A couple nights ago, I was just falling asleep when I was startled into alertness by a racket on the roof above my head. My first fear was that the rats had returned to my attic, but judging by the sound, these would have been REALLY BIG rats! This morning, our garbage can was over-turned, garbage was strewn over the grass, and my daughter discovered raccoon paw prints in the silt at the bottom of a bucket filled with rain water, which was sitting close to the garbage can. Mystery of the night visitors solved. We had inadvertantly set up the perfect raccoon dinner stop: garbage can buffet and right beside it, a place to wash the food.

Here’s a photo of a raccoon climbing up my back porch a couple years ago.

We were socked in by fog almost all day yesterday. It was so thick during my daughter’s soccer game, we could hardly see the opposite end of the field (couldn’t at all when we first arrived). When we were walking across the parking lot after the game, a raven flew over, trailed by several cawing crows.

Lying awake in bed last night (I always have a hard time falling asleep Sunday nights), I had to jump up and jot down this haiku:

raven in the fog

if not for the noisy crows

might have passed unseen

CBC radio is having a contest right now, calling for poetry, short stories and songs about ravens, so it seems timely to have had a visit from a raven. Now, what to submit?

My dog, Dylan, usually goes to work with my husband, but today my husband went to a meeting and couldn’t take him. So, when I walked my daughter to school, the dog came too. Dylan, a blond Lab-cross adopted from the local animal shelter, knows the streets of our neighbourhood and knows his mind. After saying goodbye to my daughter, I turned to head home, and Dylan turned purposefully in the opposite direction. I gave in.

As we walked, I watched birds and composed haiku (sorry, couldn’t help myself). Dylan, interested only in checking out the various odours along the way, didn’t care at all about the birds (even when a Northern Flicker flew up right in front of his nose).

The dog:

The haiku:

new snow softly falls

black crow glides over white field

— silent watcher

in the middle of snow

crow sits in bare-branched tree

centre of the world

on our snow walk

my dog and I, in two worlds

mine sight, his smell

How many wind storms can we have in one winter? Right now, the trees in my yard are dipping and dancing, and a rolling current of crows just flowed over the neighbourhood rooftops like snowboarders over a mountain.

The crows do seem to be enjoying themselves, but the dancing frenzy of the trees is getting me nervous. I should probably get off the computer before a branch falls on the power lines again.

To be honest, what I really need to do is get off the internet and get to work on my current story. I have a deadline looming, and I’m not as far along in the writing as I’d like to be. I need to stay away from internet distractions (and the urge to write crow and wind haiku) until I get a serious chunk of writing done.

I’ll leave you with two hints about the story I’m working on:

1. I found out last spring that there are crows in Japan (really big crows).

2. The oldest comic, or manga, in Japan is said to be the 12th century Choju jinbutsu giga (Frolicking Animals and Figures Scrolls).

(crow in Ueno Park, Tokyo, Spring 2006)

I didn’t plan to write about crows today, but I went to pick up my daughter from school, and it was like walking into the Alfred Hitchcock movie, “The Birds.” There were crows everywhere! So many, that it was freaking out the kids. I tried to take photos, but the wind was blowing in black clouds and rain, and it was getting so dark there wasn’t enough light to focus properly.

I’ve seen crows out sky surfing on windy days before (they actually seem to enjoy the wind), but I’ve never seen anything like this in my neighbourhood — they were in the sky, on roof tops, on the ground, on fences, in trees.

It was like being near the roost when the crows all start arriving for the night. And it was all focused mostly around the school.

I wonder if the loss of trees at the crows’ usual roost has set them searching for somewhere new to hang out. . . .

Like crows, rats are another sometimes maligned species. They are associated with disease and filth, considered dirty, sneaky, etc. Usually they get cast as the bad guy in children’s cartoons. Although, there are exceptions (the wise martial arts rat who teaches the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, for example), and rats can have different significance in different cultures. If you are born in the Year of the Rat in the Chinese zodiac, you are supposed to be charming and attractive to people of the opposite sex, as well as thrifty, honest and a hard worker.

Athough their public image may not be as bad as it once was, rats are examples of urban wildlife that we generally don’t enjoy catching sight of. Still, I do get a kind of covert thrill when I see a rat run along the underground part of the Skytrain tracks, and I imagine a whole secret world existing under the noses and feet of all the busy business people in the city above. I have to admit, though, that I don’t get the same thrill when I hear rats scrabbling around inside the walls of my house.

When I was writing my latest novel for kids, “The Truth About Rats (and Dogs),” I fostered a rat from the SPCA shelter, so I could experience what pet rats were like and what it would be like to look after one. I found Oscar quite enjoyable and modeled the rat in my story after him. It did seem ironic, however, to be pampering a pet rat inside my house, while scheming of ways to get rid of the wild rats outside my house and in my walls. I’d be sitting at my computer in the basement writing my rat story, and a wild rat would scuttle along outside the window on his nightly rounds, as if to remind me of who the real owners of the city are.

It happens at the same time every night — just before dark. One by one, winged black silhouettes begin to move across the sky. All over the city, as if in response to some mysterious signal, they abandon their day-time haunts, rise up and join the exodus. By ones at first, then twos, tens, hundreds….. they head in the same direction — silent, purposeful.

I look out the window of the Skytrain as I head home and catch sight of them, scrawled like graffiti on the pink-streaked sky — a secret code of moving black marks. A message of crows. I feel a thrill, a tug at my edges. As if something in me wants to pass through the hard Skytrain metal and glass, fly out into the night and join them? Or maybe it’s just the satisfaction of knowing they’re out there — beyond the control of city-planning, a mystery, a wildness……