...This is a high-stakes time for all the birds. The crows, like everyone else, have invested heavily in the contents of their nest.

They burned countless hours and calories collecting sticks and mud and grape-vine bark. Pa Crow led the family force to keep the territory free of invaders. Ma Crow channeled calories and nutrients into her eggs. Pa and the kids fed her as she sat for nearly three weeks, converting worms, roadkill squirrel, and pizza-crusts into heat, which passed through the skin of her featherless brood-patch and warmed the eggs. If the nest tumbles in a high wind, or if a raccoon or squirrel gets the eggs, all that effort is wasted. But turn-about is fair play, I suppose. Crows themselves are famous home-wreckers. In addition to eating other birds' eggs, they'll kill adult birds. They'll even take on larger mammals. Lawrence Kilham, author of The American Crow and the Common Raven, reports watching crows hammer on a sickly wild pig, and jabbing a newborn fawn. (The fawn was fine, but my admiration for crows felt the blow.)
One day at the end of May I follow a worm-bearing crow to the nest, and, Ah-hah! Two expensive little heads protrude above the nest rim. An adult is gliding in to feed them. Her feet barely touch the nest. The heads rise as she approaches. Soundlessly, she tucks food into the open mouths. Then she's away from the tree, and the heads withdraw into the nest.
All the adult crows, both the parents and the elder siblings, bring food to the kids. It's unusual behavior, this sibling helpfulness. And apparently it's not all that helpful. Researchers have set up studies where they monitor some breeding couples who have helpers, and some with no helpers. There's no glaring difference in nesting success. Unassisted parents lose no more eggs or babies to predators, so the helpers aren't keeping the nest safer. Nor do they lose more babies to starvation, so the food that helpers bring isn't crucial. The best guess is that the helpers are helping themselves: When they eventually have children, they'll be seasoned parents.
Then again, perhaps after these young helpers get well acquainted with their baby brother, they'll decide against reproducing. I name Yawp in early June, shortly after waking to a symphony of braying crows. I peek outside. The four adults are stationed around a neighbor's house, perched in trees and power lines. They're flinging gusts of complaint toward the neighbor's porch roof. On that roof is a crow, picking bits of gravel off the shingles, and toying with maple twirlies. From time to time, this crow looks around, opens his wide beak and says, "Yawp." There's a hint of complaint in that expression. In tone, it's akin to a kazoo. When an adult flies overhead, the youngster flutters and gapes. "Yawwwwwwwwp!" The adults rain another storm of cawing upon him. Yawp picks up a maple seed and drops it. He has tried flying. He didn't care for it.
When I study up on this stage of crow life, I find that youngsters leave the nest a bit prematurely. They typically spend a few days on the ground or in low trees, figuring out the flying business. The parents feed them, and worry loudly as the kids fumble around the neighborhood, dodging cats, dogs, cars, and crow-haters. I go out to check on Yawp an hour after his debut, and find him settled into the porch-roof gutter. The adults sulk nearby. Later, a neighbor tells me Yawp did finally make a move. He plopped down to the lawn, giving his family fits.
In the afternoon when I don't see him around, I walk to the nest. Both kids are back in it, but just barely. They're hopping from one side of the nest to the other, swapping places. Teetering on the edge, they lift their wings and flap. One crow flap-hops out onto a limb, and nibbles an overhead stick. They're busy, busy, busy.
The next day the other kid, the quiet kid, gets her flying lesson. The four adults fly through the neighborhood in a clump. Tagging behind, veering all over the skyway, is a fifth crow. When the grown-ups reach their territorial boundary, they turn left, but their protege does not. They race back and herd her to a tall tree with slim, vertical branches. The young crow flaps and grips a branch. The branch bends to a right angle. She flaps to stay upright. But the branch can't support her. She flaps free and tries another. Over and over. Even when she finds a sturdy branch, the tossing wind keeps her off balance.
It's baby season all over. In Neighbor Hugh's yard, English sparrow babies are fluttering and begging loudly in the grass. In my yard, they're investigating the litter under the lilac hedge, testing everything in their beaks. Petals are rejected. Twigs are rejected. Leaves are rejected. I don't know what they accept, but they're exploring at full tilt. On my walkway a youngster I can't identify has discovered an endless source of little protein packets: He waits beside an anthill. The crow kids are fully mobile within a few days, and they, too, work the yard. Well, the quiet one does. She has a droopy wing, perhaps from crash-landing in a tree. Like her elders, she walks quietly through the grass, hunting worms. Droopy, I call her. Droopy is a diligent crow.
Yawp, though, is a nightmare crow. I can hear him from one end of the neighborhood to the other: "Yawp! Yawwwwp!" He starts at dawn, and he goes until dusk. Today he rushes each family member in turn as they pull up worms. "Yawwwwwwwwwp!" He assails his first victim, but that bird turns away and swallows fast. Yawp runs toward his sister when she scores, but she shreds and eats her worm alone. Then a third crow flies into the yard, and when the squawling brat approaches, this crow opens wide. Yawp dives into the black throat to gulp a meal. There follows a gorgeous minute of quiet as he swallows. Then he resumes kazooing. He's a bottomless pit, and he has no intention of filling himself. One insight afforded by Yawp's ever-gaping maw is that young crows have pink mouth linings, in contrast to their parents' black ones.
Baby birds can be difficult to distinguish from adults. Some wear a duller suit of feathers than their parents, and many sport wedgier bills, but these can be subtle distinctions. My crow babies do have brown feathers, as opposed to black. But the brown is so dark I can only distinguish them in direct sunlight. Even that clue is being diluted as new, black feathers emerge. So if Droopy's wing isn't drooping and Yawp isn't yawping, I have to fall back on clues won through hours of study with the binoculars, like the pink mouths and the fat beaks. They also lack the pronounced ridge over the eyes that gives the grownups their noble expression. In profile, the kids have smaller heads. Their tails come to a square end, while adult tails are rounded. The kids' legs are set closer together, which produces a less swaggering gait. And they're a hair smaller than adults. But all these traits are so hard to spot that, as with pigeons, I expect most people believe they've never laid eyes on a baby crow.
In spite of Yawp, I'm growing fond of my crows. I head into the yard every day with good intentions — I'll watch the ants, I'll study the trees — and the crows distract me. Yawp becomes a great fan of hopping. One day he spends ten minutes hopping up onto the neighbor's birdbath, then hopping down again. Sometimes he hops straight up in the air and comes down facing a new direction. Whenever another crow pecks the ground, he bounds across the lawn in a series of gallopy-hops. He bounces at starlings and pigeons, sending them whirring away. He hops at squirrels, who hop right back at him, swinging a paw. He picks up a green pear the size of a walnut, and careens toward Droopy, holding it high. Droopy walks away from her brother. Yawp drops the pear and hops over her, landing in her path.
Droopy's talents lie in another direction. She's a stick girl. In her spare time she sits in an old apple tree and breaks off twigs. She toys with each for a few minutes, then drops it and chooses another. This can be a dangerous time to be friends with a crow. Someone has written to crow scholar Kevin McGowan's web site about crows repeatedly peeling the rubber off their windshield-wipers. Textbook juvenile behavior, McGowan replies.
While young crows are extra-pesky, crows of any age can be terrible teasers. Kilham, author of the crow book, once watched a crow flaunting a piece of "food" to lure a wild turkey into chasing him; after a good romp across the field, the crow revealed his prize: a chunk of cow pie. Tee-hee! Kilham writes that they're also tail-pullers, yanking the tails of vultures and otters to make them abandon food. This I saw once myself, when a seagull was hogging peanuts I had spread for my crows. Four crows circled the gull, and one in the back leaned forward to yank a tail feather. In a similar vein, I once watched two crows at my neighborhood beach mugging a seagull. The gull stood over a crab, with a crow posted four feet to either side. The gull seemed to fear that if he shook the crab apart, pieces might spin toward a crow. So he waited, clucking. The crab gathered its wits and walked away. The seagull snatched it back. The crows gazed out to sea, as though butter wouldn't melt in their beaks. The seagull clucked louder. The crab again excused itself, and was again dragged back. And then the seagull could stand it no longer, and charged the right-hand crow. The left-hand crow flew away with the crab by the time the gull reconsidered. The two crows did not share.
In mid-July, it is suddenly Droopy's turn to be annoying. One balmy morning I step outside to the soprano racket of a crow losing her mind. From the depths of an apple tree comes a string of contradictions and pronouncements that add up to gibberish. By now, I am fluent in crow. And it sounds to me as though Droopy has suddenly learned to speak, but has no inkling what words mean. First comes a long "Caaawwwwwww!" Then immediately, "Cot-Cot-Cot-Cot!" And then, "Caw, caw, caw." If I may tender a translation, this means roughly, "I'm Droopy and everything's fine. Horrors, a crow-eating devil! Hey, guys, I found food! I'm Droopy, and here comes a demon! There's food here." At the end of a verse Droopy flies to the neighbor's cherry tree and clambers around looking for fruit. She babbles on. "Cawwwwwww! Cot-Cot! Grrrrrrrack. Graaaaack. Cot-Cot-Cot! Tuck. Tuck."
For weeks she wakes the neighborhood at dawn with a string of witticisms she's thought up overnight. Her family learns to ignore her. They don't fly in to investigate her announcements of feasts or fiends. She chatters to herself as she hunts worms. When a family member down the block issues his routine sentry call she tosses off a perfect imitation of him. (Crows, like starlings, are fair mimics, even managing human speech.) She attempts a series of super-quick caws but ends with strangled cough. The girl even looks demented, with leftover baby down poking out through her feathers, and a lump on her droopy shoulder.
The whole family is molting and revolting. And it's not just them. All the neighborhood birds are facing a change of feathers, which are designed to last through one year of flying, fighting, and bumping into things. With summer food plentiful and the demands of nesting past, birds can now afford to invest in fresh plumage. I find something new on the ground every day: sapphire blue jay feathers; glossy crow feathers; salmon-pink cardinal down...