The Summer of Delight I had spent all day landscaping the yard with machines and hands and blood and sweat but I minded not. The sun infusion felt glorious on my body and it was gratifying to help Renee and Peter, as they had been such gracious and generous hosts to me. Upon their return from being out all day running errands, Peter surveyed his freshly manicured lawn and beamed noticeably, praising my efforts, while I beamed on the inside. He invited me inside the house for some refreshments and conversation and I happily obliged. I was sitting on a couch with the dusk sun streaming through the windows, holding a glass of filtered well-water, when Peter, my elder of exactly 5 decades, started to tell me the story of the crows: It was the early 90s, and he and Renee were living in another house on Salt Spring Island. A telephone company had cut down a tree in the nearby vicinity and as a result a nest had fallen to the ground with two baby crows in it. The worker had offered the nest to Peter and he had accepted, and thus began the saga of raising baby crows. As he started to explain, Renee caught wind of the conversation and grabbed the mic, as she turned out to be the primary caretaker of the birds and knew the story most intimately. ~They had to be fed every 20 minutes. worms was their natural diet but she found canned dog food to be a good substitute. ~As youngsters, they would hop around the yard all day until it started to get dark, upon which they would willingly go into their cages to spend the night in a safe place. ~When it was time for Bigwig and Kazbah to be taught how to fly, Renee and her 5 year old son Jordan would take the crows to a specific part of the garden where there were very large leaves. Then they would launch the crows into the air, the crows would flap their wings crazily, and crash down into the cushion of the large-leafed garden plants. This process went on for about a week until the crows learned how to fly. Renee stressed how her son particularly loved this daily ritual and would laugh himself silly over it. For a good minute after she mentioned this it was difficult for me to retain concentration as I kept visualizing her son being joyous and thinking about the phrase he laughed himself silly. ~Once they were able to fly, they stated a ritual of pecking on their bedroom window at exactly 5:30am each morning wanting to be fed. Renee had to design a special bird feeder which she installed on the roof so they would not be disturbed. How they knew which window was theirs was a mystery to them both. ~Adjacent to their house was an additional house where Renee would practice her pottery craft. Any time she would make the walk from one house to the other, the crows would dive bomb her and playfully grab her hair with their talons, or zoom right over her shoulder. The pottery studio had an angled roof with a sky window, and they would often roll apples down the glass in order to get her attention. They would also routinely hop along the border of the studio to herald her approach to the front door, and hang down over windows to peer through at her while she worked. ~Summer transitioned to fall, and the crows began to spend more and more time away from home, until one day they never came back. Months later Renee was walking towards her pottery studio when she was stunned to see a massive number of crows on her property. She said there must have been thousands all sitting in nearby trees. . . like a scene out of Alfred Hitchcocks The BIrds. However, two birds had separated from the flock and were sitting on the archway over the front door of the studio. Renee was convinced these two were Bigwig and Kazbah, and so she spoke gently with them for awhile before heading inside to commence with her craft. They hung around for a few hours, until, in a grand synchronization, the entirety of crows flew off in unison. Peter, who had been so patient during his wifes recounting, chimed in to take it all home: Ill tell ya something. . . I sure gained a lot of respect for crows after that whole experience. What wonderful, intelligent creatures. And what a great summer that was. Just a delightful summer. A summer of ab - so - lute DELIGHT! Ill never forget it. So now, whenever I see a utility man chopping down a tree, I hand him a piece of paper with my phone number on it and I tell him if he happens to come across a nest with baby crows to give me a call
Posted on: Fri, 30 May 2014 06:34:08 +0000
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