The Twa Corbies by Arthur Rackham
Crow family...or as dad always called them in his Armagh brogue...
"The Craws".
I have a board on my Pinterest site dedicated to these amazing creatures.
One of my most loved of Aesop's fables...always to be found in Arthur Mee's Encyclopedia for Children....
( beloved books of information long before wikipedia!)
...was the one about the clever crow who dropped stones one by one into a jug of water, until the level was high enough for him to drink out of it! How good is that?!
Peter Davies mentions not only the intelligence of these birds, but also their sense of humour.
We two sat last Friday in the Rotunda bar at The Midland in Morecambe watching two crows pick stones up off the beach...
...fly up to about ten feet...do a kind of back flip and as they were doing it...drop the stones on the pebbles.
Were they trying to break open some mussels?....or was it just for fun?...either way they had a great time.
And we had a great time watching them.
Icelandic Raven.
Crows are found in so many differing cultural stories.
In Irish mythology...crows are associated with Morrigan, the goddess of war and death.
In Cornwall magpies are feared as associated with the other world, and thence the respect shown by some when they encounter one of these birds.
Norse mythology has a pair of ravens flying around the world and bringing news back to Odin.
And then there is the wonderful ancient flood saga where Noah sends the raven off to find land twice...
...second time it doesn't come back...
...land at last!
I really think that for me the reason for my facination is actually just the way dad would say....
...."craw" ....
and there would be that smile playing conspiritorially around his blue, blue eyes!
Lots of information from Wikipedia....naturally!
