Ich bin ein [Texas-Born] Berliner

Habitués (naturally including any additional sons of habitués) of this playpen may recall that when my Knoxville blogfather Perry Nelson finally bludgeoned me into getting it started I led off with a true – but highly improbable – nature story from here in Germany’s thoroughly metropolitan capital, of how a parental pair of crows, with blood clearly in their eyes, divebombed me during my first dog-walk the morning of June 3d, not once but twice actually doing a sort of avian kamikaze number, doing their level best to stab their sharp hard beaks directly into the back of my neck.  Seconds before that strafing attack I’d discovered what obviously had motivated it: a helpless crow chick, its frantically fluttering wings still almost bare of feathers, obviously fallen from the next, floundering directly ahead on the path my Dachshund Maxe and I customarily take several times a day.  Even though we reversed our steps immediately, I didn’t make my get-away fast enough.  To catch up on that memorable encounter with Berlin wild life, you might search the blog for “crows”.

After that encounter last summer I naturally used it to bore every Berlin friend and neighbor I could collar, some of whom considerably extended my education about this topic – for instance, one lady who lives in the same house said she’d not only seen but even photographed citified foxes in the little garden colony beyond the foot of our own little plot of garden; another told me that in her Schöneberg neighborhood, not far away, foxes sometimes sit out on the sidewalk in front of the apartment buildings.  Most recently of all, the early morning and late afternoon have sometimes brought into our own little garden the tiniest cottontail rabbit I’ve ever seen, so irresistibly miniature you could – in the highly unlikely event he’d hold still long enough – pick him up and cradle him in your cupped hands.

But I started out to tell about today’s most recent development in The Case of the Divebombing Crows.  At that time, everyone I told about it voiced the melancholy but realistic assumption that that poor almost featherless crow-chick would definitely not survive.  Its devoted parents clearly had no feasible way of hoisting it back up into the nest, and the little Schoelerpark, where cruel fate had left it stranded and totally unprotected (except for those murderously irate parents), has numerous roaming cats, plus a few dogs, that comb the area for mice and anything else edible.

Well sir, this morning brought fairly solid evidence that that chick has indeed, almost miraculously, managed to survive after all.

The little Schoeler-Schlösschen (a miniature sort of modest castle) has directly behind it, between it and the Schoelerpark proper, a fairly spacious fenced-in area – presumably what remained for the Schlösschen’s occupants of that time when Berlin, by long tradition a populist kind of city, opened the erstwhile castle garden to Berliners in general, and this morning, as Maxe and I approached, I saw a man from time to time leaning forward over that fence and talking to, I assumed, a dog or some other animal down on the ground within that enclosure. That seemed unlikely, for no gate permits free access between that enclosure and the park itself.  Finally I saw that he addressed himself not to some small quadruped but to a bird – a crow, by golly, and by appearance a young one.  The two obviously knew each other reasonably well, for he addressed the little crow as Lotte.  (Don’t ask me how he’d ascertained his little friend’s sex; could you have?)

When I regaled him (naturally) with my own Berlin crow story from last June, he reciprocated with his own.  Gestures indicated that he lives in one of the two apartment wings that today embrace the Schoelerpark, and he spoke the purest form of the knife-cuttable proletarian Berlin dialect I love so that I’ve sometimes almost atavistically had the feeling that in some earlier incarnation I must have spoken that as my mother tongue.

Lotte, he told me, appears regularly to keep their presumably daily rendezvous, which he’s made more interesting by rewarding her with various kinds of tidbits.  When Lotte either saw or smelled Maxe, she immediately put some distance between herself and the fence, but not so much that I couldn’t get a fairly good look at her.  Not only her small size indicates her youth; she hasn’t yet become all black, with her back still grey, maybe silver-grey.  All things considered, I can hardly imagine that I err in recognizing Lotte as a slightly older version of that helplessly floundering chick from last June 3d, the pride and joy of those two vicious crows that divebombed me.

It goes without saying that from now on I’ll always equip myself with crow-bait tidbits whenever Maxe and I head in that direction, which we customarily do at least twice a day.  Since I’ve thus far had no experience whatever in the care and feeding of crows, whether young or old, I immediately sought the advice of two wise old spinster sisters who live a couple of floors above me and know this area of Berlin like the back of their hands.  When to them I wondered aloud what crows like to eat, they had a simple pragmatic answer ready:

“Anthing.”