Kenya has decided to kill a million Indian crows by the end of the year. They have carefully chosen to use Starlicide which will kill the crow slowly over a period of 24 hours and also get degraded during the same time so that the carcass doesn’t stay poisonous. This decision was taken stating how the crows were staying on top of the food chain there so their numbers are growing exponentially and how they are feasting on Kenya’s native birds, destroying their nests and eggs and the potential possibility of these crows moving onto Nairobi National park area where hundreds of special species of birds are being cared for. The government is passing special bills, allotting great amounts of funding to import this particular poison in huge amounts to buy cages and to kill the crows. Slowly over a period of 12 hours in captivity. A million of them within a year’s time.
Have you ever heard of or seen a crow’s death.If you heard or saw a group of crows easily over fifty in number cawing and flying in circles over a single spot you could tell one of them is sick or in trouble or dead. I have seen a few such incidents. They come in groups. May be the group that lives together or maybe the group that found the body of the bird or the sick bird. They caw. All of them caw. They might be calling for help or crying or shouting so loud in an attempt to release their sorrow. They sit around after a while. They settle in surrounding trees. They wait. They stay silent but if any predator comes to savour the carcass they sweep down and fight. They stay around. They stay silent but they protect the body and they grieve. There is no other way to explain this behaviour. If there is a person who tries to clear the carcass and lay it to rest they allow it. So graceful. So mature. So humane.
Science says crows are intelligent. Science says crows have a brain that is approximately as large as a human brain if you compare the proportion of brain tissue to body size. Science says crows can do maths, analyse, solve basic problems and can take decisions to overcome minor difficulties to achieve a desired outcome. These are all evidence based concepts derived from scientific studies.
During COVID lockdowns, I was fairly home most of the time and grew a large garden. During the first lockdown we were not particularly exposed to outer world so we would just open the door water the plants and lock the door. My mom however had developed a very strong relationship with the crows surrounding the house. They were fed by her everyday regularly. She wouldn’t have any contact with them however. She would buy packets of biscuits specifically for them and leave them at a particular place along with a special bowl of water and another bowl of food but the food was eaten up mostly by the cats and kittens so the crows preferred the specially broken bits of biscuits left at zones which were safely located at an altitude difficult for cats to reach. They will swoop in pick the biscuit fly down dunk it in the water bowl and eat it. They will every day leave a gift for her at a specific spot in the garden. Sometimes it will be a beautiful pebble, sometimes a glass piece, sometimes a piece of gravel, a seed , a plastic bit, left over dead carcass, one day even a coin. For a while she couldn’t understand how such heavy unusual things came to a freshly swept spot in the garden every single day.Then one day a crow dropped off his/her gift to her by dropping it right on her head while she was standing on the spot in the garden. She thought how rude to get hit with a stone while you are feeding them. Them the next day again she noticed the crow bringing her another gift and thats when we decided that its a gift being left for her. My mom saved some of those beautiful stones from then on. My mom never fed crows like how some people feed them before every meal. Since we went to that home the crows had hanged around, fighting with the kitten for food and water which my mom left for the kitten in two specially bought bowls so she started giving the crows their separate meals. That became constant since we were almost always home and they would simply come and demand if she even missed it by a few minutes.
One day while I was half asleep rolling in my bed trying not to wake up, I heard a conversation. I sleep as long as possible in the mornings. I don’t find it easy to sleep at night so most days I stay awake till early mornings so sometimes I don’t wake up till the sun is up and about and people are on their way to work. My mom was telling Jojo to stay. She was telling him not to go. She was telling him not to come out and to stay. She said stop. I realised Jojo must have gotten out of his cage and was walking. Jojo is my sun conure. I got him to compensate for the loss of my Grandpa just like how I got Empress to compensate for the loss of my Grandmother. I got him when I was in my final year of Post graduation so after a few attempts to train him to fly freely inside the house and not fly away, being a bird novice that I was and not having time enough to spend on climbing up the high walls of the house to grab him from the ceiling I had resorted to just keeping him caged and catching him only when he opened the cage himself to put him back in. So from this conversation I had understood that my Mom was trying to ask Jojo to stay inside the cage while she was filling his water bowl leaving his cage open. When she said stop I had grabbed my blanket and started running towards the dining room. To my surprise she was standing outside the house in the garden looking up at the sky saying “Jojo don’t go come back!” Seeing me she said “there, go fetch him”. When I looked at the direction where she pointed it was just outside the fence of the garden and almost near the compound wall. Had Jojo crossed the wall I would never have gotten him back. He is a very domestic guy and he wouldn’t survive an hour in the open world. When I saw her standing outside looking up at the sky I had decided that Jojo was gone. I had already lost hope and was almost dropping the blanket, half asleep and grief stricken. When I looked at the direction where she pointed I couldn’t see Jojo at first due to the height of the grass however when I ran he was sitting on the ground and when I put the blanket over him he was more than happy to comeback with me. Once he was safely inside the cage only did I tell my mom to never open his cage and leave the back door open as he was not trained to stay and he wouldn’t stay if she told him to stay like how my dogs follow orders. Who am I kidding, my dogs don’t stay when we tell them to stay either. I have on numerous occasions run behind them, into friends and strangers houses, onto the road sometimes even in my nightclothes wearing a face full of face mask. Not the kind to keep COVID out but the kind that enhances beauty. So yes no one actually follows orders when they are parented by my mother. She is over protective and strict to me but overprotective and very, very lenient with them. So they are all spoiled brats. So he is in the cage and then she tells me this “ Jojo almost flew away. He was almost forty feet high in the sky. So beautiful, his beautiful yellow and orange shining enhanced by the sunlight such a beautiful sight he was. But a fleet of five crows flew down from five directions surrounded him and brought him to the ground. Thats how he stayed in the ground. Almost waiting for two minutes for you to open the lock get to him and bring him back.” I just couldn’t believe it but I was so grateful. I still am. Thats when I started noticing them. They were almost like our own they would demand food like they were our pets, miss us when we are away and immediately come looking for us if we came home after two days. Since then I started reminding mom to leave food for them if we left early or tell her that they are looking for her if they come asking for food at different timings other than their regular feeding time. These days when I have breakfast in my car before going to work I even have a crow coming and sitting in the rear view mirror asking for his share. I usually keep a packet of biscuits for my regular stray dog which I feed him with. I so love these small biscuit packets which are too handy to keep in bags for such occasions.
Now that I have made these points I can also understand how they might be posing a threat to other birds. Once during lockdown my mom called me to fetch a baby bird that was being fought off by a set of crows. I thought it was a set of parents trying to teach their young to fly but the baby was again and again walking behind each flower pot and hiding. So I told her I didn’t understand this. Let it go the parents will take the bird up like how they have done in the previous centuries. But I saw its eyes and they were red. Both of them. At first I thought it was injured and couldn’t see clearly So it’s hiding. Then I thought it was sick and possibly infected so I told her may be its a sick, old bird. Then she said no its a cuckoo. Its a baby cuckoo whose identity is found by these crows so they have dropped it down from the nest before it could fly. Thats how we took in our Manikkam. He was a beautiful loving baby cuckoo. I loved him so much. I used a syringe to feed him biscuit and water. He was beautiful and loving. He made my life so beautiful for a while. So I have seen how they can team up and throw even a baby bird away. I can also understand why they did that. Not even humans can handle the grief of finding out that their baby was killed and they are parenting the baby of the murderer. Poor birds how else could they react to the same situation in a better manner?
Now if one killed a million of such family oriented birds who will explain to their families the unexplained reason why one of their one or many of their relatives are missing. Why they never returned home. When everything had gone as planned. When the goodbyes were the same as yesterday why they didn’t return home by the end of the day. Why no-one has heard from them again. Who will console a million others of their families? Who will doctor their grief? Who will teach their young ones in the nest to fly. To feed. To stay alive.
You might think that any species that is endangering the lives of another does not deserve any of this and deserves only a slow painful death away from their near and dear for no fault of theirs. Kenya decided to take 200 of these Indian crows to its country to get rid of its accumulated waste. They were taken in to do scavenging. They didn’t choose to live in Kenya. They were forced to make a life there, kidnapped form their families and friends. They were not selected by nature to live there but by humans. As a cheap labour to manage their waste products. Now that nature didn’t put them there it didn’t put anything to maintain their population there. And neither did the people who decided to take them there. Who is at fault here? Now who is responsible for all the trauma that they are going to inflict upon these millions of birds who didn’t even choose this of their own free will.
A lot of old books and fairy tales have stories of people talking to birds. Nityananda once said that he would make a dog talk. Most of Indian folklore has the main character talk or get advice from animals, birds or plants. So I have sometimes thought if actually in ancient times people could actually talk to animals and birds. I sometimes wonder if we could use AI to decipher what birds and animals are saying. I am one hundred percent convinced that they are constantly communicating with us. So I do not understand why not many people are actually actively working on understanding their languages. Recently AI has given voice to a dodo bird. One day AI might give us the blueprint for their languages too.When I talk to my Jojo or Kulfi may be I can enjoy it. But given our behaviour with strays and non residential slave crows of Kenya will we be able to live with ourselves if we could understand their language and hear them tell their side of the story? The lotus ponds and parrot songs that are music to our hearts might show us how cruel and evil we are. Today its world osteoporosis day. Osteoporosis is a pathological condition where new bone is not formed at the rate of loss of old bone. Aren’t technology and development at the same stage. Are we progressing enough in a holistic manner that our values are not lost in the process?
Written to celebrate National day on writing
- Dr Thenaruvi Marimuthu 💔
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