Learning to Look at Nature

I took up drawing this year. I’m still very much a beginner, but I am getting much better at really looking at something and seeing it at the level necessary to draw it.

One of the things I do is take pictures of things I think would be interesting to draw, so the sketch accompanying this post was made from a photo I took of a crow standing in the street on a sunny day.

My sweetheart and I feed the neighborhood crows, so I’m always looking at them. And, as with drawing, I find that the more I look, the more details I discover.

Years back my sweetheart started carrying some cat kibble in a small pouch so he could try to make friends with the crows. However, this was a hit-or-miss system and it didn’t really take off until during the pandemic, when he joined me on my regular walks around the block. The crows took note of us because the pattern was more regular.

After awhile, I had to start carrying treats, too, because they associated me with my sweetheart. They come to our bedroom window most mornings. We now feed crows within a four-or-five-block radius of our place.

Today, though, when we went for a short walk, none of our crows were nearby. However, there were large numbers of them in the sky, all flying the same general direction.

I’m pretty sure there’s a big crow meet-up somewhere downtown. I know crows have meetings from time to time. Sometimes they have them in a big tree in our neighborhood, but whatever they were doing today involved more crows than that.

Crow business. I’d really like to know more about crow business, but I don’t speak Crow, more’s the pity.

We have learned a lot by watching and looking things up, though. The most obvious thing we figured out was that crows can distinguish people. They know us, and they know us apart from other people who live in our building or on our block.

And while I’d assume they’re picking up on the fact that both of us have a lot of wavy gray hair, they recognize us when we’ve got on bike helmets and are riding our bikes. They also recognize us both separately and together.

I find this embarrassing, because I can’t tell crows apart. I can tell that one is larger, some smaller, and after years of watching, I’m pretty sure that a lot of smaller ones are this year’s fledglings.

Occasionally, one will make a slightly different noise. There’s one my sweetheart is calling Carlson who makes a hoarse clucking sound different from a regular caw. But we only know that one when it speaks.

I can’t tell gender at all. I assume in the spring that the largest ones we see demanding treats are males looking for food to take back to the nest, where the female is sitting on eggs. But there are others begging food as well. Crows have small family groups, usually including at least a couple of junior birds from last year’s nest, and all of them help in the spring when the females lay eggs and those eggs hatch.

The fledgings learn to fly before they are able to feed themselves. This was a surprise to me, though I looked it up and it is not uncommon among birds.

In early summer, juvenile crows are often perched on the telephone wires, screaming at their parents and older siblings for food.

I think of them as teenagers, always hungry. And they keep it up even after they’ve finished developing enough and learned how to get their own food.

You can tell this is what is happening because (a) juvenile crows make a different sound, (b) juvenile crows are red inside their mouths, and (c) the other crows do, in fact, feed them.

Though sometimes they tell them to take care of themselves.

Something else about crows: they don’t see well in the dark. They get up with the sun and head for the roost when it goes down. In spite of the fact that we think of crows in connection with Hallowe’en and gothic matters, they are daytime birds.

And while they live in family groups, and are very territorial about their daytime spots – we probably see five or six family groups regularly– they roost in large groups, usually in parts of town that have a lot of trees.

The location of the roost changes from year to year and I’m sure in places like the East Bay there are multiple roosts.

There are a reasonable number of birds of all kinds in our area – house finches, towees, hummingbirds, blue jays, sparrows. Geese are often nearby and starlings come through several times a year. You can often hear birdsong, but it all goes quiet whenever a raptor comes by.

Usually that’s some kind of hawk. You’ll see it up on a tree or a pole, just sitting and waiting.

But you’ll also see it in the air, with a group of crows yelling at it and chasing it off.

The crows aren’t stupid. They don’t take hawks on one-on-one. They’re at a disadvantage and they know it. But a crowd of crows can discourage a hawk from hanging around looking for dinner.

I’m writing about our crows because I recently read a piece by Jenny Price about the Los Angeles River – usually considered something of a joke because it was encased in concrete by the Corps of Engineers – in which she talked about how cities are not, in fact, devoid of nature.

I have actually been paying attention to the nature around me for a long time, but I’m not sure I really thought of it as nature. But of course it is.

In addition to the crows, my sweetheart has discovered that there is a dawn redwood – a deciduous species of redwood that originated in the Arctic back when things were warmer there (so a very long time ago) that has migrated farther south to survive – in Mosswood Park, about five blocks away.

That’s not just nature; that’s ancient nature.

And of course, we have done a hike on a small trail to see the only remaining old-growth redwood in Oakland – a scraggly tree that’s hard to get to, which is probably why it survived the rush to make money off all those trees.

There are creeks here, though some have been forced underground. We are fortunate in the East Bay to have an abundance of parks, which helps keep nature a little more natural.

And of course, there’s the Bay itself, never far away. Lots of nature there.

But mostly I see nature on my walks around the block. Some of it wild, some of it cultivated, a lot of it people and their dogs.

We are, after all, part of nature ourselves.