What a Murder of Crows Taught Me About Backyard Naturalism

12.13.2023

Honoring the pigeons, raccoons, and other creatures that dwell nearby frees us from an extractivist mindset of nature.

The sky screeched with the caw of crows. They settled on slanted roofs, squawked at their neighbors, then ascended into the dusk, tens of thousands of them, scattering like bits of dark confetti.

I had come with the Seattle chapter of the Feminist Bird Club to watch a nightly spectacle for the city’s avian community: 10 to 15 thousand crows fly from as far as 14 miles away to roost together in the wetlands of the University of Washington’s Bothell campus. Corvids all around the world sleep in large groups to offer each other protection from owls, raccoons, and other predators. And when the university restored a wetland near Lake Washington in 1997, it created an ideal, convenient bedroom community for the crows of the greater Seattle metropolitan area.

If you had told me 10 years ago that I would do anything that could be described as “birdwatching,” I would have laughed in disbelief. I thought my poor eyesight would make it impossible. But I didn’t need sharp eyes to see the crows massing on the sports field under the floodlights. There were too many of them to miss, and they didn’t startle away from human presence. Like true urbanites, they went about their business, unconcerned with the other beings sharing their space.

When I was a child, I used to disdain common, easy-to-spot animals like crows. From a mix of envy and internalized ableism, I valued what others could see that I could not. But recently, I have come to believe that observing, and honoring, the nonhuman creatures that share our daily lives is more than a consolation for those of us without the physical, financial, or geographic means to access conventional wilderness. It is an inherently valuable practice that can help us bridge the false human-nature divide at a time when such reconciliation is urgently necessary.

This shift began to crystallize while I was researching an article about birding in Seattle.

“Every bird has a story,” bird photographer Nathaniel Peters told me—even ones that humans might consider pests, like rock pigeons.

“We like to be number one and when we’re not, we kind of get a little angsty about it,” Peters said.

But if we understand the secrets of their success, discomfort can give way to wonder. Pigeons mate for life, and couples lay two eggs at once. Each parent will take charge of feeding one “crop milk”—a nutritious fluid that the parents secrete at the base of their throats, regurgitate, and “pump” into their children’s mouths. Using this strategy, they can raise five or six broods a year, while most bird species only manage one to three.

Like true urbanites, they went about their business, unconcerned with the other beings sharing their space.

“We need to stop thinking about how to separate ourselves from the natural world,” he said, and instead learn “how to integrate and regain and retain and foster a connection with that world.”

Peters’ words resonated. As Western capitalism began to extract raw materials at shocking rates, Western philosophy extracted human consciousness from the web of life. Nature became something outside of human society—to be used, exploited, or enjoyed in designated parks.

But the pigeons roosting on rooftops prove this separation never really took, as do crows matriculating to university campuses and the raccoons who dare my porch if I leave a trash bag unattended. For those even subconsciously attached to the myth of human domination, this awareness might prompt anxiety, but it also offers hope.

While crow-watching, I met Kelsey Lafferty, the co-leader of Feminist Bird Club South Sound, whose first foray into birding involved watching house sparrows visit a feeder she’d set up on her apartment patio in Brooklyn during the pandemic. Observing the urban birds squabble over food or puff up for warmth “gave me a glimpse of a world that I just didn’t really realize existed,” Lafferty told me. It’s a world accessible to most should they choose to tune in; after all, house sparrows are the most widely distributed bird in the world.

Soon, other birds came to the feeder, too—tufted titmice, morning doves, woodpeckers, a bluejay—and her interactions with them made her feel connected to the nonhuman world in a way she hadn’t since she was a child growing up in Alaska, in what most people would recognize as wilderness.

Now living in a part of Tacoma without much tree cover, she still notices many birds visit her home, including house sparrows, house finches, goldfinches, black-capped chickadees, and, once, an immature bald eagle. She also finds herself more willing to share her space with insects and spiders.

“Honestly, it’s hard for me to describe how much it changed my life,” she said.

Engaging in this sort of backyard naturalism can also, in a small way, resist the colonial legacy of traditional natural history, which saw explorer-scientists under the flags of and guns of imperial powers travel to distant lands to catalog and “discover” species well-known to local Indigenous communities and bring back specimens for museum collections in the metropole.

This is a legacy that the birding community in particular has been wrestling with recently. Seattle Audubon, for example, changed its name to Birds Connect Seattle to distance itself from John James Audubon’s history of slave-holding and knowledge theft from Black and Indigenous sources. Last month, the American Ornithological Society committed to renaming all birds named for people, including Audubon, a Civil War general who helped oversee the Trail of Tears named Winfield Scott, a graverobber of Indigenous people called John Kirk Townsend, and more.

In order to make a city “more hospitable” to non-human animals, you first have to recognize them as neighbors.

But such changes risk being cosmetic if they don’t interrogate the colonial mindset behind certain ways of engaging with the so-called natural world, that still see it on the distant frontier rather than something happening next door.

Of course, I type as a woman of European descent getting to know the crows and raccoons of the unceded lands of the Duwamish people, who still lead efforts to protect Seattle’s nature despite not being federally recognized as a tribe. I, like most white people in the U.S., am only here because of colonialism.

But learning about local ecosystems can also be an entry point into learning about the local Indigenous communities that work to preserve and restore them.

I spent two weekends this November watching chum salmon return to Carkeek Park. The Carkeek Watershed Community Action Project gets a total of 100,000 salmon eggs and fry from the nearby Suquamish Tribe’s Grovers Creek Hatchery, raises them throughout the winter, releases them to sea, and counts their return in the fall. This year, the park’s salmon celebration drew more than 1,000 spectators—more than the staff had ever seen, project’s Director of Salmon Programs David Koon told me.

They were drawn in part by the presence of a beaver dam that had made the local press, which some worried would block the returning fish from their upstream journey.

Salmon are vital both for endangered orcas of the Salish Sea and for its many Indigenous peoples, and Koon said growing awareness of these issues had made people more concerned with the salmon’s plight.

“There’s a lot of things that tie into salmon,” he said.

It’s a two-way road, where an increased sensitivity to Indigenous rights and culture has made non-Indigenous Seattle residents more aware of issues impacting local wildlife, and where programs like Carkeek’s provide opportunities to learn about the efforts of Native groups like the Saquamish who provide the eggs that make it possible.

This awareness is more important than ever.

“Climate change plays a huge role in salmon survival, and we’re seeing lower stream flows,” said Thomas Tall Bull, who manages the Grover’s Creek Hatchery.

The climate crisis is the ultimate, violent consequence of capitalism’s alienation and exploitation of the nonhuman world, but human-animal collaborations like the Carkeek salmon run, the restored wetlands-cum-crow roost, or even the bird feeders that Lafferty has inspired her neighbors to place in their yards show that another relationship is possible. But, in order to make a city “more hospitable” to non-human animals, in Lafferty’s words, you first have to recognize them as neighbors.