My favorite part of my morning exercise walk is the CROWS.

[Amerigo Vespucci]

I walk a two-mile stretch of Santa Clara each morning to start my day. There are several places along the way where you will usually find crows. I dig 'em...the way they walk / hop as often as they fly, the way they sit up on the telephone wires and bounce while they make that "AK AK AK AK AK" sound, the way they sometimes ignore you when you walk by instead of fly off like they're spooked.

That's it, nothing profound. I just look forward to seeing, watching and hearing them along my walk, and I'm never disappointed.

:-)

[Fire Walk With Me]

1. "AK AK AK AK AK"....they're obviously Bill the Cat fans.

[Swede]

2. Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird - Wallace Stevens

I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

[emilyg]

3. Love them. Every morning

I throw out some dry cat food for the crows.

[blogslut]

4. Here, in the High Plains of Texas, we have Grackles

Great-Tailed Grackles:



Feisty, fearless fuckers. Not crazy-mean like Bluejays but imposing birds nonetheless. I dig them.

[Amerigo Vespucci]

5. I remember them from Massachusetts, too...

...I moved to California when I was 16, but I remember grackles.

And the blue jays...YEAH! What's up with THAT?

:-)

[blogslut]

6. Bluejays = Meanest Bird EVAR

They're just assholes. Pretty, pretty assholes.

[geardaddy]

12. We have those too, but the influx of crows here has declined their population

When I was a kid in Minneapolis we had no crows. Only grackles. Now with all the farmland going to housing developments we have tons of crows and very few grackles.

We also have these in Minneapolis


red-tailed hawk

[zanana1]

7. In the winter...

They come in swarms. These guys are BIG; some of them the same size as a cat. They're scavengers, so they'll eat anything they find, including the dry cat food I leave out for the strays. Sometimes I'll have dozens of crows at a time on my back porch. I do love them, though. I like their brashness and their "I'll eat it if I want it" attitude.

[Brigid]

8. There are crows all over the place around here.

They usually leave during the summer and come back when the weather turns cooler, but this summer they stuck around. There are several out in the yeard right now, arguing with the squirrels. :)

[Brigid]

9. dupe

[Randypiper]

10. You should find this Nature program interesting

A Murder of Crows
http://video.pbs.org/video/1569194820/

Amazing how intelligent they are.
The program shows that the crows communicate with each other.
They probably identify you.

[denverbill]

11. Every time I hear a crow, I think of Jack Handy-'The crows seem to be calling my name' thought Caw.