The Crow As Muse

The crow gets no respect. The farmer erects a scarecrow in his garden not just for any  bird, but to frighten only that scavenging pest. Edgar Allen Poe wrote about the  crow's cousin and saw the raven as a harbinger of death. His story made the raven a rhythmic little devil that drummed its cadence into our American psyche.

We have a  bird feeder and bath in our back yard where several cardinal couples add color  and music to our routine and little wrens and finches entertain us with their antics. Songbirds share their space with squirrels and chipmunks, but a crow is an ill-mannered and unwelcome guest; when he swoops in, the smaller birds  scatter.

A few  nights ago, a glassy-eyed crow perched on the lip of our birdbath. Neither  splashing nor drinking, he looked intoxicated while two of his ilk watched him  from a nearby tree. My presence scared off the onlookers, but the sick one stayed. I called the medical student who lives with us; he had completed his neurology rotation and I thought he would enjoy seeing an ataxic bird. He gauged  the black bird's illness and agreed this crow was a goner.

I asked my next-door neighbor, head of public relations for the Illinois health department, if the state lab would want to test a soon-to-be-dead crow. He said they had  stopped accepting freshly dead birds because all such birds the lab had tested this summer were positive for West Nile virus. Before daylight, the bird was dead in my driveway. Picking him up in a plastic bag and dropping his remains into the garbage can, I was amazed by his lightness.

Later that morning, the medical student returned from a marathon training run to report seeing a crow fall from a tree. During my morning run the next day, I saw  another dead crow in the park and composed a four stanza haiku:

           Bit by mosquito,

           Stricken by West Nile virus,

           Crow falls from oak tree.

           Marathon runner,

           Training in Washington Park

           Watches black bird fall.

           Sweating and panting,

           He tells me of his sighting.

           I say, "Time for DEET"

           Ignoring advice,

           Weak from a flu-like illness,

           Marathon now off.

This poem  will win no awards, but we two runners were entertained and perhaps will wear mosquito repellent.

That evening my neighbor told me the health department reported the state's first human case of West Nile fever. The newspapers and N.P.R. carried the story the  next day, along with reporting more West Nile deaths in Louisiana. Then the  first case of encephalitis was found in Illinois. Like Poe's raven, is the crow a harbinger of death? Concerned, I ask my medicine residents to test for the  virus in our new lupus patient, since she has manifested signs of encephalitis.

Ironically,  the same week, research published in Science shows that crows are quite intelligent.  Not the birdbrains we  thought they were, crows always choose a hooked wire over a straight one to retrieve a morsel of meat buried deep in a cylinder. But that's not all, because  the dominant male won't share his hook; the female crow bends the straight wire into a hook and uses her tool to fetch the food. And it's not a fluke—she  repeats this trick nine of ten times.

We share intelligence, as well as a deadly virus, with the crow. My respect for the scavenger grows, and although I will never know why he dropped in my back yard, I feel guilty for not having given his corpse more reverence.

I reflect  on how Native Americans view this bird and find a story told by an 89-year-old  Tagish woman at the Yukon International Storytelling Festival. In Angela Sidney's telling, Crow didn't so much make the world as trick it into being: "Crow is always stealing things. He steals the sun, the light, the moon, the fire, the fish, the rivers, the earth itself—all the necessities of life. . . .  And whatever Crow steals, he releases into common use. 'Go to the skies,' he says, tossing the sun and moon up into the heavens; now no one man owns it—it  will be for everybody. Crow steals the world, and gives it away to us, the creatures for whom it is to be a dwelling-place."

Pondering  the many faces of the crow—pesky scavenger, disease carrier, death harbinger, bright trickster, and world stealer—I see an enigma. Many years ago, Native  Americans were in balance with their environment, including the crow. Europeans  displaced them and brought the scourges of smallpox and tuberculosis. Now the crow—hated by the farmer but revered by the Indians—bears a modern, mostly urban epidemic.

Returning to "The Raven," I find this  line:

           "Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore."

                                                                       August 13, 2002

Postscript

It is now  two months later. I seldom see a live crow anymore, so when I do it is  remarkable. Today when I drove from Chicago to Springfield, I saw a crow on the expressway scavenging a small animal killed on the road. He was alone. It is the first live crow I have seen in a month. This summer, Illinois will document more cases of West Nile fever and encephalitis than any other state—over 750 human cases and 52 deaths. I personally cared for two patients who survived, but one suffered severe neurological damage. Last night, we had our first frost, which  should kill most of the mosquito larvae. Yesterday, the runner finished the Chicago Marathon in three hours and one minute, a personal record. He used mosquito repellent.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                       October 14, 2002

Paul Rockey, M.D., M.P.H.

Clinical Affairs

First Place, Prose