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Don't eat crow! [1]
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Date: 2022-07-23
I'm weird about a lot of subjects, but Corvids are my favorite. Birds rule just by virtue of being the only surviving dinosaurs. I blame a lifetime of being told dinosaurs were extinct. Not true! Birds are avian theropods. With struthiomimicus, they didn't even bother to put a new wig on the old school ostrich.
Even more amazing is that birds boast at least two families that share great ape level intelligence. That's Us kids! Parrots and Corvids. I would argue starlings, w/ the talking Myna bird, would constitute a third family. Hand raised starlings talk as well, though in nature they're raucous little barbarians who mob like black and iridescent diminutive Hells Angels. Everybody gets a bite.
Parrots live well w/ people. Smart, charismatic, long lived, and attired in colors rarely seen outside of a reef. Corvids, by contrast, are funereal in appearance and insular. Like wolves before they sold out and became dogs. Blue jays being the big exception. They are members, along w/ starlings, of the raucous asshole avian union who seem to spend their time being loud and dive bombing cats. Corvids never forget a favor or a grudge, and pass these on to their babies along w/ very accurate facial descriptions. And to everyone else they know. I suspect they collect shiny things because they know WE like shiny things. They leave trinkets for people who feed them regularly. As though they have acquired a rudimentary understanding of currency and exchange. You just know they have and share Martha Stewart level best practices when it comes to dealing w/ us featherless primate upstarts.
Being both verbal and vocal, they would be a natural subject for SETI. Learn their language instead of teaching them ours. This would be rounding a huge corner in our own evolution as a species and is a tiny but necessary baby step in learning how to communicate w/ extraterrestrials. I warned you. I'm weird about these guys.
So it was w/ no small amount of horror that I discovered that there has been a tradition of eating these guys in Oklahoma since the Dust Bowl days of the 1930s, which began as a means of extermination. I am not comforted by the fact that they a supposedly delicious.
It may seem like a long walk for a sad joke, but ravens are the largest songbird in America. Crows are songbirds as well. It is illegal to kill and eat songbirds. That's just not going to fly! [Hur hur hur!]
What happens during times of famine, which the Dust Bowl was, is one thing. It doesn't bear commemoration. People also survive famine by resorting to cannibalism. It would make for one grisly Thanksgiving of a holiday.
Trade trinkets w/ genius flying dinosaurs. Don't eat them.
Thank you.
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