Crow wisdom

One of my neighbors has a mean virus, so when Evan arrived for Baba time, the first thing we did was go pick up some food for her from a restaurant six blocks away. It wasn’t raining when we left, but it started up again while we were walking. As always, he was perfectly agreeable. “Sure, whatever. I’ll hold the box for her and it can warm my hands.”

On the way, he tells me he has figured out what crows do every night when they roost downtown by the river. “They gather a few leaves, they glue the edges together with tree sap, and then they gather a little fresh mud in an empty nut shell. Then do you know what they do?”

No idea.

“They write, in very tiny letters, books about the weather, and about where to find food, and about the mean humans and the good humans. They leave these tiny books for other crows to read, if they’re young or they just moved to Portland. And that’s the reason why we have so many crows. They come here to study.”