Every gardener has a crow story, a tale that either exalts the cunning of crows or vilifies their malicious intent to overthrow the garden. My crow story takes place in western Washington, where I once had a garden of a different sort.
Washington’s Skagit River Valley, north of Seattle, produces the majority of the world’s cabbage seed, a process that involves over-wintering headed cabbages, then allowing them to flower and set seed the following spring. Plants were dying in winter fields during the early 1990s and I was funded by the seed growers to find a silver bullet. I ended up turning this project into a doctoral dissertation.
My research, assessing the effect of two plant growth regulators on winter hardiness, required growing cabbage plants in a field plot at the Puyallup Experiment Station. After a month of work in the greenhouse to produce several hundred transplants, I spent three days planting the small plants in the plot. In the soil next to each plant, I inserted a 6-inch white plastic label that indicated the randomized treatment that the plant would receive.
After planting, each plant was sprayed with the designated treatment and at the end of the day I walked away feeling good about a job well done. All I needed now was a map of the plot indicating the treatment information for each plant, just in case a label was lost or damaged. I could look out the window of my laboratory, across the road and uphill from the field plots, and see the perfectly straight rows of bright white labels reminding me to make that map.
On the afternoon of the second day after planting, I went to the lab window and watched a crow pluck one of the labels from the ground with its beak, then fly to a branch in a nearby chestnut tree. Before the consequences of this act registered, I realized that there were several crows flying back and forth from the same tree, and then I noticed the pile of white labels at the base of the tree.
The crows had finished the job by the time I made it to the plot, every label laid to rest under the chestnut. Since I had not yet made the map, I had no record of which treatment each plant had received. A month of greenhouse work and three days of planting lost with no option but to start over.
I have carried this story around with me for nearly two decades without understanding what was going on in the minds of those crows, and then I read Lyanda Lynn Haupt’s new book, “Crow Planet, Essential Wisdom from the Urban Wilderness” (2009, Little, Brown and Company). This is a must read for gardeners who garden with wildlife, the more-than-human world, as Haupt describes those creatures that have managed to adapt to our urban and suburban ecosystems.
I now believe there are two possible explanations for the behavior of the Puyallup crows. They may have simply been playing. According to Haupt, crows will toss sticks into the air and catch them in their beaks as they fall. They have been observed playing in the snow, gathering it on their heads and then tossing it into the air; climbing ladders, one rung at a time, over and over; catching cherry blossoms on the wind like a playful cat.
Or the crows may have not recognized me, taking my disturbance of their habitat as an intrusion not to be tolerated. Haupt explains that crows learn to recognize the human members of their habitat and label each as friend or foe, depending on behavior. Humans who pay too much attention to crows during nesting season, for example, are often dive-bombed when approaching a nest area.
The crows in Marjorie’s Garden see me as harmless, I hope. They hang around the garden, doing little damage except for taking an occasional strawberry. Their caws greet me in the morning, reminding me that I share this space I call a garden with all those who are more than human.
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