Copyright (c) 2001

Our house in Montlake was a Northwest Mediterranean with a red mission tile hip roof, the kind where the clay shingles alternate concave and convex.

Back in the `80s, a retired couple lived two houses down from us. Her name was Mrs. Johannson. I don't remember his name, but she called her husband "the Colonel", and so we did, too.

Mrs. Johannson did not really care much for people. She did like animals, though. All animals.

Some people think raccoons are cute. People in Seattle know that they are a pest. They upset garbage cans, eat cats and dogs and dig up your garden.

Mrs. Johannson, however, fed the raccoons. They gathered around her house every evening, dozens of them, singly and in raccoon families, growing very fat on dog food. She also fed the squirrels, feral cats, pigeons, rats, voles and crows.

Crows are very smart birds. To most of us they are just malevolent looking scavengers, smart scavengers that look at us like they wish we were roadkill so they could peck out our eyeballs, like they do with squashed squirrels in the street.

But the crows loved Mrs. Johannson.

They would sit on the power lines above the street, thousands of plump, black ravens cawing while they waited for dinner; the pigeons sat in their own groups on the telephone lines while on the Johannson deck gathered the raccoon clans. At feeding time, all the animals would close in on the house at once, and a black thundercloud of crows would descend onto the deck where Mrs. Johannson would spill out bags of unsalted unshelled peanuts.

Wherever Mrs. Johannson went the crows would follow her. Like a domesticated pack of dogs, the crows would follow Mrs. Johannson whenever she left the house. While she walked down Boyer Avenue crows by the hundreds would fly along her path swooping low over her head.

Mrs. Johannson fed the crows unshelled peanuts because she wanted them to get `exercise' pecking open the shells. In that way, she reasoned, they wouldn't get too chubby. In order to open the peanut shells the crows had to hold the shells down with their talons and then peck through the shells with their beaks. The best place to do that was on our roof. Our gently sloping hip roof with its concave mission tiles made an excellent dinner table for the birds.

So after picking up peanuts from Mrs. Johannson's, the crows would fly over to the roof of our house, hold the peanuts down and peck through the shells. This happened right above our bedroom so we would hear this tapping noise coming from the roof and amplified inside. I would open a window and shout, or clap my hands or lean out the window and flick a bath towel toward the roof to scare them away.

It was a nuisance, but we learned to live with it.

Then one November, I was in the bedroom watching a Seattle Seahawks football game on the television. The game was bad, as were the Seahawks in those days. The weather was bad, too.

Shortly before halftime when I was going to give up and shut off the t.v., I felt it: a drip on my nose. And then another. It was raining outside, and now it was raining inside. I looked up at the ceiling; it was sagging slightly, and right in the middle of the sag there was this big drop of water getting ready to fall down. The roof was leaking. Nothing to do on a Sunday afternoon when it is raining and the roof leaks except to get aggravated, worry and put a bucket under the leaking ceiling.

It stopped raining the next day, and the day after that we were able to get a handyman out to our house. He climbed up on a ladder, looked around and came back down.

"Do you know what you've got up there?" he asked. "Your roof is covered with peanut shells, your gutters are clogged with them and half your roof tiles look like they've been hacked with an ice pick."

So more than a thousand dollars later I called my insurance company. They dealt with small claims like this over the telephone, the adjuster told me, and would I please tell her what had caused the leak in our roof. "Crows", I told her. "What kind of crows?" the insurance adjuster wanted to know.

What kind of crows? Big, black crows, what other kind of crow is there?

"Are these wild birds, sir?" the insurance adjuster wanted to know.

Of course they were wild birds, I told her not thinking for the moment that those crows were clearly half domesticated by Mrs. Johannson. But my moment came and went because the insurance adjuster, with a tone of voice like the game show host who says `I'm sorry, you lost' told me that my home owners' policy had a "wild bird" exclusion so they couldn't pay my claim.

So I fixed my own roof at my own expense. And soon the crows were back on the new roof tiles pecking at their peanuts. It was time to talk to the Johannsons.

I went over there Thursday morning. Mrs. Johannson was there, and so was her husband, the Colonel. I explained what had happened, the crows on the roof, the peanut shells all over the place, the debris in our gutters, the roof leak and what the fix had cost me. Mrs. Johannson did not get it, though. She could not, or would not understand that her crows had damaged my roof because she had fed them peanuts. I asked her to stop, politely at first, then more insistently. But she would not hear of it because the crows, like all the other wild animals she was feeding, needed her and depended on her, and she just could not stop feeding them because of that.

But her husband, the Colonel, understood the seriousness of the situation. I told him that his wife really had to stop feeding peanuts to the crows and I really did not have any more time to talk about it because I had to get in to my office. To which the Colonel asked, what exactly do I do for a living? And I told him I was a lawyer and a litigator by profession.

That, at last, seemed to register with the Colonel. He said to his wife, `"He's a lawyer, honey, and he's going to sue us if you keep feeding the crows!" Of course, I hadn't said that or even thought about it, but the idea seemed to have such a salutary effect on Mrs. and Colonel Johannson that I said nothing to relieve their angst.

Mrs. Johannson did not stop feeding all the wild animals in the neighborhood, let alone the crows. She did, however, change their diet. Instead of feeding them peanuts in the shell, ball park style, she bought and fed them shelled peanuts. In order to give the birds some exercise, since they could no longer peck apart the peanut shells in my roof tiles, Mrs. Johannson would walk down to the park four blocks away to feed them. They would fly down there with her, getting their morning exercise, an ominous black cloud of crows that caused an eclipse of the sun and changed the weather in Montlake.

The crows did not come back to our house and the roof survived the rain of subsequent seasons. Mrs. Johannson's husband died of a heart attack a few years later, and a few months after that she moved into a retirement center and sold her home.

No one fed the animals then, and slowly the raccoons and the feral cats and the stray dogs and the squirrels and pigeons and crows stopped dropping by her former residence looking for handouts. But the crows still sit on the power lines. Now they sit closer to my home. They look at me menacingly like I am responsible for something I don't know about, and they look at me like I should be roadkill so they could peck out my eyes.

Crows of Montlake was composed by Zbignew Zingh. Copyright 2001.