![]() ![]() I should have worn some kind of shirt, I guess.īut politics were involved. I wasn’t able to dress up like that, wearing my overalls and a St Louis Cardinals ball cap. Obviously, Blackie was the crowd favorite, but first place was won by a little girl dressed up cuter than me, carrying a big old furry cat. Mom and Grandma made him a little Styrofoam hat and a vest and he sat on a little perch he was tied to just like he knew he was an attraction as we marched down Main Street, actually cawing at the crowd as we went. One pet crow I had when I was about 6 years old won second place in a pet parade in Houston Mo. Some pet crows can live up to ten years old, but if they roam free they aren’t apt to. Eventually he was shot by a farmer who didn’t realize he was a pet. One old ear-ring showed up that wasn’t even hers! He was one to wander and once showed up on Main Street, several miles away. I knew that he took all his treasure to our woodpile, where there were golf tees and spoons and shiny tins and even coins (always pennies and nickels)…and Mom’s jewelry. I recovered it, and saved Joe from a shotgun blast. As a wife in the rather poor Dablemont clan, Mom had no expensive jewelry, but she still wanted too keep what she had and she saw Joe take off with some as he flew through the window carrying with him a beakful of shiny treasure. One of my pets, Ol’ Black Joe, got into our house on a hot summer day through a bedroom window that had been left open. The common crow, or American crow, is something I know a lot about, because I had several for pets as a boy. The common crow’s scientific name is Corvis brachyrynchos.įrom the raven, a northern crow that is found across Canada and much larger than any others, to the smaller fish crow, there are a heck of a lot of separate subspecies of the black rascals everyone seems to look upon rather unfavorably. The scientific name of the fish crow is Corvis ossifragus. They don’t live on ridgetops or in deep woods. They were not in the Ozarks 10 or 15 years ago but they are spreading northward and westward, wherever wetlands or rivers are found. There’s nothing wrong with the crow they are hearing, it is just a different subspecies, a tiny bit smaller and thinner than a regular crow with a different call entirely. When I take people down the river who aren’t familiar with the ‘fish crow’ they are puzzled by the call. By Larry Dablemont, Contributing ColumnistĪlong the Ozark streams, a favorite place of mine nowadays, as it gets hot and muggy, there comes the cry of a strange type of crow, a kind of caw that sounds like the black rascal is choking on something or trying to gargle. ![]()
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