A storytelling of crows

Wenlock Edge, Shropshire Birds verminous and ominous, persecuted and mythologised, foolproof, climateproof, futureproof

Two crows fly into a tree towards the end of a long dreamy summer's day. They had been walking their beat on Windmill Hill, through the flowering cocksfoot, lady's bedstraw, pyramidal orchids and whitlowgrass, hunting there as they have done every day for 15 years I know of. They now perch together as if watching the sunset, and so do I.

In the same place doing the same thing, what can I know of the corvid mind? We know corvid intelligence is equal to that of primates. We know early people were intimately connected to the crow tribes and there are funerary relics from more than 5,000 years ago containing the bones of crows and ravens buried in this land. This belongs to ancient rituals that suggest a mutual trade in death; these were birds of omen long before they were thought of as vermin.