A Murder of Crows

Our house is cute, but it has walls that are paper thin and the windows are as old as Abraham Lincoln's mom. Sound doesn't just travel, but it seems to amplify, especially when we are trying to sleep. We are used to it by now, and we sleep through most noises, but a few months ago, the ungodly noises we were hearing outside our bedroom window almost drove me to use my machete on a murder of crows...
Shortly after the neighbors chopped their tree down, we began hearing a horrible squawking noise- as if a crow with pneumonia was being choked to death. This noise kept waking us up when we didn't want to be awake (when we were sleeping) and so finally I began to search. Looking directly outside our bedroom window, I saw a full nest in the bushes growing over the neighbor's fence. In the nest, 3 young crows were squawking almost continually.



Apparently, the neighbors chopped down the tree and thought they would do a good deed of preserving the crows by placing their nest right outside our bedroom window. My brother gave me a double-edged machete that I keep by my bed and I was tempted to chop the crows to pieces but my animal-loving wife talked me out of it. We waited and waited and within a few weeks, the crow-babies had somehow disappeared. I think maybe they got old enough to fly away and start their own nests, but they probably we just eaten by one of the Petaluma river possums. Anyway, we sleep again. The moral of the story: Don't chop down trees and if you need to, don't put crows outside your neighbor's window.



FACT: Their are many different collective nouns (words describing a group of something) for different animals. A group of crows is called a "murder." Another good collective noun is a "smack" of jellyfish.