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F(l)ight

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I have always watched crows.  At the bottom of the Cheshire garden of the house where I lived as a teenager, was a small woodland that had grown on what used to be a river bank before the Dee silted up. The Murder that made their home there were loud, brash and very smart. Some became quite tame, others sneered at me for years. 

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The crows in this series live at the edge of a field in East Sussex. I don't know them that well.  But I know them much better having spent several hours documenting them. Ragged ones, sleek ones, shrieking together or brooding alone, in flight or playfully fighting with eachother. They are all here.

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“...the ominous thing in the crow's flight, the bare-faced, bandit thing, the tattered beggarly gipsy thing, the caressing and shaping yet slightly clumsy gesture of the down-stroke, as if the wings were both too heavy and too powerful, and the headlong sort of merriment, the macabre pantomime ghoulishness and the undertaker sleekness...”

 

[Ted Hughes, 'Poetry in the Making: An Anthology', 1967, Faber & Faber]

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