet in the faces of their most seasoned elders, the scars of a learned life spent laughing.

Crows’ feet, the mark of craft and cunning, crow’s feet a sense of humour made skin and sinew.
He swings down on the branch, holds himself upside down and swinging, the silver falling down around his upper leg as he barks in delight. Sky below his feet and swaying, silver pools above his head. The world so beautifully inverted, he cannot keep from laughing. This is beauty: the world turned upside down. You can keep your lithe ingénues, your florid sunsets and cloying sentiment: beauty is all that cleft in two, a cunning spark suspended by crow’s feet, a fall from a deadly height and then the swoop of wing, the thickening of the air beneath splayed feathers. Seeing air rising within air and climbing on it, sun glinting blue-black as night sky off your feathers? Night colours blazing brilliant from your feathers? Beauty is day turned to night and night to day.

Heart beats furious beneath that dark breast, mind burns in onyx eyes. Beauty a glint of laughter in a bottomless dark eye. He barks again.

Sun above live oak, a thousand suns refracted on the earth below. Grasshoppers leap into the air clicking. Wild oats, tawn in the summer heat, lean eastward with the breeze, and a wall of fog on the ocean twenty miles west. All this beauty: all this.
<sup>Story from Coyote Crossing

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The Playful Crow

“Even the blackest of them all, the crow, Renders good service as your man-at-arms, Crushing the beetle in his coat of mail, And crying havoc on the slug and snail.
 - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Coco, my Black Crow - Pilot Fineliner Black Ink sketch and watercolour in Moleskine 200gsm Watercolour Sketchbook

Crow – Corvus capensis. Found: Africa

 

Ample press is given to charismatic animals such as dolphins, chimps and the like, but few, when talking of intelligent beings, think to mention the crow or raven. It is, however, easy to understand the natural aversions some people have towards these birds: They’re lacking in any type of floral-like beauty; they have a cacophonous and sometimes incessant caw, and are cunning thieves to boot. 

But if you look closer, and get to know these beautiful birds on a more intimate level, you will see not just see ‘plain black’ feathers, but beautiful iridescent colours of purple, blue, green and brown. And discover a great intelligence, and even a sense of humour, not normally associated with birds. 

They are smart, ingenious, protective, adventurous, and full of engaging play; I recall my 27yr-old crow, Coco, watching intently as I planted my pansy seedlings, only to up-root them the minute I turned my back, cawing in laughter as she fled my mock chase! 

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