Winter Crow Gathering
The common American crow isn’t brightly colored and its voice can hardly be called musical. Even so, the crafty bird has played an outsized role in human myths and legends for centuries. In the same family as ravens and blue jays, crows fascinate many bird watchers today, professionals and amateur alike. But it is the crows’ habit of gathering in great flocks each winter that brought one group of observers out into the cold in Kalamazoo recently. WMUK’s Andy Robins went along:
The sky is grey and the clouds are low as the crow aficionados gather near a golf course off West Main. It’s cold and there’s more than a threat of icy rain. But that doesn’t stop either the people or the crows.
[Man] “It’s like the approach to O”Hare Airport.”
Crows fly in from the north in groups, some larger, some smaller. But they don’t stop. This disconcerts crow watching group leader Russ Schipper:
[Russ Schipper] “Two nights ago they were right there between those two conifers. There’s roughly 2,000, maybe 3,000 birds, a real rough guess. They might be there again tonight, or maybe not.”
[Russ Schipper] “They’re very intelligent and very interesting and, this year, extremely frustrating. Because I want birds that will come to some place I can show them to people!”
Crows spend the warmer months in small family groups. But come fall, they begin to gather in large groups.
[Russ Schipper] “And there’s a lot of different theories on why they do that. It has something to do with communication, something to do with food, but maybe they just like socializing. That’s not out of the question either. And then they’ll go out in different directions and feed during they day, I think up to thirty miles. Probably much less than that if they don’t have to. And then they’ll come back in.”
On their way back they often gather temporarily in “pre-roosts” before settling down for the night at their final destination. These roosts can be in the same place for decades and some cases for more than a century. But these Kalamazoo crows are being coy about where they’ll end up:
[Bil Gilbert] “I find these Michigan crows very erratic.”
That’s Bil Gilbert, an author and naturalist who helped found the American Society of Crows and Ravens. He’s studied crows and their relations for years. Gilbert says crows don’t often move far if people try to disrupt their roosts. And they can seek revenge if humans do interfere, as some residents of Frederick, Maryland, discovered.
[Bil Gilbert] “The good people of Frederick got very upset washing off their cars every morning. So they complained and they got people to come in with sound cannons. It didn’t change the number of crows and it shifted a lot of them over to where well-to-do lawyers lived. (Group laughs) I always thought there was ironic justice in this.”
Crows are notoriously intelligent and often recognize the faces of individual people. And they pass that knowledge on to their young, something Gilbert sees as evidence that crows have cultures just as humans do. Scientists once tried an experiment by banding crows, not an easy thing to do, while wearing a mask of a certain former vice-president:
[Bil Gilbert] “A year later somebody would come with a Dick Cheney mask and they knew it, the crows. This is all cultural.
[Russ Schipper] “That was a great study.”
[Bil Gilbert] “Well, if you like to be Dick Cheney I guess it would be.”
[Woman] “Look at ‘em all, holy mackerel, look at ‘em all!”
[Russ Schipper] “There’s a good group coming right now.”
[Woman] “Yeah, a huge group.”
[Russ Schipper] “Just when you think it’s over…”
[Man] “…A couple hundred more.”
The crows are flying over but they’re still not stopping. So Russ Schipper sends out a scouting party to find out where they’re landing.
[Russ Schipper] “Yes?”
[Walkie-talkie voice] “We did see a bunch of them down in a hollow, off the first road, Driftwood, way in the back where the field is.”
[Russ Schipper] “Is there a thousand there or 500 or 20?”
[Walkie-talkie voice] “Probably two or three hundred.”
[Russ Schipper] “Okay, that’s good.”
The human flock moves off to join the crows perched in several trees, conversing and perhaps asking each other just what the funny creatures in the parking lot are up to. We can’t know for sure. But Bil Gilbert is not surprised that have loomed so large in the human imagination for thousands of years.
[Bil Gilbert] “But I had a friend. He worked for my dad. His grandmother was Potawatomi. I just followed him. He was a great natural naturalist; I just followed him all over the place. And he told me one time that his grandmother
said that crows are either risen people or we are fallen crows. Take your choice.”
You’ll find for information about the American Society of Crows and Ravens at the group’s Web page.
Update: Bil Gilbert died on Friday, January 27th, a few days after this interview was recorded. He was 80. A memorial Web page has been created to highlight his career and accomplishments.
Never the Sinner
The University Theatre at Western Michigan University continues its’ run of the John Logan play “Never The Sinner” Thursday through Sunday in the York Arena Theatre. The drama tells of a Chicago murder trial in the 1920’s that was one of the first in the U.S. to be called the “crime of the century.” WMUK’s Lorraine Caron reports:
In the months leading up to May of 1924, two wealthy University of Michigan alumni and University of Chicago students, 19-year-old Nathan Leopold, Jr. and 18-year-old Richard Loeb, planned what they considered “a perfect crime.” In this scene from the play, WMU actors Max Rasmussen and David Lou Cooper play Leopold and Loeb as they coldly consider which of their young acquaintances will be the target of their scheme to get away with murder.
[Richard Loeb] “Alright then, who’s it going to be?”
[Nathan Leopold] “Johnny Levinson?”
[Loeb] “Maybe.”
[Leopold] “Bobby Franks?”
[Loeb] “Better and better. So many nasty little boys. Our problem is merely one of selection.”
[Leopold] “Why don’t we leave it to the gods?”
[Loeb] “How do you mean that?”
[Leopold] “Why don’t we just cruise around the Harvard school area and just take whoever best fits us?
[Loeb] “Genius! We leave it to fate then. We leave it to the gods.”
Fate placed 14-year-old Bobby Franks in the wrong place at the wrong time and Leopold and Loeb kidnapped and murdered him. Once apprehended, the brilliant young criminals retained Clarence Darrow as counsel for the defense. Darrow was a well-known opponent of the death penalty, saying he hated the sin but "never the sinner."
Retired professor of theatre at WMU D. Terry Williams is directing “Never The Sinner.” He says the challenge for the actors, and audiences, is in getting inside the heads of these unusual young men. Not only were they highly intelligent and raised with monetary advantages, each was also enamored of the other.
[Terry Williams] “They don’t think there is anything wrong with killing Bobby Franks. They know that society says it’s wrong, but to them Bobby Franks is just a kid and there are plenty of other kids to take his place, he’s disposable. The media made it the crime of the century, in part, because Clarence Darrow, who was already a famous attorney, got the two boys to plead guilty, so the trial wouldn’t need a jury. It was tried in front of just the judge who then had to decide would they hang or spend life in prison? The whole country wanted them hung because they were so arrogant during the trial, laughing and smirking. But, of course, Darrow wanted them to get life in prison which they did. But besides being a story of the famous trial, the play is also a love story between the two boys.”
Max Rasmussen, who plays Nathan Leopold, says playwright John Logan’s script is littered with the word arrogant, used to describe the criminals.
[Nathan Leopold] “So, it’s just so interesting to play a character who is both shy and neurotic, but still thinks he’s above the world.”
[Terry Williams] “Well, they have a very interesting take on the idea of Nietschean supermen, who could commit a perfect crime.” They are intelligent, and affluent and sophisticated, and they really think they are better then their peers. What they lack is a moral center.”
D. Terry Williams directs the University Theatre’s production of “Never The Sinner” by John Logan, through Sunday in Western’s York Arena Theatre.
Other Events:
For the month of February, the Air Zoo is allowing visitors to sit in the cockpit of three historic planes: the Texan, Trojan, and Skyraider. Click here to see when each cockpit will be open.
Beginning this Thursday (February 2nd), the Festival Playhouse of Kalamazoo College will be performing Line, a play by Israel Horovitz. The play is a satire about America’s struggle to always be ‘first in line.’ The performance will be in the Dungeon Theatre in the Light Fine Arts Building.
If you would rather see a musical, the Wicked Divas will be at Miller Auditorium, Friday at 8 p.m. Broadway stars Nicole Parker and Alli Mauzey from Wicked will be in Kalamazoo singing tunes from Wicked and other Broadway hits.
Poet and author Rachel Eliza Griffiths will be having a reading during the first February Art Hop this Friday at 8 p.m. in the Bernhard Center on Western Michigan University's campus.
