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The Naturalist

by Dan Ivec and Nick Liadis

By Nick G LiadisPublished 3 years ago 8 min read
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multimedia image by the authors

A curious crow collected bills that had dropped from purses and wallets and pants pockets. These were like leaves to the crow. Woven with sticks and actual leaves and moss and other forest things, they made for the crow a nest on a favorable branch in a far-away tree.

The nest was a part of a series of observations by the naturalist, documenting the curious habits of crows for a natural history. She first wandered into the Allegheny Cemetery on a hunch - before lingering there for a long time. Dumbstruck by the manifold pages, cards, scraps, and many bills collected by this particular crow, she guessed the sum of all the bills might total ten - or even twenty - thousand! It was a very large and old nest after all.

The unlikely nest which the naturalist viewed that day was like nothing she had yet witnessed in her developed tenure of observing corvids. It seemed a large sandcastle - hanging somehow in the tree above her - with newer and also faded, archaic dollar bills poking out of it all ways. She scrutinized the nest for patterns, jotting them down with analytical diagrams and descriptive geometries inside the notebook; these would elucidate her discoveries. She had a rapid and intuitive approach to note-taking. And yet she hesitated in this instance, pausing between ideas, and even sensing something awry. She tilted her head up to view the nest.

Again stunned by the sight of this architecture, the naturalist was ill-prepared for its sudden falling to the ground. She thus received a thunderous blow to the head when the nest fell from its tree and shattered, causing a plume of decades-old debris to erupt before clearing away.

The crow of course knew splendidly the impermanence of nests. So it sat on a nearby-branch from where it marveled at the immensity of what it had made.. The difference between the crow and the scientist was the bird knew the nest was approaching its demise; the naturalist had no idea. She had somehow missed the natural occurrence of nests falling in her prior analyses, likely too fascinated by the way they were made.

Corvids are wise, wiser than owls - if one could even imagine such an education. The crow really felt the trembling of this castle from below the weight of its scavenged pieces. Such precarity was ever heightened by creeks and cracks from the slightest of breezes. And there had been a gentle rain the night before, in which the nest had swayed and weakened.

Finally it fell with a creak from its tiniest twig, breaking under the weight of the nest while the naturalist drew in her notebook. She had also sneezed. But who knows if that had much to do with the decisive occasion in which the nest fell, amounting to a pile of crunched leaves and tattered money. She quickly morphed into an archaeologist, parsing through the rubble while a whole litany of questions excited her. The crow had accrued a remarkable amount of currency and leafage, and from multiple nations as well. It must have migrated incredible distances to find such rare currencies and leaves to weave in this nest amongst branches.

The naturalist sneezed again - this time surely from the dust created by the collapse - before bending down in order to begin documenting contents of the heap - only to discover a nearly intact and complete, small black notebook under some Burr Oak leaves and a few dollar bills. No wonder this mansion must have tumbled, with such a heavy object wedged somewhere within it!

She had never seen something so dense among the gatherings of a corvid, and picked it up. The naturalist was compelled to do this before even touching the many-thousands of bills, which were already being blown off by the breeze. At this point, the crow made no attempt to reclaim the materials of its fallen nest. In fact, it seemed rather unimpressed by the explosion, as well as by its observer. The naturalist knew this reticent behavior meant migration for the crow. It didn’t care because it was going to leave. And the crow, although still present at the site, had already oriented and mapped out a route to another tree. The naturalist carelessly jotted this observation in the little black notebook, while her own red notebook sat in her front pocket.

The crow saw the red notebook before flying the northward gails to its new tree. It would require a new notebook for the nest, and why not a vibrant one? Suddenly, the scientist sneezed, again. And that very minor shake dislodged the red notebook from the pocket of the naturalist. The crow, being so wise, knew the notebook would fall - as it knew the nest would crash - and awaited the moment in which the naturalist took a few steps forward, unaware she had dropped the red notebook. Another weighty volume for my next edifice, the crow laughed casually before leaving.

The crow swooped down, hopped a few steps, and secured the fallen red notebook. With it firmly clutched, it flew off undetected by the naturalist, who reached for a pencil to inscribe her closing thoughts for the day. Now where did I leave off, she thought as she thumbed through an unusual amount of blank pages. It then occurred to her, but far too late - that she held the little black notebook and not her own.

Her red notebook contained years of notes and poems about corvids. Recollecting the events that had just occurred, it was easy for her to decipher the situation. Her hunch was immediately confirmed by the absence of the crow, already en route to the new tree. Thwarted by a corvid, she murmured.

She couldn’t believe her bad luck. She was on the verge of receiving an incredible amount of funding for a new project, the proposal for which depended immensely on the contents of the absconded notebook. Well, she would keep her eyes peeled for the red notebook upon her subsequent wanderings. That was all she could do - hoping the crow may have dropped it in order to fly more quickly to its new tree. It was unlikely. Crows start their new constructions immediately upon arriving at a site. She knew this because she was the first one to document it years earlier. For a successful nesting season, a crow would want to have the first piece ready to be placed.

Then realizing the ramifications of her loss, she began to crouch and hunt for all the faded dollar bills which were currently stirring in the wind and disappearing. She lumbered after them with abandon while dreaming an ancient and collectible piece of money might resolve her troubles. Ornithology had not made her wealthy. But earning large sums never piqued her interest either. That became clear as hours now passed since the nest had fallen; most of the bills were still fluttering around and some were even a few miles away by now. Yet she was still there, and writing in the notebook. The data was her priority.

The crow had proven itself rather cosmopolitan in its banking endeavors, and perhaps it had an equally sophisticated understanding of diaries. She took the black notebook and started filling it with her observations from today and from prior events. This will do for now, as I begin again, she sighed and thought, while remembering to be thankful for her impeccable memory.

She drove back into town while wondering what might be inside the earliest pages of the notebook: poetry, recipes, or maybe the deadlines of a stranger? She parked beside her rowhouse and went inside to pour a shot of Super Punch - as she sometimes did when her time in the field amounted to a misadventure. She then rifled through her documents and also scoured her desktop, in an attempt to learn how much work had really vanished with the disappearance of her red notebook. And it was not inconsiderable. Her hope for that year was to publish an exhaustive work on ornithology, securing that her future endeavors would be funded.

The year passed strangely and quickly. She’d inscribed so many things in the little black notebook that she almost believed it to have been hers forever. This despite the many recipes and private reminders which the first half of the notebook kept, and which meant so little to her. She continuously visited the grounds on which she had traded journals with that crow, observing the other birds before returning home in order to refine what she had scrawled within the black notebook.

By July she felt she had almost retraced all her steps, and had documented everything initially needed in order to apply for a Hemingsbord Wildlife Grant, which would have allowed her to spend the entire following year watching crows and writing about them, without financial obligations. Of course this deadline was months in the past, and yet it still felt good to have recovered lost endeavors and to be just past the point where she left off many seasons ago. She would have to wait for another unheard-of opportunity. And yet there was some triumph and certainty which accompanied the act of writing everything down twice, first in a red - and now in a black - notebook. She felt she had memorized the entire life-cycle of Allegheny Cemetery crows.

fact or fiction
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About the Creator

Nick G Liadis

Ornithologist writing about the birds I study and the ones I imagine.

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