The crow’s augury

After the Ninth Circuit argument in our case over court access in Idaho, lawyers, bureau chiefs and reporters walked to Jake’s Crawfish, a venerable Portland bar and restaurant. At the table, our court reporter in Portland, Lily Roby, told us about the Vaux’s swifts.

In the fall, the birds migrated by the thousands from the northern forests to the equator. On the way, they stopped at a school in Portland.

“The tiny birds gather above the chimney as dusk approaches, flying in erratic, twisting swoops,” Roby wrote for a Courthouse News feature.

“More birds join, growing the group to thousands. They circle the chimney, finding rhythm together, taking unpredictable dives before soaring back into the air.”

“Then, suddenly as it began, the show seems to be over — but that’s not quite the end of their performance. The Vaux’s swifts take their final plunge, plummeting into the chimney for the night.”

For decades, the birds did this magnificent aerial ballet above, around and finally into the chimney at Chapman Elementary. “Until this year — when the number of these special birds seemed to dwindle, then just disappear.”

After a long dinner with cocktails and a couple bottles of red wine, we out-of-towners from San Francisco, New York and Pasadena walked back to our hotel two blocks from the Pioneer Courthouse where the Ninth Circuit panel heard arguments that morning.

It was late. I happened to look up at the barren trees on either side of the street.

Evenly spaced throughout the trees, so that they were festooned with them, were big black crows. There were thousands of them, on this street and for blocks around, roosting in silence.

If I hadn’t looked up, I would not have known they were there. The swooping, swirling swifts had been replaced by a great army of brooding, black crows.

As I watched them, there came a passing sense of strangeness and dread.

I had gone to school in Portland, attending Reed College, and one of the first-year requirements that was often bemoaned by freshmen was Humanities 110, a survey course covering Greek and Roman art and literature. In that class, we read the Odyssey and I now remember the augurs.

They divined the future by studying the songs and flights of birds. The Roman practice had followed the Greeks, say the historians, where the word orthinomancy is translated into ancient Greek as “take omens from the flight and cries of birds.”

On the its website landing page, the present-day Audubon Society says, “Birds are telling us — in their behavior, in their dwindling numbers, in their silence — that we must take action now.”

If we were to bring the ancient practice of augury into the modern day, what then might be the omen held in the disappearance of the swifts.

It is perhaps that sometime sooner or later, maybe not this year, maybe not in ten, the actions of our leaders in abandoning the protection of the earth in its natural state and turning toward an energy policy based on pouring heat and the carbon debris into our air, will have degraded our beautiful refuge in this universe of rock and fire to the point where life is harder for most of mankind and miserable for many.  

What is remarkable in that course of events is that it is not fated. Little Denmark is now generating over 90% of its electricity from renewable sources, the highest in Europe, according to a release this month in Eurostat.

And China, the most populous nation on earth, is rapidly moving away from gas and coal, building nuclear power plants and wind farms, well on its way to not only sustaining its own energy needs but becoming an exporter of clean energy.

So the vector of history plays out in ways large and small. On the small side, I first passed on a suit by the Center for Biological Diversity against Secretary of the Interior Douglas Burgum. I thought Burgum’s decision represented more of the same but then it hit me with its soaring buffoonery, and I asked for a story on our page.

The secretary decided to pass over the winner of a contest for the photo on next year’s annual pass to the national parks. The winner had captured a stunning panorama of a wide, green valley at Glacier National Park. Instead, every park pass holder will now see on the pass in their wallet an image of the president’s scowl. This even as the man since early on has attacked any rule protecting our fields, forests and mountains and the creatures that live there.

So a warning to our species could be read in the disappearance of the swifts. What about the arrival of thousands of black crows. What might they foretell about the future of this government. (I also read Poe in college.)

“Ghastly grim and ancient raven wandering from the Nightly shore—

Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night’s Plutonian shore!”

Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”