by a murder of crows
I just want to tell you about a fascinating sounding program airing tomorrow evening, Sunday October 11th at 9 pm on CBC-TV: A Murder of Crows. Check out the promo video. If you don’t have access to CBC-TV or don’t have a TV, the program will be available later to view online at the CBC site.
I look forward to seeing this program for it sounds like we may be in for some surprises. Crows and ravens are such intelligent birds and feature in so many of our myths, fairytales and legends and yet live around us in almost all parts of the world. I’m quite curious about the very odd term of a murder of crows for a group of them but there seem to be no truly definitive answers that I’ve found. I hope some of my crow-loving blog friends will see this program and give us some feedback!
By the way, the delightful drawing above is by Susan of Adventures, Ink and phantsythat. She has kindly given me permission to use it here. Please do read the story of how Crow met Susan as well as both her lovely blogs.
UPDATE Sunday evening: Just finished watching this – excellent! I learned so much. Highly recommended! But I still don’t know the source of ‘murder of crows’….
October 10, 2009 in Blogging, Films, Other artists by Marja-Leena
It is an intriguing title no doubt. Would be interesting to learn about what the program was about. I will not get to see it out here.
The drawing is very very good. It is almost as if the bird is trying to reach out to the girl.
There’s a secondary informal meaning to the noun murder: Something that is very difficult, dangerous or disagreeable – as in It was murder trying to find a parking space. I’ll let you know if I’m blessed with enlightenment.
Anil, yes, it’s a lovely drawing, thanks on Susan’s behalf! You should be able to see the program online soon – did you check out the links?
BB, yes, I’ve used murder in that way too. One of the suggestions made is that crows being carrion birds do murder hurt birds or small animals, but to me that still doesn’t explain why a group of them is called a murder. Did you look at the link about all the odd group names for different birds? Do enlighten me on this one, please.
If anyone knows, it would be Bernd Heinrich, the author of the fascinating book ~ Mind of the Raven. I’ll pull my copy out and do some digging.
Rouchswalwe, oh, I do hope you find the answer! Thanks for looking. Sounds like an interesting book.
Good morning Marja-Leena, am planning on looking into the language of crows today; meanwhile, here’s a title for your interest in graphemes/phonemes. It starts out übersimple and then becomes interesting and meaty: Teach Yourself Linguistics, by Jean Aitchison.
It could come from the German “murren,” to grumble and grouse.
I love crows and miss seeing them here. The native species of crow is almost extinct.
R, thanks for the book tip! (Readers, see this to find out what we are talking about.)
Hattie, “murren” does sound very very possible! After seeing that program, my respect for the crows’ intelligence has increased thousandfold. Apparently it ranks with chimpanzees and elephants as the smartest in the animal world.
Hattie is on the right track, I think. John Hodgkin of the Philological Society (London) wrote in 1909 that he attempted “a rational explanation of the meanings of the Collection of Phrases in ‘The Book of St. Albans,’ 1486, entitled ‘The Compaynys of beestys and fowlys,’ and similar lists.” His study included a manuscript (the Egerton manuscript from the mid 1400’s) and several other old manuscripts. To make a long story short, the oldest list included: “a Mursher of Crowys” and later we find, “a Morther of crowys” and “a Murther of crowes.” Hodgkin concluded that “this is a new word, intended possibly to represent the noise of crows.” He also noted that it did not appear in the N.E.D. (New English Dictionary, now known as the Oxford English Dictionary).
R, wow, thanks so much for researching this! It does make sense that it’s their noise, especially a large group. Though I’d hardly call them murmurs! In the program they mentioned that crows have a large number of calls that mean different things, I don’t remember the exact number. So amazing – I hope you’ll be able to see this online.
Oh, here it is on the CBC website: ‘Crows have different warning calls – one for cats, and one for hawks, and another for humans – 250 in all.’
My pleasure, Marja-Leena! I wondered too why it was so, and this gave me the perfect excuse to spend some time looking into it. I’ll cross my fingers the online link works for me here.
But there is a whole series of them, isn’t there? Like a charm of finches, a piteousness of doves, an unkindness of ravens, where the abstracts of the birds’ qualities become the collectives. I feel they must have been the work of someone, rather than genuine folk terminology, but I don’t know who… I’ll try to find out.
Lucy, yes, that list is long and quite amusing. I’d love find out if it comes from a single source.