My mother leaves rice for crows on the parapet near the parking lot outside our home. One morning, as I walked to my scooter, a crow swooped by, almost touching my head. He landed at the very spot where the rice was usually put and looked at me, I thought, enquiringly and crowed loudly. My mom was a little late that day. But how did he know that I would help him?
According to bird enthusiast K. Mohan Raj, it is because crows are intelligent. “They are able to survive amidst humans while other birds cannot,” he says. But we cannot be sure about their numbers or their well being. Says Joseph Reginald, Sálim Ali Centre for Ornithology and Natural History, “There is no study or statistics on crows as far as I know.”
Still, the house crow with the jet-black body, smooth grey neck, deep eyes and a sturdy beak has always been a part of our lives. There are so many stories about them — how can we forget the crow that stole a vadai from paati ? Or the thirsty crow that filled a pot with stones to raise the level of water?
Most of us take these birds for granted, but they make a lot of difference in our lives, says Mohan Raj. “They keep our city clean,” he says. “They scavenge dead animals, and stem the stench and diseases that might spread from them.” Mohan feels that the activities of the crow are fun to watch. “It’s a playful bird. It sometimes imitates the eagle by trying to fly without flapping its wings. It can travel long distances and fiercely defends its young.”
Mohan recalls seeing a crow fishing during one of his bird-watching expeditions. “I was at the Sundakamuthur tank and it was windy. The crow flew against the wind — it hovered like a helicopter at the same spot. Though crows cannot hover, that one used the wind to its benefit. It caught the fish, flew to the bank, dropped it on the ground and fed on the fish.”
R. Mohammed Saleem, Environment Conservation Group, says that crows always call out to their friends before they start on a meal. “They do not eat alone,” he says. But Saleem feels that the bird is declining in numbers. “I don’t see as may crows as I used to in the past,” he says. Bird expert A. Sukumar feels the same way. He attributes this to lack of nesting sites. “Trees are being cut in cities. Tall buildings have cropped up every where. Since crows do not fly high, their path is obstructed by these structures. How will they fly and nest?” he asks.
Sukumar has studied crows up close for his book on the nesting behaviour of Indian birds. “In the past, crows ate healthy food such as ragi and kambu that had no pesticides. So out of about four eggs they laid, three survived. But now, they lay only about three eggs of which only one or two survive.”
The crow displays extraordinary love, romance, chivalry and a strong sense of togetherness, says Sukumar. He explains how before nesting, a male crow will go out of his way to court his woman with acrobatic flights. He will fetch her favourite food and gently caress her neck with his beak. Once the eggs are laid in the nest that the two carefully built with twigs over a week, the female incubates for two weeks. And when the young ones hatch, the parents support them till they are able to fend for themselves. If one of their own is dead, crows from near and far flock together to mourn, says Sukumar.
Fond of crows
In Visakhapatnam, Srinivasa Rao, a fisherman, was so fond of crows that he spent half his earnings on food for them, recalls M.Adinarayana, a professor of Fine Arts at Andhra University. “He would spend hours at the jetty, feeding them. I sometimes accompanied him. The entire city knew him — he was called Kakula Srinivasa Rao. He believed that crows were incarnations of his forefathers.”
Srinivasa Rao drowned three years ago. Gurajala Sairam, an artist based in Visakhapatnam, says that he feeds Srinivasa’s crow-friends on Beach Road every year on his death anniversary. When Srinivasa Rao’s body was found floating the next day, there was a flock of crows around it. Adinarayana believes it was the crows that identified the body.
