crows and jays and magpies, oh my

lunch today was with one of my favorite non-fiction writers, Candace Savage. Her new book is Crows: Encounters With the Wise Guys. My favorite Candace books have been about beauty queens and cowgirls so you can see how wide her interests are.

Crows is a celebration of crow consciousness, with a surprisingly sprightly look at their basic biology and family structure, as well as their almost-human social interactions, incredible tool-using capabilities, and how humans have seen them over the ages. It's full of, as Candace says, "Gosh, I never would have imagined it" moments.

Talking about a crow observed to mourn the death of its partner, or the mother crow who stalked the person believed to have had a hand in the death of her nestling, Candace says:

The stories that hint at human-like emotion are pretty compelling."

It's one of those serendipitous things that this evening I started reading Graeme Gibson's new book, The Bedside Book of Birds, which begins with the gargling of Cuban crows.