Ghost, an American Crow
I made a post recently called The Ghost of the Church Crow that featured artsy black and white pictures of a faceless crow. While I loved how those shots came out, the original intention behind taking pictures of this crow I call Ghost was to see what was going on with her wings.
Ghost started showing up along our afternoon walk about a month ago. Crows watch other crows, and Ghost must have seen me handing out snacks and decided I was a good food source. It seems like the crows who see other crows trusting me are quicker to develop the trust themselves, because Ghost would come within about ten feet of me after about a week. That’s close for a wild crow that doesn’t know me. More recently, the gap has closed, and we play “catch” with kibbles from a distance of about six feet.
As Ghost started getting closer, I noticed something peculiar going on with her feathers.
I was ready to dismiss this peculiarity as battle scars, thinking she had been in a fight and had some feathers torn out. This is common with crows, who, from what I’ve observed, have a “fighting season” in spring that coincides with choosing and defending territories, defending trees for nesting, then defending nests and chicks. Sometimes crows end up looking pretty ragged. But Ghost wasn't ragged, and funny thing was, her other side matched.
What was this? I decided I needed to do a photo study.
My Nikon D7500 can shoot up to 8 frames a second and has a 51-point focus frame designed specifically for tracking things that move fast, like birds. I knew I had to be able to get at least some answers through photography. But I didn’t realize how hard getting those answers would be.
On top of being curious about me and Pilot, Ghost was pretty stoked on the tremendous amount of food I plied her with. My intent was to get her to eat her fill, then fly off to cache the rest, whereupon I could get some good shots of her wings while she was in flight. It sounded easy enough.
It wasn’t easy.
For one, Ghost was comfortable enough to eat in front of me AND cache her food right there on the ground without flying anywhere.
Here she is chowing down:
And here she is caching a very precious whole peanut by covering it with dirt clods. She put at least three clods on top of it to make sure it was hidden. It must have been very valuable to her.
So I gave Ghost more food. Lucky her. And finally she started to fly up to the rain gutters of the church to soak/cache food and drink water. But even with all the fancy tech on my camera, catching crows in flight is tricky. They are dark, so the sensors don’t detect them readily. And the lush foliage of the urban scenery creates a lot of distractions when I’m trying to follow a moving shadow, so most of my pictures turned out like this:
Ok, something is going on, but what?? Luckily digital photographs are essentially free (until you run out of hard drive and cloud space), so I took a ton more pictures.
Still, so many were such near misses. Like this one, in focus, but not telling me anything:
Or this one, wings perfectly exposed and in focus, but behind a $%@#%! tree:
Or this one:
Is that a crow or did someone knock a baseball through the window?
But I did, eventually, after more than 500 shots, end up with this one:
It looks like Ghost is missing portions of the vanes (the feathery sail part of the feather) of some of her primary flight feathers. The white color is likely from the exposed shaft or rachis that has no barbs (the individual feather pieces that make up the vane). Although I can only see it on her left wing because of the angle of this shot, I am assuming this same situation is happening on the right. Which leads me to believe it might be some kind of birth defect, although I really don’t know. I emailed some photos to a corvid researcher in Washington. Hopefully I hear back from her with some answers.
Since I’m such a nerd, I drew a picture of one of her feathers. Drawing helps me to get an intimate understanding of the subject.
Prints of this piece are available for a really low price in NFT, and you are welcome to purchase one and support my bird nerd habit.
Thanks for birding with me!