By Beth McCoy
I've long been a fan of crows, even before Ian Frazier's "Count on Crows" imagined the corvid slogan "Crows: We Want to Be Your Only Bird™." I've remained a fan even as my city, like many, tries to expel the intelligent birds and after a friend recounted grimly how one culled ducklings methodically from their panicked mother.
This year I became enamored with a particular crow: @streetcrow (profile: "Caw caw caw caw caw caw caw caw caw caw caw."). From Vancouver, Streetcrow tweeted the corvidian quotidian:
"Sidewalk. Walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk."
"Cheese bun."
Streetcrow barked alarm at dogs, provided "poo" as pointed commentary. Reflecting on a friend's death, the crow offered the bleak "Mourn." In the process, Streetcrow gained 3500 intimate, interactive followers collecting crow-related material around the world.
I got drawn in. A tiny restaurant table centerpiece took on significance when I noticed a beautiful black feather amid botanical matter. Tweeting the picture, I asked Streetcrow "WTF?" I got favorited for that. The bird is extraordinarily generous with the favoriting.
So generous is Streetcrow on this point that I interpreted the frequent favoriting as the gathering of crowd-sourced crow material for a book. The idea made a lot of sense. Ian Phillips' Lost comprises nothing but lost-pet posters. And Andrew Sullivan had turned his blog's "View from Your Window" reader-photo submission series into a successful print-on-demand volume. Why not the crow?