Ambitions for the afterlife

Heh. One of them would be never to stall for ten days without writing anything. My rather odd work schedule (half-day, full day x 2) has led me into a rhythm for writing, and over the past few days that rhythm has been interrupted. No, make that torn down, spat upon and trampled. It does make one reflect that scheduled time to write, no matter how oddly achieved, is fairly important to the craft.

Among the distractions has been redoing the kitchen vinyl tile. Why uncool vinyl, you ask? Why not ceramic? Because

1. It's an old house with lightly-framed floors and the weight per square foot of the vinyl is less than half that of most ceramic.
   
2. Period kitchen floor covering for a vernacular house of this age (c. 1895) is linoleum. I go with tile because one can do the job in sections, which is impossible with linoleum, or I should say sheet vinyl.

I did manage to inflict a variety of damage on my crumbling body even doing as much as I did, and shall likely do that again at intervals until the job is done. This led me to a reflection on mortality.

All winter I've been watching the back yard symbiosis between the feeder birds and the crows. The former don't come out of the bushes to nibble and bathe until the latter give the all-clear. This is necessary because one neighbour's cat lives mostly outdoors, and shows an excessive interest in the birds. We also have picked up a sharp-shinned hawk. The hawk is of a genus (buteos) that by nature doesn't chase a lot of small live birds. But, absent the accipiter hawks that do, buteo (or buzzard) hawks are opportunists.

The feeder birds, especially the sparrows, are what the poet had in mind when coining the expression "bird-brain." Left to their own devices, they go merrily into harm's way, even if the cat is watching from below and the hawk from above. Not so with crows. I've watched them from boyhood on, and have developed a deep respect for their collective intelligence and survival skill.

Watch a murder (that's what it is) of crows to see this in action. There will not be a single bird in sight. Turn away, then turn back. A scout crow will appear if there is any food to be had. In our neighbourhood, the scout perches at the topmost end of the highest branch of a large oak at the end of the street, swaying nearly 100 feet up. When the scout is satisfied that serious predators (read cats and hawks) don't pose a problem, it will caw.

Then one or two crows fly into the target area, swoop over it, and perch in medium-height branches of nearby trees. They're the close support. Not only can they warn against predators, but they can attack them. Hawks, with their binocular vision, are vulnerable from behind. They can be chased off by birds much smaller than crows. Cats--at least this one--seem nonplussed at being buzzed by birds nearly as large as they are, and most retreat when crows show up.

Once the crows have established their perimeter, the rest of the family arrives, and everyone (or nearly everyone) gets a turn at the goodies, be they a bird feeder or a pizza carton in someone's trash. There is always a scout, and there are always close support guards, and they seem to take this by turns.

In the case of our feeder, when the crows arrive, the feeder birds pitch in, secure amongst the bigger, more alert cousins, who don't seem to mind the little birds. The crows do object to sharing with squirrels, who generally wait for their chance under cover. Then, at some crowish signal, the whole circus melts away, to repeat the same act elsewhere.

Should there be anything in reincarnation, one could make a good case for coming back as a crow. There's something to be learned about cooperation and learning. Like cockroaches, their ancestors were around long before ours--and probably ate some of our ancestors after their incessant conflicts. The descendants of both will probably outlive our self-destructive species by many millennia. The cockroach may be more durable, but the crows are smarter.