of crows became

a murder

My neighbor Crandall stops by.

&uot;How are you doing?&uot; I ask.

&uot;Same thing, different day,&uot; is his reply.

&uot;Anything exciting going on?&uot; I ask.

&uot;Well, a opossum got run over on the road by a truck, but it didn’t seem very excited about it.

I’ve been working in my garden.

I wish you’d stop telling everyone that it’s a plant cemetery.&uot;

&uot;I’ll start calling it the garden Armageddon instead,&uot; I conceded.

&uot;I put up my bug zapper,&uot; says my neighbor.

It’s the zap heard around the world. My neighbor Crandall has returned to the scene of the crime.

He puts up a bug zapper each year, but this time he has outdone himself.

He rented a crane to put up a zapper that’s big enough to handle anything up to the size of a pterodactyl.

It covers a 10-acre area.

When he plugs it in, all the lights in the township dim. It even comes with an automatic counter that registers kills.

I have no doubt that satellites are able to pick up the glow from this monstrosity.

He has been seduced by the idea of ridding the five-county area of all flying insect-life. Ever cautious, he has hung a &uot;Beware of Dog&uot; sign on it. He likes to sit under the zapper and practice his hobby of tying flies.

He’s good at tying flies, but some of them do get away.

&uot;Well, I’ve got to get home,&uot; says Crandall. &uot;I have a big day planned.

I’m going to sit by my bug zapper and watch a can of gas appreciate in value.&uot;

Amery, Wis.

It was my pleasure to speak at The Nature Festival in Amery this past June.

It was my privilege to lead some pontoon rides down the Apple River and across Pike Lake.

We saw baby loons riding on the backs of parents in order to keep from becoming bait.

We moved past sundew and pitcher plants as the music of the wood thrush, veery, goldfinch, oriole and titmouse provided background music.

We stopped to look at a pair of statuesque bald eagles teed up at the top of a tall tree.

I talked to a mammalian expert who told me of a big male badger wearing 30-35 pounds and a fisherman telling me of his friend hooking a river otter while ice fishing.

Lake Carlos

I spoke and lead some birding trips in the Lake Carlos area outside Alexandria recently for Lake Carlos Environmental Center.

The Center was once a State Patrol training facility.

We watched a chickadee travel in and out of its nest cavity in a dead tree.

We looked at barred owl pellets.

Hawks also leave pellets.

A participant referred to a coot as a &uot;rooty-toot coot.&uot;

A doctor who walked with me extolled the virtues of the berry of the hawthorn.

He maintained that pills made from the berries were great to control high blood pressure.

The legend is that it was a branch of the hawthorn that Christ wore as a crown.

Lake Carlos State Park claims the second highest number of campers of any state park.

Lake Itasca has the most.

Trees

We are so lucky to have so many trees.

This fact was reaffirmed to me the other day by the comments of a couple of friends.

One told me that her family holds its reunion in North Dakota each year.

Where in North Dakota?

Under the tree.

Another told me that he and his family were traveling near Rock Springs, Montana.

They stopped at a lone cottonwood.

The sign on the big tree read, &uot;Rock Springs State Forest.&uot;

Quick, paint the car! Here comes a flock of gulls!

There are some who claim that it is good luck to be hit by bird droppings.

There are others who feel it is good luck to be free of animal excrement.

Charles West of Bristol, England decided to conduct a survey of bird droppings on automobiles and find which color made a car the most tempting target for a bird intent on putting down a deposit.

He recruited 40 people and equipped with a clipboard each, they began examining splattered cars.

They looked at 1,700 vehicles and discovered that white cars had the highest number of droppings while black or dark blue cars had the fewest.

West was surprised as he thought that blue cars would be hit the most as he assumed birds would think it was water.

The conclusion reached from the analyses of crappy cars?

People who own white cars don’t wash them as often as they should.

Murder

I was leading some wonderful folks on nature walks around Maplewood Park during the Chautauqua in Waseca when someone asked me how a group of crows had come to be known as a murder.

According to James Lipton’s An Exaltation of Larks, the term dates from 1450 in the form a mursher of crowys. By 1476 it had become a murther of crowes. Whether it arose because murdering was thought to be a characteristic of crows or was simply a negative comment upon a flock of crows is not known.

The mursher is a problematic word as we are left to wonder if it was intended as murder or was mistakenly interpreted as such.

A different answer is given by the American Society of Crows and Ravens which says, &uot;A ‘murder’ of crows is based on the persistent but fallacious folk tale that crows form tribunals to judge and punish the bad behavior of a member of the flock. If the verdict goes against the defendant, that bird is killed (murdered) by the flock. The basis in fact is probably that occasionally crows will kill a dying crow who doesn’t belong in their territory or much more commonly feed on carcasses of dead crows. Also, both crows and ravens are associated with battlefields, medieval hospitals, execution sites and cemeteries (because they scavenged on

human remains). In England, a tombstone is sometimes called a ravenstone.&uot;

And lastly, Macklin Smith of the University of Michigan had this to say, &uot;In Old English (pre-1066, AKA Anglo-Saxon), “morth” means death, destruction, and in particular homicide, murder.

‘Morthor’ could mean any deed of violence, torment, injury, punishment, or even deadly sin, but commonly meant murder.

So the term ‘murder of crows’ might, depending on when it was coined, refer either to crows as killers, crows as death omens, or crows as raucous perpetrators of mayhem; but ‘murder’ probably means murder.

Most of the intriguing collective nouns for birds are literary inventions of a fanciful and usually aristocratic or sentimental nature, and can claim, per se, no other linguistic authority.&uot;

Etcetera

&uot;Great people are those who make others feel that they, too, can become great&uot;. – Mark Twain

&uot;Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.&uot; — Kahlil Gibran

DO GOOD.

(Allen Batt of Hartland is a member of the Albert Lea Audubon Society. E-mail him at SnoEowl@aol.com.)