The Bishop's Weekly Column from the Parish Bulletin

OUR LADY OF FATIMA

CATHOLIC CHURCH

The Return of the Crows

January 14th, 2008

Look closely at the middle of this photograph...

After the second Mass in Spring Hill I was speaking with some parishioners about the crows. I have written about them before. Well I need to update the story so far...

Last year our crows gave birth to three youngsters. Two spent the night at the rectory quite literally. When a baby crow gets curious enough it will wander out of the nest and since it can't keep its footing holding the branches (and can't fly either) they eventually fall to the ground. Dad and Mom will try their best to protect junior but in some cases they're on their own (which was why two of the three were rounded up and housed for the night to protect them from predators). The next morning they were let out and learnt to fly. That was last spring.

A year has gone by and the parents have to think about another family. In December when the Father (who I named Blackie) returned to the nest he built last year, he was not pleased. In fact when he is angry he actually growls like an angry cat. One morning in early December I heard a loud growl from an evidently irritated male crow. He had found his nest, the "Taj Mablackie" was in ruins on the ground. Pine trees in our neck of the woods are under attack from bark beetles which eventually kill the tree. The beetles eat away at the branches causing them to become brittle and in high winds to snap off. I am forever picking up those branches. A few days before the bird found his nest was gone, I discovered it on the ground and later had the unenviable task of retrieving the twigs he had so painstakingly constructed the year before.

For the last few weeks I have been finding oak twigs at the base of a neighboring pine tree to his last haunt. Every time I looked up before there was no nest. I remembered what he did last year; when he had finished work on the last nest he began to fake building a nest in a pine tree some distance away to fool potential predators into thinking the nest was in another tree. Since I never saw a nest in the new tree this year, I concluded he had built his nest somewhere else. Watching him flying in and out of the tree yesterday afternoon with the parishioners I thought he was rather zealous in trying to fool the predators again and he began to arouse my curiosity. Later, after making sure the crows were not around, and believe me, you can think they aren't and then, all of a sudden, a caw from a tree lets you know they can see you even if you can't see them, I made an excursion round the side of the rectory and looked up, and yes he has a nest about a third of the way constructed. He's moving back in, in fact he and his mate (Beeper) will soon become my closest neighbors. The picture above is of the partially constructed nest. Then the wait for the first sound of a baby crow will be on, much like the other passtime of waiting for important documents and decisions to come from Rome... it will be before Easter, Pentecost, Corpus Christi or possibly Doomsday ?

+TF