Hroc, Grajo, 白嘴鴉

At night there is a wild darkness and shimmering lights stretch out into the distant horizon; I'm all at sea here. But when I wake up the whole landscape is transformed-as if I were living in two different worlds. A slow and heavy mist hangs around the trees-ankle length-and the fields lie sodden, like a medieval battleground before a battle. Large pools of water congeal, always at the same place. From a distance they look like mirrors, reflecting the splendour of the morning light. A few birds dart upwards and out of sight, others lazily make their way to a quieter part of the field. Everything at this holy hour is trying to write its name.

At 4 0'clock, the suicide hour, the shadows start to lengthen, scarring everything they touch. There's a terrible fatality about the place then. There's nothing more tragic than this fading sun. It wants to break. Crows start to congregate near mounds of grey sand, settling for death...

'Birds are following a set behaviour of pattern that has persisted for 10,000 years, ever since the last Ice Age. In fact, it seems likely that, before that time, for millions of years of their entire 150 million-year span on Earth, birds exploited seasonal abundances in this manner. With each fresh interglacial period, when the northern lands warmed sufficiently to host breeding birds, they reacquired the art and science of migration like some cosmic weaver on the great loom of time, picking a stitch and reworking it at 10,000 year intervals...


Corvids (include the Northern Raven) are the most intelligent, the first because they are the last. Magpie, Rook, Carrion-Crow and Northern Raven, Fire Crow ( Pyrrhocorax genus).

Rook's iridescence: 'The bird appears clothed in shining light-it is as if the feathers were polished like a mirror.'

16 th century, Ed Topsell: the white crow a kind of prodigy, an omen....'Yet as they spiralled overhead, it turned entirely at one with its neighbours, a freak bound into the wider mystery of their night-time evolutions, until the gloom enfolded them all...A carrion crow has a binding social attachment only to its mirror image, its partner..a fierce territoriality. Rooks, by contrast, live, feed, sleep, fly, display, roost, recreate, fall sick and die in the presence of their own kind. Their whole lives are enfolded in the flock, a collective pattern of their own image-a self -perpetuating inner universe of rook sounds and rook gestures that the birds carry with them..a continuous shared experience.'

'Store surplus as an insurance against hard times (eg. Eurasian Jay)Our Mesolithic ancestors were accustomed to place deceased relatives on the special excarnation platforms. Original home probably on the open plains of Eurasia.

'They open those dark eloquent wings like a great story book, conjuring the steppe landscapes and their numberless human hordes trekking forever westward-the Cimmerians?, the Scythians, Alans, Huns, Magyars, Bulgars and Mongols. Mingled with the rolling craa notes is the sound