Divebombed by crows – ME!
Jun 3rd, 2007 by Paul Moor
My strong-willed short-haired Dachshund Maxe (the proletarian Berlin dialect version of Max) permits me to share quarters with him and does all he can to regulate and order my largely disorderly life, and he got me up this morning at 7 - unusually early for a Sunday, but I immediately recognized an emergency so in a trice I had him on leash and out for our matitudinal walk – left down the Wilhelmsaue (our Wilmersdorf street despite of its literal meaning: Wilhelm’s Meadow, recalling its original status as the personal preserve of one of Prussia’s fairly numerous aristocratic Wilhelms), then left into the pretty little Schoelerpark, directly behind the Schloss there, nominally a castle but in this instance a miniature one.
Since horizontally King-Sized Maxe – extraordinary in every conceivable way, naturally – has one vertebra more than nature intended for both bi- and quadrupeds, our veterinary lady has advised me to restrict the length of his walks to the necessary minimum, so we soon turned right into a narrow path between Schloss and park proper. Almost immediately one hell of an avian racket from a tree there smote my ears, unmistakably identifiable as coming from an agitated crow invisible up there. (Berlin has an annual invasion of extra-hardy, infamously aggressive crows from distant Siberia, migrating to our milder climate.)
Almost immediately I discovered the reason: floundering on the path directly ahead of us a desperate chick, fallen from its nest, frantically trying to use its flightless, only partially feathered wings to escape the six-legged menace rapidly approaching from our direction. Mere moments after that a whirring flying bomb swooped just barely past my head – clearly that outraged parental crow, almost immediately joined by another, presumably the mate parent.
Fortunately I had Maxe on leash (I never let this anarchistic beast out of the apartment without having him totally under control), and we reversed our direction, when suddenly P O W ! - a black flying bomb struck me an almost painful blow directly to the back of my neck. We quickened our step, but not swiftly enough to escape another P O W ! – to the same spot, presumably from that defenceless chick’s other parent.
Back out on the Wilhelmsaue it occurred to me to feel for possible blood, or even a wound – you don’t just mess around with an angry sharp-beaked crow - but I’d evidently escaped that measure of strafing. I’d more than once read about this kind of behavior by protective animals of all species, but this morning brought me my introductory personal experience of it – one more milestone on the road to final wisdom.
Tonight: our glorious Berlin Philharmonic, with Sir Simon Rattle conducting and Daniel Barenboim playing the mighty Second Piano Concerto of Brahms, then, with the mezzo-soprano Angelika Kirchschlager as soloist, what I regard as Kurt Weill’s masterpiece, his and Bertolt Brecht’s “ballet with song” “The Seven Deadly Sins”. See why I’ve come to love this Berlin over all other cities I’ve ever known (and I’ve lived in New York, Paris, Munich, and San Francisco) and have made it my home for most of the past half-century?
7 Responses to “Divebombed by crows – ME!”
I am absolutely floored and amazingly proud to see this post in my feed this morning, and I celebrate the milestone it signified — the very first post you’ve made without any supervisory, over-the-shoulder-looking by anyone. Congratulations! Give yourself a pat on the back!! You deserve it. I’ll never again believe it if anyone tells me, “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” I’m just beaming with pride in your accomplishment.
And to think, all it took was a couple of slaps upside of the head by some crows to get you to do it!
[...] when I opened Google Reader, I was both delighted and surprised to find that he had posted a new entry at his blog on his own, without any hand-holding from me. He has discovered that it is [...]
Your parental pride in my leaps & bounds forward gratify me enormously, Junior. I still have thus far insurmountable difficulties with the technology of responding to these Comments, but I know that with your expert tutelage I’ll sooner or later get there.
I don’t know about the technical difficulties with blogging. But I enjoyed the story with Maxe and the crows enormously. Please carry on …
What a pleasant surprise to get such a nice comment the Oberpfalz – that part of Germany customarily Englished as the Upper Palatinate, not too far from Nuremberg. I hope you’ll keep coming back, ma’am.
Here I am again. This time as proud owner of a new dog, that is to say an eleven year old poodle-terrier mix named Blacky. All this doggy talk, especially the one about Misha and its predessors, apparently triggered it off. After four years without a dog (five dogs in succession) I just realized what was missing in my life and I had to do something about it. And that day there was that ad from the local kennel in the newspaper …
[...] us with another of his delightful stories, I thought I’d re-direct your attention to his first post about his encounter with the crows (and the 2nd and 3rd) and then finally to his follow-up post. [...]