How to think about a murder of crows

Did you know that crows are songbirds? A discerning ornithologist long ago decided, no, concluded, from research and objective observation, that given the vast range of screeching hollers the crow is known to produce, it had to be singing.

The classing could only be more delightful if the same perceptive biologist had also decided to catalogue the crow under Mattel's Barbie The Swan Bird of Beauty Collection. Natural science naturally gets chucklesome sometimes and runs amuck denaturing its subjects.

Let's not play around, though. A crow is a bastard. And not the kind Jon Snow was thought to be until the last few wretchedly produced episodes. A crow is a veritable scoundrel.

Those who disagree are invited to verify this sturdy fact by subjectively experiencing a crow's personal presence. It will be reported to be raucous despite the nomenclature, vexatious for seemingly no reason, frightening as the crow will bore plumb to the back wall of your brain with a dead-eyed stare, and unsettling when it will look at you like it knows you steal regularly from the donation jar at the general store. The truly striking part? By the time you will begin wondering why you haven't seen a baby crow at all and it will dawn on you that they are clearly hiding the cute ones from you, the crow under study will seem to have given a call to arms to its glassy-eyed peers around town to move at once to your specific neighbourhood. Presumably just to start a choir, if the scientist got his notes right.

But, of course, the neighbourhood has to have a municipal dump yard for it to be truly appealing to an apocalyptic flock of elite crows, slick urban dandies that they are. And so skilled! Blarneying the likes of David Attenborough into talking them up, as the naturalist does in a film starring the creatures. The footage pivots on the pyrotechnical flourishes of a particular one at a busy city corner. It is seen dropping a walnut -- stolen, in all likelihood -- onto a tarmac road while imperiously perched atop a traffic light, getting the unsuspecting car drivers passing below to crush it under their tyres, then waiting for the signal to change to red, and crossing over safely to collect the cracked nut before flying smugly away, probably singing to itself.

If crows have such street smarts, the obvious thing to do is enslave them with civic employment. Recruit them to train jaywalking humans and pedestrians out to accurately mimic the movement of a blobfish floating through the sea. If there can be a K-9 unit, it couldn't be much of a bother to put a Kro-9 together.

It's not like crows have anything better to do, other than to portend death and decay, which is something that they have consistently been failing at of late, or else the problem of overpopulation would be on the mend.

This way, they could give something back in the way of useful civic service, besides their free-meals charity initiative, as part of which they helpfully toss nubs and hunks of raw food not to their taste right into your defenceless balconies, presumably as refreshment to go with their throaty renditions.

The crows have to be integrated since it is evident they don't like being dismissed. This is clear by their response when you interrupt them if they are busy being in the middle of staying clawed to the bird net outside your window, cawing. They stop cawing and instead greet you with a bawling rebuking screech, refuse to take their business elsewhere and pretend the bird net is a recliner chair, this last an act that is instantly seen through since nobody is that comfortable gripping a flimsy grid of fibre thread at 87 degrees in a three-dimensional world while delivering what you are told is a vocal performance.

For such persistence, in addition to their potential for human improvement, the glossy shrill carrion-eater can be forgiven its psychotic need to make unwanted eye contact with its glassy dead-eyes.