It might not seem that one could say it was a blessing to have a baby crow live and die in your backyard.
And still, it was.
It began on Tuesday morning, two weeks ago.
I saw something that didn’t seem right in the backyard.
It was black, wasn’t moving, and I went out, and I saw that it was a crow just sitting there.
They do not usually do that.
It was not that small.
I thought it was injured.
I called the animal rescue, and I described the crow, and they said, it’s not an injured crow, it’s a fledgling.
And over the next week and a half, it cried for food, and sometimes his parents fed it.
And sometimes they didn’t, and it’s crying made me cry.
And little by little, it got a little bit bigger, and fluttered a little bit from here to there.
It was there every day and went away, somewhere to sleep out of sight at night.
One time, I helped the crows chase off two coyotes.
Every day, I got to watch the baby crow in the backyard.
Growing, cawing, not learning to fly and walking kind of funny.
Eventually I was able to give it a little bit of food.
I looked up what to give it.
I gave it a little bit of hard boiled egg and the parents fed it now and again.
And I loved it.
It was the cutest little baby crow, and it had its own look about it and its own funny, wobbly way of walking, and it’s little baby cawing.
And I was waiting and waiting to see.
Is this baby crow okay?
Because it had been more than a week, almost 2 weeks.
On Friday afternoon, it was sitting underneath our glass table in the backyard, on the beams underneath the table, gazing in the most cute and curious way up at the glass.
Realizing it couldn’t fly through that, but looking at it, with such interest, and it was just so cute.
I’ve learned that when the crows make a big rookus, something’s wrong.
Saturday morning, which for me is Shabbat, I woke up early, and I heard them.
It was about 5:30 in the morning, and I heard really loud, cawing of one crow, and then many, many crows cawing and cawing loudly.
I thought, uh oh, maybe there’s another coyote in the yard.
I quickly dressed and ran outside to where they were all screaming and screaming.
At the end of the cul-de-sac, beneath our house, in the back of our garden.
There was another non-moving black lump.
Only this time, sadly, it was indeed, the baby crow, and it was dead.
It was hard to tell what happened to it if it got hit somehow by a car or some other cause.
It wasn’t bleeding, and it was whole. It was already kind of stiff, and I didn’t really know what to do.
Because crows are amazing.
There were hundreds of crows above, and they were cawing, and cawing, and cawing, and flying around, and you could tell they were they were so upset that this baby crow had died.
I picked it up, and I held it up over my head to them.
And I just cried with them.
I didn’t know what else to do.
I just cried with them.
It was Shabbat, and on Shabbat, I don’t use my phone or do anything of that nature.
So I put it down and then I realized that I wanted to put it down where it couldn’t be seen.
I finally put it down very gently in the bushes near where it liked to hang out and was hidden from sight.
Then the crows calmed down.
And they eventually flew off.
I came down, again, a little bit later that morning.
I think the parent crows, the family crows were there.
Just a few quietly sitting in the trees above.
I came near to where I put the baby crow.
And then they just started cawing at me and I just stood and I began crying.
I was I was also sad.
Not as sad as the crows, obviously, but I was also sad.
I just stood there and I cried with them.
What was kind of amazing was that, as I stood there crying with them in that moment, with all those crows crying with all my heart,
Standing there by the dead baby crow with the crows above me.
They became quiet.
And then I became quiet.
And we all found our own way of accepting that this little baby crow brought so much sweetness and love into the world in its short little life.
It’s left me contemplating so much of what it’s like when people lose somebody they love very much.
These small animal lessons are great teachers for us to remember what it’s like to love and to experience loss and to get back up again and to greet the new day with hope.
And feeling blessed and knowing that there’s still love in the world, even in times of loss.
So thank you, baby crow, for bringing me the blessings of your sweet little life into my heart and into my soul.