 The baby crow sat in my hand and clutched onto to me. His disproportionate huge head to his little body did not take away his defense mechanism of opening his big beak every time I petted him on the head. After a while, he got used to me and sat quietly in the taxi for the ride from Mani Bhavan at Gamdevi to Fort. I was attending one of the hundreds of calls in the year that the WSD (Welfare of Stray Dogs) receives to rescue city-birds… mostly crows, pigeons, cuckoos, owls and kites; sometimes parrots, sparrows, egrets and herons. I am not a bird-enthusiast and cannot distinguish a heron from a magpie… but yes, I love our everyday city birds.
The Indian House Crows are a subject unto themselves. You will see them all over Mumbai - cawing away, sitting coolly atop BEST buses, following garbage trucks and riding on top of fisher-folk’s baskets. Look around, especially before the rains and you will see them toiling away – gathering twigs, wires and anything they can get their hands or beaks on, to build their nests on trees amidst the traffic and busy streets.
Crows can be mean to other creatures including sparrows, kittens, cuckoos and monkeys. A recent story blamed the crows for the disappearing sparrows. Unfortunately, nobody seems to be blaming the humans and our garbage creation for the increase in the crow population. Only the koels (cuckoos) seem to have outsmarted the crows. They lay their eggs in crow nests, the crow hatches them and feeds them till she realises that they are not ‘crow’lings.
I remember a story reported by CNN-IBN about a gentleman named Treekambji who is known as the ‘Pied Piper of Crows’. He lives in Mulund in Mumbai’s eastern suburbs and has been feeding these crows for nearly thirty years. When asked how this all started, he said, “I used to whistle out to stray dogs so I could give them food every day. A friend challenged me to try it on crows. When I started, nearly five hundred of them responded to my call." 1
Many people have found crows a very interesting subject to draw or write about. Mark Twain has written about them when he stayed at Watson’s Hotel at Kala Ghoda in 1896. In his book Following the Equator, he calls them ‘Birds of Birds’ and four pages of this book are dedicated to the Bombay crows. They also find a mention in all Mumbai-centric books including in the chapter “Arriving in Bombay” by Aldous Huxley from the book, Bombay, Meri Jaan edited by Naresh Fernandes and Jerry Pinto and in other books like Maximum City by Suketu Mehta, Anita Desai’s Baumgartner's Bombay and Thrity Umrigar’s Bombay Time.
R. K. Laxman’s fascination for crows is also very well known. He told this to Gowri Ramnarayan in the book Past Forward, “At age three I began to sketch crows. I tried to draw their antics. My mother saw this and encouraged me. She told me that Lord Shanisvara used the crow for his mount. ‘If you draw His crow, surely He will send you good luck.’ I have never grown out of this childhood fascination for the crow. I have painted hundreds of crows, singly and in groups, from near and far, and in many moods. Sometimes I put crows into my cartoons. My crow paintings have gone to many countries – one of them hangs in faraway Iceland now!” He also thinks that crows are “immensely intelligent and are unfairly dismissed by fretting people as a nuisance.”
I am sure all of you have a story to ‘crow’ about. Do share yours.
Abodh Aras
Abodh runs WSD (The Welfare of Stray Dogs) and knows his way around the nooks and crannies of the city.
Article sourced from Abodh’s blog: www.strayingaround.blogspot.com
Image sources
1. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/asifthebes
2. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/dimitri_c
3. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/pautina
Reference
1. http://ibnlive.in.com/news/this-pied-piper-attracts-crows/3723-3.htm
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