urban naturalist
Through Different Eyes Lenape culture holds deep respect for our region’s less-than-loved wildlife
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ver the years I have learned to pay attention to crows. A group of crows — also known as a “murder” — making a persistent racket often points the way to a hawk or owl that they are mobbing, a common behavior in which smaller birds gang up on predators. A few weeks ago a chorus of caws on my block pointed the way to a red-tailed hawk a murder was trying to move along from the rooftop of a house across the street. Crows have both a fascinating history and complex ecological relationships to ourselves and other creatures in our urban habitat. They’re also just plain beautiful: 6 GRID P H IL LY.CO M A P R IL 2 0 23
black and glossy, they fly over the city with deep, liquid wingbeats. In Euro-American culture, crows have a bad rap: they’re seen as carrion eaters and harbingers of bad news (not to mention bearing associations with racism, as in the last name of “Jim Crow”). If a bluebird on a sunny day sparks optimism, a crow cawing on a dreary winter day inspires the opposite sentiment. Barbara Bluejay, chief of culture, tribal secretary and tribal counselor of the Lenape Nation of Pennsylvania, tells me by phone that the Euro-American view of the crow — and other wild animals with which we
by bernard brown
share cities in Lenapehoking (the Lenape name for our region) — isn’t universal. “The crow is significant to us because of the prophecy of the four crows,” Bluejay says. In that prophecy the first crow flew in harmony with the creator, the second attempted to clean the world but became sick in the process, the third hid when he saw that the second crow had died, and the fourth again flew in harmony with the creator. The Lenape see the prophecy as an allegory for their own history, starting before European colonization, then being driven off their land and into hiding, and ultimately assuming their role as stewards P HOTO G RAP HY BY TROY BYNUM