The Black Clan 
What Is the Status of the Crow? Numbers Spell Danger, and Control 
Rather Than Extermination Is the Keynote of Sound Conservation 
with the world, the common crow 
dips an arrogant black wing-tip 
to the landscape and drops a harsh 
challenge to unsuspecting ears. The 
black figure is a world bird, throwing 
a sable shadow over every continent 
with the exception of South America. 
He knows intimately the men of the 
five races from the boreal open places 
to the dusky jungles of the steaming 
tropics. He is a well-known citizen 
whose morals are lax. He is one you 
can not overlook nor ignore, this cor- 
vine individual—he is the crow. 
Like Banquo’s ghost, he will not 
down. Prosecution makes the bird 
wary, and under relentless pursuit he 
grows more subtle as does the coyote 
or any wild thing. Warfare means a 
spreading of geographical distribution. 
He knows man, all his idiosyncrasies, 
and thrives on such knowledge. And 
man knows the black bird, knows him 
from long association and costly ex- 
perience, and at this point the acquaint- 
ance ends for he does not understand 
his wily characteristics. The friend- 
ship is merely an acquaintance, a nod- 
ding affair colored somewhat profanely. 
There is no intimacy, no confidence. 
The crow is not a bad fellow to 
know. He has been over-painted with 
sombre colors, over-drawn with lurid 
legend. It is a familiar bit of in- 
formation a little condemnation may 
hurt the best of men, the finest of 
things. He is not as black as his 
feathers. He may not have the purity 
of the dove nor the confidence of the 
robin singing at sundown nor the aes- 
thetic soul of the thrush who spills 
earthward -a cataract of pure song, 
but he does own and enjoy a number of 
beneficial traits beyond the comprehen- 
sion of man. 
A BUSED, anathematized, estranged 
[oe a Northern landscape with- 
out a flock of these birds swinging 
heavily toward some grove of dark 
pines. It is unthinkable—earth would 
seem lifeless. One of the pictures of 
adolescence would be missing from life’s 
gallery. One might as well forget the 
somnolent millpond, the wet lands, the 
line of gnarled oaks and graceful elms 
standing along the sandy country road. 
The crow is a part of it like the smell 
of apple blossoms and the “tinkle-tonk- 
tonk” of cow-bells behind a willow en- 
tanglement. 
200 
By EDWIN C. HOBSON 

From the topmost limb of a pine tree, the 
black rascal caws his defiance to the world. 
Singly, he’s a coward, in numbers, a bully ; 
‘of the first order 

Think of winter landscape with its 
leafless trees and blanket of snow. It 
is a wild scene, even austere and heroic. 
Earth is silent under a splendor of 
Arctic beauty. Lines replace leaves, the 
sheen of white replaces the green lustre 
of summer, and shadows are like living 
things. 
RACKS mark the snow, trails of 
furtive passers, but no life in move- 
ment greets searching eyes. Suddenly 
a single, lonely, raucous “Caw!” shat- 
ters the lethal stillness, and then a 
straggling flock of sable birds wing 
silently over the hill and swing like dark 
shadows down the snowy levels to the 
lines of corn shocks in the bottom lands. 
With a single note, a velvet flap-flap of 
wings, the crow makes earth inhabited 
once more. 
Beyond the pavement’s end where be- 
gins the lure of open country clear into 
the blue distance, where meet earth’s 
far hills and inconstant skies, the crow 
shares with the audacious blue jay the 
honor of greeting the wayfarer. It 
may be just a melancholy note of alarm, 
perhaps the coarse outcry of a number 
of evil-appearing birds, but they strike 
a responsive chord in the ears of the 
listener and a strange instinct awakens. 
It is the voice of the wild, all-alluring, 
adventurous. The bark of the squir- 
rel, the sudden snap of dry limbs as a 
white-tailed deer bursts from its covert, 
the rising of trout in the placid black 
waters of a still moon-lit night—these 
sounds are old echoes. They are in- 
delible as tradition. They keep alive 
the primal beginnings, the primitive. 
Out of such as these comes man’s love 
for nature, beauty of scene, the wild 
things. The voice of the crow intro- 
duces him to the open places. 
N a fallacious ecstasy poets have 
written for unnumbered years of 
black skulking birds, and their efforts 
have not been true pictures nor com- 
plementary to their birdish characters. 
To them they appear a sinister figure 
symbolic of all that is sombre and evil. 
The color of black seems a shroud. They 
places these birds as haunting gloomy, 
romantic scenes, where skies are ever 
gray and brooding, and mortal shapes 
stalk like sickly ghosts. From hoary 
myth and fable to the prose and poetry 
of the mad moderns it has been so and 
undoubtedly shall ever be. Poets, fab- 
