Moments ago, as Viv and I emerged from our car after wheeling to the drive and carport, we were struck by the ungodly ruckus a great mob of airborne crows were raising. I remarked to Viv that the crows must be worked up by the encroaching cloud cover, as we have noted with interest the wave of bird life that overtakes our hill when a squall line comes through.

Something seemed different tonight, however. The center of the sound seemed to shift from moment to moment and from every direction, crows were streaming toward this shifting center. As the focal point passed to the south I noted a particularly large crow headed for the center of the pack from somewhere near my yard. As I watched this crow, the bird’s wings appeared to move somehow more slowly than the birds I took to be in the distance. Just as I was musing on this, the bird banked sharply and my error of perspective was revealed in a flash of white.

The spread tailfeathers flashed against the dark clouds as the bird braked and banked. It was a fully-grown bald eagle running like hell to escape a growing mob of crows. As the eagle wheeled closer to the treeline, I exclaimed to Viv. The feathered dogfight had dropped beneath the trees, probably about twenty feet above the ground in the area where the birds ducked out of sight.

I have often been bemused and somewhat heartened by the sight of one or two crows doggedly climbing to harry a hawk or eagle. In my experience the bird of prey generally climbs rapidly beyond the reach of the smaller birds and glides away, the crows breaking off their attack at that time.

Viv and I continued to follow the center of the birds’ attention as it traveled in an arc around our position, until it finally emerged across the street. The eagle’s distinctive plumage was clearly visible; I involuntarily shouted “Get some altitude! Climb!” as the bird and fifty or sixty crows vanished again to our north, in the direction of a large graveyard.

As the sound of the crows’ hue and cry faded into the distance, the rest of the birds in the neighborhood began to twitter and call and hoot and whistle with frantic vigor.

—

How an eagle killed a crow, S. C. Turnbo, 1877.

Eagle and Crow on Flickr

Well into summer, I can see that our neighbor’s fruiting trees will yield a generous harvest of Granny Smiths and that his sickly, aged cherry tree is doing just fine, with a batch of plump cherries at every juncture where the tree still fruits.

My own fruit trees are not nearly as happy. Three large cherry trees are fruiting, but the fruit is only about the size of the pit and is being gleefully devoured by the bewinged dinosaurs that frequent the area. A smaller apple is not apparently fruiting.

The largest of the cherries is comparable in size to the untended and grand cherry back at the apartment building, which produced bushels of fruit even under sustained corvid assault. That tree also produced a volunteer seedling that grew from a sprout to a fruiting tree of twenty feet in the ten years we lived there.

That reminds me, I need to swing by and pick a peck, for eating and for planting. I bet I could get my old landlords to let me dig up the smaller tree, come to think of it. Word is that they are not renting the vacancies – just letting the leases lapse to ease sale prospects, which I believe will mean demolition.

That makes me pretty sad.

Back to cherries: clearly, this calls for research!

In our backyard, there is a five-foot pole that arcs to create a hook. We’ve hung a birdfeeder from it and have enjoyed watching the local critters – many varieties of bird and several squirrels. On Wednesday i had the unpleasant duty of doublebagging the remains of one of the squirrels, apparent moments after the little guy’s head was flattened by a passing motorist.

While there are plenty of crows in the neighborhood and a growing contingent of starlings, these last two have more or less not chosen to waste valuable garbage-picking time on such dry, tasteless food as birdseed.

This morning as Viv and I nursed our coffee, I was standing in the rear window of the house, wondering why there were no birds clustered about the feeder. From a bush at the side of the house strolled a small black rat with rather large ears. The rat nosed about under the feeder for a moment as I got Viv’s attention. She immediately began making horrified exclamations.

As we watched, the rat hopped onto the pole and quickly, surefootedly, clambered all the way up it as we shrieked in dismay. The rat peered about for a moment and then ran down the pole and across the lawn to the bush.

A few moments later, he returned and this time halted partway up the pole before climbing up and over and down onto the bird feeder. From the roof of the feeder he jumped back to the pole, edged down a bit, and then leapt onto the feeding tray.

As this was happening, the usual cast of birds and squirrels were there, but keeping a consternated distance as the rodent fed. Eventually he ran away.

As it happens, I recently finished reading Rats, a personal natural history of the rat in the context of Manhattan. One point I recalled was that if you see a rat out in the open in broad daylight, it means there’s a problem in the rat population, such as a food shortage or overpopulation. A bit of googling confirmed that the rat we’d seen was of the species known as the roof rat, or black rat. The species prefers to live in trees, bushes, and attics. We have not had the pitter-patter of little rodent feet above us in the dark watches of the night, so presumably the nests are in some of the plentiful trees in the neighborhood.

Further googling regarding trapping outdoor roof rats led to dispiriting news, including the predictable problem of not trapping squirrels and birds in your newly-mounted tree-borne traps. I believe for today I will ignore it and hope it goes away, although my impulse this morning involved purchasing a BB gun.

After a hard four hours of yardwork, for some reason I smell the distinctive aroma of pin oak, a tree that dominated the Northern Indiana woodlands of my earliest youth. The vast quantities of leaves and acorns the enormous trees deposited on our yard and the expansive, forested ravines over the back fence mulched over the winter into a slick, layered goop, and that’s what I smell this afternoon.

Man, no sooner did the DSL get restored than the server went down, pinned in some perly loop. I hate it when that happens.

And now, internets, while it’s great to have you back in my house, I have plans with my wife. Please don’t drink all the beer.