According to the current Ornithological Union listing, the appropriate non-scientific name for a crow is “common crow,” which is very appropriate. Like most commonly observed objects, crows flit across our field of vision largely unheeded. Cawing, they flap away over the fields and into the woods like pieces of black flannel waving in a breeze. We hear and see them, but we don’t really pay attention. We rarely think about them. We never ask ourselves: “What are these birds up to?”

In the last several years, however, crows have decided to relocate into the valley that we live in, which is west of Bryson City and adjacent to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. This flock is composed of perhaps 25 individuals. They seem to primarily feed on horse feed left over on the ground around the barn after my wife feeds her horse. They apparently roost and nest in a thicket of scrub pines on a ridge high above the valley.

They have become rather tame and often come down to feed in the garden next to our home, when they think no one is around; that is, when both of our vehicles are gone. You did know that crows can count, didn’t you?

Sometimes, however, both vehicles are gone when I’m alone at the house. That’s when I listen to the crows talking things over. I have no idea what they’re talking about. They don’t caw when there’re discussing things. At this time, their vocalizations consist primarily of low rattling and gurgling sounds. One will rattle for awhile and then another one will gurgle for awhile in response. I keep asking myself, “What are these birds up to?”

I have never observed a large roost of crows, which is properly referred to not as a flock but as a “Congress of Crows,” but in some places they form winter enclaves that number into the thousands. One standard source reports winter flocks of up to 200,000 birds. I have an AP wire service clip in my “Crow” file dated Jan. 6, 1987, and titled “Crows Decide Illinois Town Is For The Birds.” The town in question was Danville, Ill., which had suffered a crow inundation that broke branches, pulled down power lines, and bombarded streets and houses with droppings.

“‘It’s like an Alfred Hitchcock movie over here. These birds are driving us all crazy,’ said Irene Hall, who lives on Oak Street, one of the crows’ favorite spots,” the AP reported.

Residents clanged pots and “the City Council declared war on the crow population, amending an ordinance to allow police officers to blast away at the big black birds with guns inside the city limits.”

How did it go?

“It didn’t go very well,’ said Police Chief Robert Dietzen. ‘We killed several, but for the most part they remained very high in the sky out of range.’”

Well, as most anyone who has ever tried to shoot a crow knows, it’s a tricky business. Crows seem to know before you get out of bed in the morning exactly what you’re up to. If you’ve got crow hunting on your mind, they pass the word. Their ability to detect firearms, count to three or higher, and recognize scarecrows fills the anecdotal literature about crows. I have no doubt that some of it is true.

I’ve heard numerous stories about young crows that made wonderful pets, although they reportedly become mischievous or even cantankerous as they grow older. In Birds of the South (1933), North Carolina naturalist Charlotte Hilton Green related the story “of a pet crow that would steal all the thimbles in the house, watching for them when the sewing was laid down, and burying them in the garden. This same crow would also nip the clothes-pins off the line, and bury them, until it became necessary to shut him up on wash-day.”

The first naturalists in our part of the world were the ancient Cherokees, who didn’t miss a trick in regard to the intricacies of plant and animal life. They liked to closely observe the mundane world and then make it a part of their oral traditions.

The Cherokee word for crow is “koga,” which according to one of their stories acquired its black color in a futile attempt to obtain the first fire. In another story, two crows were selected to be the guards of a gambler named Brass. Anthropologist James Mooney collected this story in the late 1880s while living among the Cherokees in the Big Cove section of the Qualla Boundary in Western North Carolina.

“They tied his hands and feet with a grapevine and drove a long stake through his breast, and planted it far out in the deep water,” Mooney recorded in Myths of the Cherokee, (1900). “They set two crows on the end of the pole to guard it and called the place Ka-gun-yi, ‘Crow place.’ But Brass never died, and cannot die until the end of the world, but lies there always with his face up. Sometimes he struggles under the water to get free, and sometimes the beavers, who are his friends, come and gnaw at the grapevine to release him. Then the pole shakes and the crows at the top cry ‘Ka! Ka! Ka!’ and scare the beavers away.”

What better lookouts than a pair of crows?

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at ellisongeorge@cs.com.