Common Birds 60 - American Crow

Monday, January 29

Last night, the rain turned to wet snow as the air slowly forgot the sun’s warmth. This morning, I was the first human on the trail, but not the first to walk it. Rabbit paws crisscrossed the path. I followed the tiny handprints of a raccoon down to the edge of the pond and as it looped back up to the trail. There it looks like it ran into a second raccoon, and the two of them got into a scuffle. The ground is torn up, a brown gash across the snow. Then, I lose the tracks. 

Following footprints in the snow like this makes the animals feel intensely present. They were right here, so I should be able to just look up and spot a raccoon tucked in the branches. I look up, and instead, I see two American crows, obsidian tricksters in the paper birches. It’s an uncanny perspective shift, realizing what I thought was the present is the past. Reaching for a metaphor, I want to say it’s like seeing a ghost, but ghosts are the opposite. The past is really the present. It reminds me of the stars. Their light feels alive and imminent, yet I know it’s distant and ancient. It feels like the scraping raccoons are just beyond the next bend, but the prints are probably hours old. The American crows notice me noticing them, and they flap off without a word.

Further along the trail, I see what appears to be the tracks of a large dog. I was resistant to the idea that I saw coyote tracks last week. Often the simplest answer is the correct answer, and I didn’t want to make a leap when it was probably just a domestic dog, but there - right there - are the loping tracks crossing a footbridge, and there are no human footprints nearby. Nothing but a coyote would be that size, and the local police have been warning people about coyotes in the area. It’s a second perspective shift. Coyotes remind me of bitter winter nights in remote Potsdam, or the echoing howls in the hills of rural Kentucky. Andover seems too built up, too domesticated, for there to be coyotes, but the tracks clear. Where do they disappear to in the day? In the trees, the chickadees are going about their day as normal as I walk back to the office, placing each step in one of my bootprints. Though, I don’t actually know if coyotes are something a chickadee would be nervous about. They don’t worry about me, and humans are the most frightening animal of all.