A Murder of Crows

Unsplash photo by Valentin Petkov

Crows squawked raucously in the trees. It sounded like they were tearing something apart, something they didn’t even want, just for the fun of destroying it. ~Janet Fitch

The last two mornings when I was our early walking my dogs I’ve seen a number of crows fly from the west to the east. One other day I’ve seen them convened in the treetops above our pond. Crows sound as if they are continually fussing about something. Of course, the crow does have to live with the voice given it by nature just as each of us have to be glad for our own voices even when they might not be as melodious as someone else’s. Crows have nothing melodious in their caws.

I’ve been researching birds a bit for the new novel I’m writing. Crows, especially. I’ve discovered crows are very intelligent birds that have some unusual traits.  Crows are common here on the farm. So when I saw one lone crow this morning cawing loudly and flying west, I thought little about it other than wishing it was the group that I’d seen the day before since on Sundays I post a bit about my walk on my Facebook author page and seeing 50 crows fly over would be an interesting thing to share with my reading buddies who “walk” along with me on Sunday mornings. No sooner had that thought crossed my mind than crows began flying in from the west. The lone bird had seemed to be a scout who had come back to tell the other birds to hurry up as it too turned toward the east now to fly toward the rising sun. I gave up counting at 70 and more crows were still flying over. Or perhaps they were the rear guard. And then they were all gone to who knows where.  At least I didn’t know where as their caws faded in the distance, but it did get me thinking about some of the interesting words that have come to describe flocks of this or that bird.

A murder of crows. Why would any group of birds be called a murder? Except that people did see them on battlefields. A crow is a bird that takes advantage of easy availability of food and as gruesome as it sounds they would come flying after a battle to feed on the corpses. So people associated the crows with death.

But why is a group of owls called a parliament? A pandemonium of parrots? An unkindness of ravens? A cast of falcons or a gaggle of geese? That gaggle of geese is a familiar one I’ve heard often and seems to fit a flock of geese. Other groups of animals have interesting names too. A business of ferrets. A quiver of cobras. A stench of skunks. A crash of rhinos.

I may not use any of those names in my new book, but then again I might mention a murder of crows or an unkindness of ravens.

The crow wished everything was black, the Owl, that everything was white. ~William Blake

Do you know any unusual sounding names for a group of animals or why they might be called that?