Crows are able to recognize individual human faces, make tools, bring gifts to humans who feed them, count, and sound out simple words of speech.
One recent morning I walked outside to my second floor deck overlooking a small patch of grass and a retention pond just past it. As I walked out to the deck high above the bird feeders, I saw a crow on one of the feeder poles. The crow sounded like she was saying hello to me, so I said hello out loud, feeling ridiculous as I called out. Would my human voice scare her away?
I believe that nature gives us signs and messages that offer precognition of events, validation, and explanations of our life situations. We need only to keep an eye out for them, and they will appear to us. It is long known that dreaming about animals are powerful symbols for interpretation, but meeting them in our waking life is a source of divination for us as well.
Over the last few months I have stood at the third floor bedroom window to watch the crows feeding at the small bird feeder below. They are too big, so they perch on the pole. Stretching out toward the feeder, they reach in with their beaks to get peanuts. I like to watch them sitting on the metal fence railing, as if they had come up to a neighborhood bar to hang out.
“… come to set the balance of the natural order to rights, they strut and flutter through the landscapes of desert and arctic, tropics and urban sprawl, over tilled farmland and the shifting soil of the human imagination.” — The Book of Symbols
I feel comforted by their presence and an affinity for the mischievous, smart bird. Watching them has been a source of healing. Observing and appreciating the crows has become a meaningful part of my daily life. I imagined having one as a wild pet, and was comforted by the idea of having it visit me. I thought… that would never happen. I daydreamed about it a little, I admit.
And so that morning, to my amazement, the crow replied to my hello with “caw caw,” as in “hell-o” with a two-syllable caw. I was stunned! So I did it again, and again the crow replied back to me. I called out, and she replied once more! Then to my astonishment she flew up to my deck and landed about four feet from my head onto the top of the privacy railing!
Incredible!
I said hello to her again, and she replied in kind. She was looking at me intensely, preened for a minute, and then hopped about a foot closer to me! My spouse was in the kitchen and witnessed it all through the opened door to the deck.
I was completely still in my body as I stood in awe. I said, “Hi” and she replied “Hi” back, a caw with one syllable! I talked to her in a gentle voice, telling her that she was beautiful and how glad I was to see her. She was watching me so closely as she dipped her head down, to the side, and then touched her beak to the wood.
She stayed for a minute more, repeatedly saying “Hi” to me with her one-syllable caw, more softly now, and then flew off. It was one of the highlights of my life, truly, it was! I spoke with a friend of mine, also a psychic medium, and he said that it was a message of more intuitive abilities coming my way. The crow is the ancient keeper of spiritual laws of prophecy.
Don’t be mad at me for eating butterflies sometimes.
The week before this amazing experience with the beautiful crow, I was hiking on a trail in a park nearby. I noticed a big yellow butterfly, still alive, being eaten by a squirrel. Was this possible? I couldn’t quite believe my eyes. I’d never seen such a thing. How terrible! I walked into the leaves close enough to shoo the squirrel away to save the butterfly, but it was too late. The butterfly was still alive, but barely. I left it and continued on my hike. I got out my iPhone and googled “squirrels eat butterflies,” and sure enough learned that they will eat injured butterflies. Not just nuts for squirrels anymore. Squirrel Nutkin is a meat eater! My perception of a squirrel has radically changed forever.
On my return, I saw a moth caught in a spider web. What next? What other nature deaths do I have to witness today? Waah! I took my hiking pole and tried to scoop the flailing moth out of the web. I know, let nature take its course… but wouldn’t you have done the same thing? After all, moths are innocent and spiders are not, correct? Of course not, but I couldn’t stop myself. So I tried to put the moth, still tangled in the web, onto a leaf on a branch overhead. —Real helpful— It didn’t appear to be coming off, so I reached up and took the moth’s wing, and as I held it I notice a big black spider is on it, eating it. My scream was heard for 100 miles.
What was this foretelling? The next day tragedy struck me in a personal situation, and I knew what the message was about.
On a previous hike at night, with my head lamp on, I saw a six-inch long crayfish coming up out of the water, crawling up onto a rock. Yes, it is true, crayfish are in creeks around here in NC. Who knew?! I looked up its symbolism, which pointed me to the Moon card in the tarot. It was definitely a message about a situation in my life and deeper subconscious influences affecting it. The crayfish needed to move out of the melancholy murky water, past the guarding dogs, past the moon, to the sun, to the light of clarity.
And then a few months later, during a day hike, I came across a beautiful juvenile grass snake. Was it time to shed this skin, shed a relationship? Was it time for transformation and healing? Yes.
Thank you, snake. Thank you, crow. Thank you, butterfly, crayfish, spider, moth, and squirrel!
Update: The crow (I named her Hello) comes back to visit me almost every day. She calls to me until I come outside and feed her by hand.
Copyright Rebecca Mitchell-Guthrie. Do not print for publication without permission.
Image credit: Crow by Arctic Wolf / CC-BY-SA 2.0
Image credit: Squirrel by Dave Shafer / CC-BY-SA 2.0