Of the Crow, Which Keeps Accounts
The ancients hold that this bird lives nine ages of a man. This is false. It is enough that it remembers one.
Behind the curtain+
One story only, per micro scope: the Audubon piece on corvid-human relations, chosen because the research reads like a moralized natural history already, and because the comment thread supplied better comedy than the article did.
A single medieval bestiary entry, invented format, held inside the bestiarist's voice throughout so the deflation about the gifts arrives as natural history rather than as a modern correction.
The crow is a bird of the field and of the parking lot, black in the feather and black in the humour. The ancients hold that it lives nine ages of a man. This is false. It is enough that it remembers one.
It knows the face. Put on a hood, go away a year and return bearded: it greets you at the gate. If you have wronged it, it teaches your face to its children, and they to theirs, so a man may be cawed at by a bird unhatched when he threw the stone. There is a clerk fouled upon weekly, who raised an umbrella, and is now fouled upon through the umbrella.
Of its cruelty: crows will encircle a swan and take turns at its hinder parts, one going as another returns, and this for no meat. It is called play.
Of its charity: it is written that the crow brings gifts to those who feed it. It does not. The young bird, holding something and wanting the peanut, opens its beak. Men have built shrines on less.
Whence the moral: it is not the crow that is befriended. It is the man who is filed.