The Wake of Crows: Living and Dying in Shared Worlds (Critical Perspectives on Animals: Theory, Culture, Science, and Law)

by Thom van Dooren

invitation to pay attention to a “wakeful world” (Restall Orr 2012), to a world of diverse forms of mindful and creative presence, of beings with their own understandings and desires, their own modes of inquisitive and agentive life. In short, an invitation into what Val Plumwood (2009) called “nature in the active voice.” Of course, if we pay attention, all living beings issue an invitation of sorts, as do many nonliving entities and processes.1 But it has always seemed to me that crows do so in a particularly blatant, perhaps even dramatic manner. For example, if we delve a little deeper into their watchful behavior, things get even more interesting. Watching is not a passive activity, at least as crows do it. Recent research has shown that beyond simply noticing us, they are paying careful attention and acting on this information: they are calculating, sizing us up, adjusting their behaviors, even remembering our faces and passing information about us as individuals on to one another (Marzluff et al. 2010). They are also following our gazes: paying attention to what it is that we’re looking at, when it doesn’t happen to be them (Schloegl, Kotrschal, and Bugnyar 2007; von Bayern and Emery 2009).2 In short, watching is here indicative of a whole world of creative, attentive responsiveness. In the presence of a crow it is incredibly difficult to pretend to inhabit a world in which all else is passive background to human lives and dramas. If we pay them even the smallest bi...