Crows are clever, smart, and natural-born scavengers. They tend to collect objects that catch their eye—usually things that shine or reflect. Eight-year-old Gabi Mann knows this all too well. Crows seem to love her Seattle backyard garden and bring her all sorts of interesting objects.
In my Dub Walker thriller series, I visited Dub with a pair of crows, Kramden and Norton, who bring him stuff all the time.
From STRESS FRACTURE:
As T-Tommy fed fresh fettuccine into a pot of boiling water, he said, “Your birds are
attacking your ex.”
My birds were Kramden and Norton. Two crows that I had rescued from a neighbor’s
pine tree after their mother disappeared. Probably killed by a hunter. Dropper feedings, then mushed-up worms and grains, and they grew into annoying young adults. That’s when I opened the walk-in cage I had built for them and let them take to the sky. They now roamed all over the county with others of their kind but managed at least one visit a day here. Usually for food or to bring some shiny object they had picked up. Crows are natural thieves and love anything with a gloss to it. Norton was the best thief; Kramden was the fat one. And the noisy one.
I looked out the window. Kramden hung his head over Claire’s computer screen as she
worked the keyboard. Norton stood to one side, eyeing her.
“She can handle them.”
She did. She scratched Kramden’s head and gave Norton a cracker from the tray of
cheeses and crackers I had prepared earlier. Norton snatched it and bounced across the table and out into the yard. Kramden followed and a squabble erupted. Once they devoured the cracker, they swirled into the sky, still going at each other, and headed west, their silhouettes starkly black against the red-orange sky, their cawing echoing off the trees. Time for them to find a roosting spot.