A different kind of scarecrow
I usually try to take a long walk every day. It helps with – well, just about everything.
And so when I was out west recently, I tried to keep it up most days. In some of the places I was staying, daffodils were already popping up and cherry trees were in bloom. So the walks were beautiful, and very special to me as a New Englander imagining what it was like back home where winter still reigned.
One day I passed by a yard that had some flowers and trees in the front, and hanging upside down from one of the trees was what looked like a large, dead crow. It was so grisly that I let out a little yelp and jumped away. Then I circled back (as Psaki might say) to look at it more carefully.
Crows are pretty big, up close and personal, and this one was very close to the sidewalk. It looked like exactly what I’d originally thought it was – a dead crow hanging upside down. It had to be fake; otherwise it would be collecting other wildlife to deal with the corpse. But it was so realistic.
Was this a sort of scarecrow? I doubted it was a leftover from Halloween decorations. I decided to look it up when I got home. Sure enough, this seemed to be it:
Etistta 17 inch Realistic Hanging Dead Crows Decoy Lifesize Extra Large Black Feathered Crow
Indeed, very realistic and very large. Put your cursor on the image at the link and you’ll see. Arghhhh! More instructions:
Simple [sic] hang it on the tree or any other place that can be easily noticed, or just lay it on the ground. You could also show it to real crows. But please remember crows are very smart, So don’t leave the fake crow outdoors all the time, in case they figure it out.
I don’t know if it scares crows, but it certainly scared me. And I imagine it would scare any random children passing by.
Crows are very curious creatures. (Sign of intelligence.)
They’ll eventually figure it out no what you do…unless you can make the thing move suddenly from time to time and then go limp.
Put it on a timer, I guess.
Crows are obnoxiously loud, but they dispose of carrion, so in most states it’s illegal to kill them. We had a cat that never killed anything bigger than an earthworm, but one day my daughter came running in to announce that the cat had bagged a crow. Sure enough. He didn’t know what to do with it, but somehow he went from vegan to apex hunter in an instant. The ruckus that the rest of the flock stirred up over the loss was so loud some neighbors commented on it a few days later.
We have deer in the neighborhood, so scaring the crows away from gardens isn’t necessary, since nobody can have a garden anyway, but that’s a cool product if you need to scare crows. Those rats with antlers will empty a garden in one night.
Nevermore
pining for
a fijord.
Nor baked
in a pie.
The crows should take a page from the activists and sue for emotional damage.
We have an English Springer Spaniel one of whose missions in life is to chase crows and other large black birds. No need for decoys.
My late father would battle the crows over his corn crop. After he planted, they were smart enough to walk down the rows digging up the buried seeds. He used to have a shotgun holster on his tractor.
The crows should take a page from the activists and sue for emotional damage.
Because Black [Crow] Lives Matter.
Among School Children, W. B. Yeats: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43293/among-school-children
re windbag – ”rats with antlers” LOL… https://www.webcamtaxi.com/en/usa/maine/deer-brownville.html
Neo, I was ‘Made in Maine’, left when I learned of warmer places. Thanks for all you share here : )
Considering the treatment of crows in Dumbo, wouldn’t hanging a crow effigy constitute a racial hate crime? Being in Calif, it is difficult to trust D.A.s not to overreach.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Me-YOqjTf9M
sdferr:
I had that poem in mind when I wrote the title.
Suspected as much. Favorite poem, that.
Art Deco:
Great addition, thanks. The next bad John Mellencamp song I hear will be the first, that Indiana boy flat-out brings it. I just cued up Cherry Bomb, probably my favorite Mellencamp tune although Authority Song is a close second. If you’re a boy who grew up in the Midwest, you just get this guy.
hmm, maybe that is what I need?
I like hanging a bird feeder in my back yard – I get mostly small birds like chickadees and sparrows visiting the feeder. There are also several mourning doves that feed on the spilled seed on the ground around the bottom of the feeder. Also, there is a pair of cardinals in my neighborhood that come to visit.
But, then the crows come! They truly seem like a “murder” of crows as they crowd the feeder and my back yard like a scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s movie “The Birds.” Even worse is that, being as clever as they are, they destroy the feeders by figuring out a way to break open the feeder to get more seed. Very annoying!
I’d like some way of keeping the crows away and only attract the smaller and, to my mind anyway, more attractive birds. But, would this upside down dead crow scare ALL the birds away? It might be worth a try.
Scott,
“If you’re a boy who grew up in the Midwest, you just get this guy.”
No, you don’t.
cb, great link to webcams. Coincidentally, I found a webcam from Watkins Glen (where I graduated high school) and it was also animal centered…a sheep barn.
…or you could call your nearest sheikh and get yourself a mating pair of, er, “watch-falcons”…
“Fowl play suspected: Fearless tiny peregrine falcon takes on a much bigger pelican in the air after it flew too close to its nesting area;
“Images were captured by a postman at Torrey Pines beach in San Diego”—
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11840467/Fearless-tiny-peregrine-falcon-takes-bigger-pelican-air.html
Talk about being in the right place at the right time…
(I guess in San Diego, all the world’s a zoo.)
A different kind of quack….
Truth-challenged psychopath—in full plumage—STILL lying “after all these years”….
“Fauci rejects claims from former CDC director that he ‘froze-out’ lab leak proponents;
“Fauci, for his part, contended that Redfield’s presence would not have been objectionable but that he had not been the one to select the call’s participants.”—
https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/health/fauci-rejects-claims-former-cdc-director-he-froze-out-lab-leak-proponents
Opening grafs:
‘ Former National Institutes of Allergy & Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Dr. Anthony Fauci on Thursday rejected congressional testimony from a former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) director alleging that Fauci had excluded proponents of the theory that COVID-19 leaked from a Chinese lab from major discussions on handling the pandemic.
‘ “I really feel badly…’
Yeah, sure ye’ did…but not nearly as badly as you should be feeling; and not nearly as badly as the people whose lives you helped destroy by your consistently mendacious quackery.)
Related…
…wherein Dr. Fauci is politely informed—since he obviously has no freakin’ idea—just how “badly” he really ought to feel…:
“Treason of the Science Journals;
“How Anthony Fauci manufactured consensus on the origins of COVID-19 with the help of science writers and the media”—
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/treason-science-journals
(Though to be fair to the good doctor, psychopaths gotta do what psychopaths gotta do…)
Jeff Cox,
Another Midwest boy who does not. Seems like a big phony, to my ears.
I quite like John Mellencamp’s music. No inclination to call him a phony. I’d say I’m a Rustbelt kid, but many Midwesterners would not regard Upstate New York or Western Pennsylvania as a part of their part of the country. YMMV.
He supposedly has a history of being ungracious to fans when they cross paths with him in mundane life (not at events, but out and about). Joe DiMaggio was reportedly quite deft in devising strategies to protect his privacy without being disagreeable to strangers, but I guess not everyone is quite so skillful. You might cut him some slack or you might recall Sonny Bono’s take on this, which is that when you’ve gone into the entertainment business, being distracted by strangers in public places is just part of the cost of doing business and you gotta roll with it.
Art Deco,
I cut John Mellencamp exactly the amount of slack he cuts everyone else, which is none. His music generally qualifies as musical terrorism – usually about dropping out of school, smoking weed, getting a girl knocked up, doing drugs, getting arrested. Rebel without a clue. Vanilla Ice with a guitar. Pretty much everyone who has dealt with him personally says he’s an arrogant, entitled douche who’s dumber than frozen broccoli. He paid for IU’s football facility and much of their football stadium renovations but is too stupid to actually be able to attend college. On top of all that, he’s a hard leftist. And if you lived anywhere between the Lake County line and the Ohio River, you couldn’t escape his musical terrorism until iPods, satellite radio, and streaming came out.
There is a cohort of shooters/hunters who like to hunt crows, partly on the theory that they are “varmints”, along with coyotes, badgers, and other critters that never make it to the dining room table. Nevada, where I lived until last June, has two corvids: crows and ravens. For some reason that no one could ever explain to me, Nevada allows hunting of crows but not of ravens. I asked a hunter once how to tell the difference between a raven and a crow. He explained that it’s a raven if its alive and if you shoot it dead, it’s a crow.
His music generally qualifies as musical terrorism – usually about dropping out of school, smoking weed, getting a girl knocked up, doing drugs, getting arrested.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4KUmm0XsLY
Whatever.
He paid for IU’s football facility and much of their football stadium renovations but is too stupid to actually be able to attend college
About 1/4 of the 1951 cohort cadged a baccalaureate degree.