Just a Crow?

Just a Crow? Earl Plato

Prudence the Crow - final episode
Gord MacDonald and family- thanks for your rich and rewarding experiences with intelligent members of our bird world - the Crow. Gord writes well and I appreciate his account. “Prudence was free to consort with the wild crows and did so, however, she would always leave them and come to us when called. In the good weather she stayed out all night but in the winter she stayed in a large open cage in the kitchen at night. You can’t “house train” a crow! However, we did teach her to stay in the cage. She would tap at the door when she wanted in or out.
A big crow tapping at the door to get in created a couple of hilarious incidents with visitors but that’s another story.
After we had Prudence two or three years she began meeting my car when I was driving home from work. This flattering practice progressed from flying alongside to actually buzzing the car like a dive bomber. We became quite concerned when we saw that she was buzzing other people’s cars too. We really didn’t know what to do about it. On several occasions we saw vehicles zigzagging along the road with Prudence making an absolute pest of herself. Though there were no accidents we’re sure she brought Alfred Hitchcock’s the movie, The Birds, to mind to many drivers’ minds.
When Prudence failed to appear on our bedroom window ledges one morning, we knew something was wrong, She had made a practice of flying from one bedroom to the next at 6:30 a.m. from the beginning. We had hundreds of holes in the screens to prove it. We suspect her “car-buzzing” was her undoing. We found her body in the ditch almost a quarter of a mile along the road.
We’ve read experts that claim that birds are wholly instinctive because they have brains only slightly larger than that of an insect. This may be true but we feel we’ve known a crow that expressed intelligence, humour, anger, the capacity to tease, and sometimes insufferable egotism. I never see a crow now without wondering what kind of personality it has.” Gordon MacDonald and family. Niagara Falls, Ont.

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