Jack the Crow

I sent my sister the picture above. It’s a Raven at Mesa Verde. She said, “You know, that looks a lot like the way Jack the Crow used to swagger around the yard.” I looked at the picture again, and she was right.

I wonder if most of the fascination I have with Ravens and Crows came from Jack. It’s funny how things stay with us through our lives - interests and thoughts and fears - and how we often don’t realize it until somebody points it out.

The people and places we knew when we were young were a scaffolding that supported us while we built our beliefs into the strange shapes of our personalities, of ourselves. The same way that scaffolding allowed Medieval builders to make their unlikely stone architectures of buttresses and arches. When the scaffolding was removed, we wonder - How ever did they build that structure? And we ask ourselves - How did we ever come to be the way we are, to believe the things we do?

So. A long time ago, I had a friend who was a Crow. And he was named Jack.

This was in England, some time around 1970. Dad was in the Air Force, and we lived on a housing area for American families associated with the Upper Heyford Air Force Base. I was about nine years old.

It was early in the Summer and school was out for the year. In the mornings, all of the neighborhood parents would open their doors and the children would pour outside, wrestling and yowling and running, contents-under-pressure.  Off we’d go, not to return until the next mealtime. Children were raised like feral dogs in those days, much more so than now.

I had an orange Schwinn Stingray bicycle, and I thought it was the coolest. I’d ride all over the place on it, exploring the local vacant lots, ponds and farmer’s fields.

The world, and the Summer, was endless.

One day I was riding my bike down an overgrown lane, next to a field full of old, ruined houses, and I found a young bird sitting in the middle of the lane. He was a strange looking creature, about the size of a kitten. Grotesque and exotic, like a baby troll or goblin, legs splayed out in front of him.

It was a baby Crow.

Jack the Crow, as a nestling

His feathers were still in-the-blood, only partially emerged. They were mostly just bluish-white tubes from which the tips of his ‘real’ feathers were only starting to emerge. He sat on his butt in the dirt, legs sprawled, staring down at the enormous grappling hooks of his feet. He looked like he was wondering who owned these strange monstrosities. He certainly had no notion of walking with them.

His eyes protruded from his head so much that he looked as if he were wearing goggles. He was covered in sparse, asymmetrical tufts of feathers, which looked more like black clumps of ear-hair. He was spectacularly ugly. I could hear Crows calling off in the distance, but this guy was all alone.

He looked up at me, opened his beak, and made a croaking sort of screaming begging call - “Hey, you there! Big Nose! Feed me!” Holy cats, I loved this creature immediately.

I picked him up, put him inside my shirt, and pedaled home. My heart was near bursting with excitement,

My Mother had some initial trepidations, but soon took our new guest in stride. She helped me set up a cardboard box with a blanket in it, to form a pseudo-nest for the bird.

Mom called a friend who knew about birds, and he told us it was probably either a baby Crow or a Jackdaw.

That’s how we came to call him ‘Jack’ - it was from ‘Jackdaw.’ Which is funny, because I don’t think we ever saw a Jackdaw around where we lived, before or since. But the piratical sound of the name suited him.

What to feed him? We had no idea. I don’t know why, but people that keep baby birds always seem to want to feed them bread and milk. We were no different. It’s a horrible diet for birds, not at all nutritionally complete, Birds fed on bread and milk tend to develop all sorts of dietary deficiencies.

We also gave the bird scraps from our meals, which he just loved. And in spite of how disapproving of the entire ‘Crow Thing’ Mom was, I’m pretty sure that she was sneaking him extra treats when nobody was looking.  I also spent a lot of time catching worms and insects for him. That’s probably how we avoided problems with vitamin deficiencies.

And, Oh, my, how that bird could eat, I’d spend all day catching bugs for him, and he’d still want more.

Fledgling Raven at Mesa Verde. Though he was a Crow, Jack looked a lot like this.

He changed from an ugly troll-baby into a beautiful glossy blue-black bird. He outgrew the cardboard box after a week or so, and moved full-time into our fenced backyard. Dad built him a little perch with a roof-shelter and mounted it about halfway up the fence, and Jack installed himself as the King of the Backyard.

At night, or in the rain, he’d sit in his sheltered perch on the fence. During the day, he’d lord it over the backyard, strutting around and investigating everything in his reach.

He was, for the most part, a benevolent ruler, but there were some issues about which he felt strongly.

For example, our backyard fence was made out of rough-cut, overlapping slats of stained wood. Each slat was about a quarter if an inch thick. One of the changes Jack decided to make regarded the knots in the the wooden fence slats. He spent a merry week walking from knot to knot, pecking at them like a Woodpecker until they fell out of the fence. By the time he had finished, all of the slats he could reach looked more like wooden carvings of Swiss cheese slices than pieces of a solid fence.

We also had a problem with the neighborhood cats. On one of Jack’s first nights out of his box-nest and in the backyard, Dad heard a terrible racket outside, and burst into the backyard just in time to rescue a terrified Jack from one of the neighbor’s cats. We brought Jack back into the house, and the nest box, at night for a while after that, only letting him out during the day.

About a week later, during the daytime, I was inside the house. I heard a horrible yowling and cawing from the backyard. I knew what this sound probably meant, and ran out of the house and into the backyard. When I got there, it wasn’t what I expected to see.

There was a cat backed into a corner between the fence and the house. The cat had a crazed, terrified look on its face, and its hair was puffed out, making the cat look like a hairy snowball. Jack was crouched in front of the cat, with his wings partially spread. He was cawing and screeching at the cat, louder than I’d ever heard him. Every couple of seconds, he’d stop calling and lunge with his ice-pick beak into the cat. The cat would yowl and jump up, and Jack would dance backwards to do it again.

Eventually, the cat managed to get away. We didn’t have problems with cats after that, and Jack slept outside again.

A couple of Jack’s favorite activities involved the laundry. He’d steal clothes-pins whenever he could  and disassemble them, leaving pieces of clothes-pin scattered over the yard.

Once the laundry was hung up, he loved to run to the clothes, jump up in the air, and grab the edges of the clothes with his beak. He’d swing back and forth from the bottom edge of the laundry, looking for all the world like a feathered bowling pin, swinging back and forth wildly  hanging from his beak.

Then he’d drop to the ground and do it again.

Jack loved to grab onto laundry with his beak, then swing back and forth

My Sister was about five years old at the time. She had a swing-set in the backyard which she had gotten for her birthday a year or so before. She loved that swing-set - it had two swings, some sort rocking-horse type of thing, and a slide. She’d drape the slide with blankets to make a small fort, then have pretend tea parties in the fort with her dolls.

Unfortunately, Jack found the swing-set was also a perfect spot from which to survey his kingdom.

Mostly, he’d sit on the swings, or the slide, and cover them with Crow droppings. I hosed the swing-set down every day, but you could tell that all of the bird droppings  detracted from my Sister’s swing-set tea-parties.

I think Jack knew that my Sister wanted her swing-set back, and he was intent on keeping it. He did not, perhaps, behave as charitably towards her as one might have hoped.

My Sister would sneak into the backyard as quietly as she could and try to set up her doll tea-party fort in between the messy places where Jack had been perching that day. Jack would pretend not to notice her, conspicuously looking off into the distance, as if fascinated by something happening on the distant horizon.

He would allow her to get part way through the process, then swoop down and chase her out of the yard.

She would run screaming, waving her hands in the air, and he’d chase after her, with his wings spread and flapping, cawing, taking big, exaggerated joking chase-steps as he chased her.

He loved this game.

Jack was very family oriented - he loved to play with my little sister.

He could have easily caught her, but never did. I don’t know for sure whether my Sister enjoyed the game. I think  she did, because she kept playing it. I know that Jack thought it was immense fun, and always looked forward to her visits. He would be pleased with himself for hours afterwards.

It was pretty tough for me to catch enough bugs and worms for Jack at this point. I started taking him out on my bike, usually tucked inside my jacket, but sometimes perched on the handlebars. We’d go to vacant lots and I’d turn over rocks and pieces of old carpet.

Jack would  stand expectantly while I lifted things up, then he’d run in and grab all the bugs and worms. His head would move like a sewing machine needle, bap-bap-bap-bap, until he had eaten everything. Earthworms were always good with him, as were sow-bugs and pill-bugs.  Ants were okay, and had the advantage of being numerous. Beetles were pretty hit or miss…he thought a lot of them tasted bad. I think crickets were his favorite things to find.

Jack loved to go out hunting for bugs.

Jack was learning to fly at about this time. I thought it was going to be hard for him, but it really wasn’t. I took him to some playing fields at the school. He went through a couple of days of awkward flapping, but then seemed to just get the knack of it. And then he could just, well, fly.

I think learning what he could and could not perch on was a bigger problem for him. He’d land on ludicrously tiny twigs in trees, then act surprised when they would give way. He worked through that fairly quickly too, though. I remember him learning it faster than young Redtailed Hawks do, for example.

The thing about spending time with Jack was that you were constantly learning and re-learning just how smart he was. There was a sharp, glittering intelligence in him that you might not understand, but that you could not help but see. There was no real need to be able to talk with him. He seemed to  already know whatever it was you wanted to communicate to him.

He didn’t think the same way that we did, but he didn’t really need to.

A Raven in profile. At this point, Jack looked a lot like this bird, but had a smaller bill. He was glossy, black and shiny.

It was after Jack got really good at flying that we started to have our first big problems. We lived in a crowded Air Force housing area, and people were working shifts around the clock. You just didn’t make a lot of noise.

Jack was not familiar with that rule, though. He’d wait until first light, then fly up to our neighbors’ second floor windows and perch on the eaves. And just as Ravens will seem to worship the rising sun, facing into it and calling, Jack would greet the sunrise at the top of his lungs….on our neighbors’ window ledges.

This morning calling was a very, very bad thing, and could just not go on. Dad clipped the primary feathers on Jack’s wings so that he could no longer fly. The feathers would grow back the next time Jack moulted, so it wasn’t permanent, but it felt awful to all of us. Dad told me many times over the years how much he regretted having to do this.

Jack seemed to take it in stride, though. We’d still go bug hunting, and he still ruled the yard, but we knew what we had taken from him - any chance of being a normal Crow.

Then Summer ended and I had to go back to school. Nobody would be with Jack.

Dad discovered that there was a Nature Park over at the Air Force’s Junior High School, and they were eager for Jack stay with them. This wasn’t as good a solution as staying with us, then flying away when he was ready would have been, but it was a good solution.

We took him over to the Nature Park and they gave him the run of the place.  That went well for about a week, until Jack discovered that there were Goldfish in the pond. He would sit on the footbridge overlooking the pond for hours, frozen, until a Goldfish would swim by. Then he’d snatch the Goldfish out of the water and swallow it down, and get set for the next one.

He ate a substantial proportion of the Goldfish before they decided to put him into the Tortoise enclosure. This went about as well as you’d expect, with Jack pecking the tortoises whenever they’d come out of their shells. That surely wasn’t going to work.

The next thing they decided to try was to put Jack into the Gerbil enclosure. I’m not sure what the rationale for this decision was. It sounded like a bad idea even to me at the time, and I was not known for my good judgement. The Gerbils did have an impressive network of tunnels in which to hide, so maybe they thought that was enough.

It wasn’t.

I did not see this personally, but I’ve heard that Jack caught and ate every Gerbil in the pen within 12 hours. There may have been one or two Gerbil tails, perhaps a couple of little feet left, possibly some blood spots…but certainly no live Gerbils.

After this in incident, they found another Nature Center and transferred him to that. I heard that he was doing really well there. I very much wanted that to be true, but to this day I’m not sure if it was.

I still think that I saved his life when I found him that morning and took him as a nestling,  I think he was too young to survive on the ground. Looking back, I think the Crows that I heard that morning were his parents, but they were too far away, and he truly was lost and abandoned, that he was too young to survive, But I’ll never know for sure if my actions that morning saved him or if they condemned him.

But I always wonder. And I am still grateful to him.

A Raven at Mesa Verde. He looks a lot like Jack the Crow.

Note - a few of the pictures in this post are not of Crows, but are of Ravens. I used them because the mannerisms and looks were like those I remember in Jack.