My love letter to the crows of Portland and beyond.

Thousands of crows congregate in Portland, especially downtown where you can watch them fly in massive feather-clouds as they roost in the trees lining the streets for the night. There isn't a day that goes by where I don't at least hear a crow. Most days they land on my roof and I love hearing their claws tippy-tapping overhead as they strut along like they own the place. I've also been watching them pull sticks from the branches of the nearby oak to build nests with this spring (bonus: giant crow nest pictured in the last slide).

This cute couple represent the army of crows who call the City of Roses their home, and I chose a wild rose bush for them to rest on to honor our namesake.

Because crows are often one of the most prevalent animals in cities, they serve an important role as an easy entry point for getting to know the natural world around us– a “gateway bird”, as it were. They are almost always the first birds I hear each morning when I wake and I love laying out in my hammock on warm afternoons as they perch in the tree overhead, eating or preening or cawing across the street at their pals. Almost daily I’ll be sitting here working and hear them land on my roof, and the tippy-taps of their claws as they strut across the shingles is a delightful little comfort reminding me that connection to the wider world comes in the smallest ways, and those ways are accessible to us no matter where we live.

Crows have become one of my anchors to the type of world that feels most like home to me no matter where I am.