Crows Hate Herons?

If my mahogany canalside were a ship mast it would have excessive rake, but in either case there still would be at top a crow’s nest. The crows are active periodically and I see them in the air attacked by darting dark shapes: grackles. The street within my neighborhood runs east to west, and I can see a crow fly westward as I walk, the crow proceeding leisurely above the very center of the road. Leisurely until, as if they are two fighter planes from 1943, the grackles fly on left and right, above below, and fore and aft; swooping, flapping, saying little, as if firing silenced guns against the crow’s unwilling Flying Fortress. The crow proceeds with little motion of evasion. No rounds are fired from non-existent turrets. With the crow so far from any trees it does not seem to be defense of nest although perhaps the grackles would assert it was, if confronted and if they could talk. I suppose the grackles see the crows as worth attacking just on principle. And yet within the very tree in which the crows have made their own nest, grackles gather on the limbs below and converse in scrapey-throaty fashion as if they know they are quite safe; acting, we might say, insouciant.

Not so the crows when they beheld a great blue heron nonchalantly gliding by, seeking out the favorite perch upon our wooden dock. Both rose up, their voices gurgling, growling, down they dauntless dove to swoop like Hellcats just above the heron’s head. The wading bird (Ardea herodias, but without, I hope, desiring John the Baptist’s head) drew back in shock, outspread her wings and croaked out loudly her dismay. The crows, relentless, dove again, the heron folded back her neck as if to fly, and fly she did, on to the seawall holding up the far side bank of the canal. But that flight availed her naught, the crows continued their attacking, pecking seemingly upon the outstretched wings or pulling on the trailing quills behind the heron’s anxious head. If you have ever tried to swallow a great gobbet of an undelicious item that revolts you then you might have made an outraged retching squawk not so unlike the wretched heron.

Just as the crows beset by grackles, the heron made complaints and fell back from the crows’ harassment, but did not offer any violence in self-defense that I could see. The heron finally flew away to safer regions and the crows flew back to self-congratulations, and the gentle mocking of the grackles.