Eating Crow:

Not The Humiliation We've Been Lead To Believe.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Eating crow is a colloquial idiom,^[1] used in some English-speaking countries, that means humiliation by admitting having been proven wrong after taking a strong position.^[2] The crow is a carrion-eater that is presumably repulsive to eat in the same way that being proven wrong might be emotionally hard to swallow.^[2] The exact origin of the idiom is unknown, but it probably began with an American humor story published around 1850 about a smart-aleck New York farmer who is outwitted.^[3]

I watched this happen.

Heard the crows, more than a dozen, fly quickly to the aid of one who sent out an alarm cry, swarming in from every direction to surround this Barred Owl who had alighted in a towering fir tree. Hatfields and McCoys level hatred. Lifelong enemies.

I couldn’t yet find the owl within the maze of branches but was pretty sure, based on the crows outraged behavior that it was an owl and then, by vectoring in on each of their directional stares, had narrowed the field of my search to just one tree and maybe twenty vertical feet of trunk and branches. But I still had not spotted the crows’ offender. Things had calmed enough that no one was screaming into the air any longer and one by one the first of the emergency responder crows were beginning to leave, heading back to their carefully delineated hunting areas nearby. Presumably, several had dependents to feed.

When she spread her broad, silent wings and began to glide, I was already looking in the right place. She had unfolded and appeared, as if from beneath a cloak. Two smooth wing beats to cross that pathway clearing and then wings quickly folded up and back to drop three, sudden feet down to a camouflaged crow’s nest hugging the trunk of a spruce, not twenty feet up and facing the path. An outstretched claw reached and grabbed, and without so much as a peep or struggle, or even a brief landing, the owl had a large, nearly fledged, crowlet, entaloned and motionless, spine broken, heart pierced, dangling beneath her own body and was rising again to fly away.

She was a third of the way to a tight stand of Coast Redwoods towering less than sixty feet away before those remaining, watchdog crows even knew what had hit them.

Then all hell broke loose and out of the surrounding trees they poured, screaming crow obscenities and giving chase. They flew to the edge of the redwood grove but alighted there while half a dozen others returned to join them. None followed the owl into those tall, dark woods, not a one was willing to risk it all for a battle that had already been lost. Crows understand actuarial math.

They cawed and jeered and lodged their complaints and outrage for just a minute or two and then grew silent. I walked quietly toward the half acre redwood grove myself, looking up while stepping carefully, watching the crows, turn, one by one and fly away.

Inside the shadowed grotto while I waited for my eyes to adjust its the faint green light I listened carefully and studied each footfall. There at the base of one of the larger Sequoia trunks a scattering of feathers that grabbed my attention, and while I studied them trying to decide if those feathers could possibly belong to the just murdered crow I sensed movement not far above me.

I looked up just as the owl leapt from a branch above me and flew to a heavy branch in the next tree over, floppy young crow in tow, still fully entaloned.

There were no other crows looking on now, near as I could tell and I was surprised at just how quickly they had surrendered to the hard realities at hand. Just me and Momma Owl then, and the newly opened carcass of a fluffy, fledgling crow.

The owl didn’t seem at all concerned about my presence so close to her, but continued to scan in all directions for incoming threats. The light was dim but I was able to slow my breathing and capture a couple of dozen intimate photos of her with her sneak-attack-kill before she flew across the glade and up to a wide, horizontal branch nearly twice as far off the ground as her previous perch. Finally she turned and looked directly at me, working out some calculation in her mind and then began vocalizing, an eerie, high-pitched call, which kinda threw me.

She wasn’t talking to me.

Within moments, a faint vocal response and then a second, full-sized owl appeared out of nowhere in the tree just above me and flew to the branch where his mother held a warm meal. There were many owl words then, sentences even, presumably compliments and instructions, and exhortations, which lasted for more than a minute until Mom leaned down and tore a bright red chunk of crow muscle from her quarry’s bloodied breast and offered it to her companion.

I’d never witnessed this entire process, end to end before, from alarm calls to stealth attack, to surrender, to ringing the dinner bell, to feeding. You could have blown me over with one of those plucked and fallen feathers.

It was the rubbing of faces and foreheads, and then the upside down head of the supplicant that impressed me most. It seemed so ceremonial, so submissive, so ‘worked out.’ The mother could simply drop each bite into the open mouth of her offspring without the risk of losing it to some missed, beak-to-beak handoff. The young one’s open mouth was perpendicular to hers, with both halves of its open bill on opposite sides of the mother’s. Almost no room for a bite to miss its target.

Each bite was offered and accepted politely, not merely taken at will by a demanding youngster. Mom set the pace and held onto the prize, choosing each next bite and waiting patiently until her young one had properly swallowed the previous one. It was fascinating to watch.

I hadn’t walked this old growth woodland for nearly a month, still reeling from my discovery of a second hummingbird nest there that I’d been following, which had been attacked and robbed just before the little ones were able to fledge. The memory of each stung but I visited both abandoned nests out of respect, then wandered the trails listening intently and trying to regain some sense of comfort with a place I had needed desperately to walk away from for a while.

Then all this; a most auspicious first time back…