C is for Crows

Ah, crows. Crows and ravens have always been special to me. I grew up in the Pacific Northwest; there are crows EVERYWHERE, and the occasional raven. I remember walking to school, and seeing a crow sitting on the sidewalk, simply watching me as I approached, until he finally hopped to the side of the sidewalk to let me pass. Perhaps some of the connection came from the tabletop roleplaying game I was playing at the time, in which I was playing a were-raven. I could see the intelligence in the crows that made the game creator think they could be humans in disguise.

A crow in the forest behind our current apartment

So I grew up loving crows, and in high school when I started role-playing, found a deeper appreciation for them.

And early on in discovering my own witchiness, I spent some time with a dear friend of mine near Seattle. She's a witch, and had been for quite some time. Enough that she knew what she was doing at the time, and helped me with a lot of my questions. More than I think she realized I had. Simply being around her and observing her helped answer a lot of my questions. She has a close connection with a murder of crows. Watching her interaction with her flock, how they occasionally guided her through city streets or appeared when she needed a sign, deepened my appreciation further.

A year or two later, I was again in the Pacific Northwest while Sascha was deployed, and found there was a murder of crows that roosted in the trees surrounding my apartment. Every day I found feathers. Every day. And always in multiples of three. Always. I now have a large plastic bin full of black feathers; not enough for a cloak, which is what I'd really like to do with them, but a lot. I keep a couple of them on my altar.

I no longer live near a murder - at least not year-round. (There was a giant murder roosting in the woods behind my apartment for a week or so this last fall.) But I still occasionally see crows when I'm pondering hard questions. They always seem to show up immediately after I've made a decision, as if verifying I've made the right one.

When we moved from North Carolina to Maryland, we saw them on the shoulder of the highway every couple of miles. As if moving was precisely the right thing to be doing.


To the right is Boudi, being very curious about the bowl of crow feathers on the table. (That bowl is about a third of what I wound up collecting, and yes, that is a normal-height table, Boudi's just huge.)