Crows are as common as aircraft in the skies over Chicago. I don’t think anybody has been keeping careful count, but I’m sure there are far more of these big black birds around than there were ten years ago. I see them all over the city, from Michigan Avenue to Cicero Avenue, decorating trees in the park and perching on church steeples.
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Rooks–Old World birds of the same genus as crows–have enough status to allow an architect to name an elegant building the Rookery. A structure called the Crowery is impossible to imagine. We might name a penthouse saloon the Crow’s Nest, but that metaphor is really from ships, not the birds.
In our culture crows are generally not eaten, although some people say they are palatable. I’ve never tried one. Once when I was a kid staying on my grandparents’ farm, I shot a starling. Since my grandfather’s rule was “You shoot it, you eat it,” I plucked the bird, singed its pin feathers, and eviscerated it. My grandmother roasted it for me. I honestly have no recollection of how it tasted, which means it probably wasn’t too bad. The British eat rooks, but the fact that the British eat something is not really much of a recommendation.
I’m not suggesting that there is anything evil about this. As Hobbes (the philosophical tiger, not the philosophical Englishman) recently observed, we are put here on earth to devour each other alive. The thing I worry about is balance. Predators that enjoy eating birds usually get fat in the summer. All those eggs and helpless nestlings and all those clumsy, stupid fledglings are easy pickings. But if the predators get too efficient, they kill off next year’s breeding stock. They bring lean times on themselves, and their own numbers decline. And while July is Fat City, January comes around every year and lots of predators don’t make it through.
It may take centuries for all the effects of ecological change to work themselves through a system. If we convert an open field to a shopping center or a collection of town houses, we can notice all sorts of immediate changes. There is no place for the red-winged blackbirds that were once abundant. The goldfinches can no longer build their nests in the hawthorns and box elders that were invading the field. Parking lots and lawns provide no homes for the meadow voles, and the northern harrier that once hunted the voles has to move on.
