Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!mailrus!ncar!ames!oliveb!oliven!mjm
From: mjm@oliven.olivetti.com (Michael Mammoser)
Newsgroups: rec.birds
Subject: Re: Crow Superstition
Message-ID: <34741@oliveb.olivetti.com>
Date: 21 Dec 88 21:41:38 GMT
References: <kXfwT-y00Uh-00p24I@andrew.cmu.edu>
Sender: news@oliveb.olivetti.com
Lines: 22

In article <kXfwT-y00Uh-00p24I@andrew.cmu.edu>, lw0y+@andrew.cmu.edu (Laurie Walz) writes:
 > 
 > I am posting this for a friend of mine from Ireland.  There is a belief
 > there that crows will leave a farm where someone is about to die.  It's
 > common enough folklore, but he was disturbed when this occured to his
 > own family -- the crows that had been living on the farm in some
 > numbers suddenly disappeared, and lo and behold, a month or so later,
 > his father died.  He said that the local people kept coming up to him
 > at the funeral and saying, well, we saw that the crows had flown
 > away but we didn't want to say anything.... that sort of thing.  Now
 > the crows are back.
 > 
 > Do crows sometimes just get up and go for some good reason? -- he
 > wants to know.

	Crows will typically flock up in the winter; sometimes in huge
flocks; and then break up into pairs and disperse for the breeding season.
It may be that the death occurred coincidentally right after the start of
the breeding season when the crows had dispersed and, of course, now they
would be back and flocked up again.

Mike