How Crows Trained Me Into Servitude

It all started with a few peanuts tossed on the lawn.

These were a gift for my pandemic entertainers, the neighborhood crows. When I hear a chorus of angry squawks, I run out to watch the show. It’s a squadron of crows escorting a hawk out of their no-fly zone. They’re fun to spy on. They make eating peanuts in the shell a high drama and caw with their entire bodies inflating and deflating like bellows.

Today I realized that the crows own me.

I find myself making special trips to the store for peanuts. I look out the window to see if they’re hanging around. When they order me to feed them by cawing outside my window, I do. When I go for a walk, I seek them out, and even my boyfriend buys food for them now.

How did this happen? A simple act has turned into a whole contagious ecosystem of behaviors. Did they train me, or did I train myself to
serve them?

And why was this all but unconscious? I didn’t set out to be the crow whisperer, but now I have developed a Pavlovian response to them and changed both my shopping and walking habits.

This epiphany made me wonder what else in my life had started as a simple gesture and become a dynamic of interdependent and automatic behaviors?

What are the “crows” we are “feeding” unconsciously in our lives? It’s so easy for these habits and dynamics to start with just a handful of peanuts tossed on a lawn.

Image credit: Wheatfield with Crows, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)