By ABA Young Birder Eleanor Magaziner
As a young adult crow, you spend most of your time alone, looking for food, navigating through suburban forests and streets, and keeping an eye out for predators and manmade dangers. One brisk spring morning, as you search for a mate, you notice a lone human child wandering through the trees. Young humans, like every member of their species, are a gamble, but children especially so. They are equally as likely to throw rocks at a bird as they are to throw food.
Intrigued but wary, you follow the child; curiosity may have killed the cat, but you never liked those anyway, and besides, you have wings. After a few minutes of swooping from branch to branch after the young mammal, with no other humans in sight, you do begin to wonder why this one is alone. Every other time you’ve spotted one of these smaller humans, they have been accompanied by a flock of adults or other young ones.
You watch as the child picks their way through a thicket of brambles, then reaches the small manmade hole in the ground, which has sat at the center of the forest for as long as any of the local murder can remember. The large hole, encircled by stone, has also never seen human activity, nor has any crow scented the slightest trace of man nearby in all the time the flock has known of its existence, and the moss and fungi which have grown thick around it have been a dependable source of bugs and grubs. As the child approaches the hole, you spot a glimmering metal disk clutched in their hand. This catches your attention even more, as a treasure this shiny would surely earn you a mate.
The child steps in front of the hole, murmurs something into their clenched fist, and then drops their shiny object into the hole. As strange as this behavior is, you are tempted to swoop down and grab it as soon as it leaves their dexterous little fingers. You hear a small splash as the disk enters the water at the bottom of the hole, then you black out.
…
You wake up on the forest floor, your limbs splayed around you. Strange. Although you’ve never been one to experience fainting or narcolepsy during the day, you would think at least a few of your bones would be broken, after falling from such a height. The only pain you feel, though, is from a few minor cuts, as though from thorns.
As you open your eyes, seeing the human child’s arm in front of you snaps you back to awareness, and you quickly turn and gather yourself to take off. Except! The arm, pale and slightly rounder than most humans’ that you’ve seen, moves to your side instead of your wing. This frightens you even more, and you let out a panicked caw to warn the human off, when you realize that your voice isn’t your own. And your senses aren’t your own. The dulled senses you’d written off as being in a daze from your fall should have returned with the rush of fear you feel in the dangerous situation you now find yourself in. Just as you gain awareness of this bad news, you realize you can’t take off. You glance back to assess the damage to your wing, all but certain now of your demise, when you see the arm again, and the rest of the human’s body, instead of where your feathers should be.
What is going on? Your head is still pounding, still certain of impending doom, but, as it seems like you aren’t being attacked at the moment, your mind turns to rapidly analyze the question. Why aren’t your senses working? Where did the child go? And where are your feathers? If you fell to the ground, why aren’t you hurt? The mysteries compound one another, swirling around your still-panicked mind, until a blue-eyed crow drops down a ways in front of you, clumsily swooping down from a branch overhead and dropping most of the way to the ground. They don’t look hostile, in fact, they look… just like you.
As you are processing this, the young crow clicks and coos up at you in a way you can tell is non-threatening, but you can’t understand any of it. It also occurs to you at this time that you are looking down at this mysterious doppelgänger on the forest floor. Quite a ways down, in fact, with a pair of human legs at the bottom of your field of vision.
Finally, amidst the storm of questions and adrenaline, you are struck with an epiphany. Those are your legs and arms. And that is you on the ground, now stepping closer and cooing. At least, it was you. Somehow, you are now in control of the human you were following. And that human must be in control of your body. As unbelievable as the idea is, it seems to be the only explanation.
You try to sit down and lower your new, tall human self closer to the young human–now crow–in front of you, and are surprised to find that your chubby human knees bend quite a ways in front of you. You’ve seen humans walking around and even sitting down on some of their manmade structures before, but you weren’t prepared to experience it firsthand.
While you are unsure, the child seems completely certain of themself in your body, hopping closer and nearly startling you again by flapping up to perch on the low stone wall. They continue to stare at you, perhaps attempting to communicate through body language. Again you try to vocalize something, this time to communicate with them, but again your voice is unable to express your meaning. The crow-child clicks in what seems like a conciliatory way, but the specifics of their message are lost upon your human ears.
You cautiously (and somewhat clumsily) approach the walls of the hole, now remembering the shiny trinket the child dropped down it before, but when you peer inside, it is too dark and too deep to see anything. Cursing your luck, you turn and rest against the piled stones, once again facing the child in your own body.
You exhale in frustration, your mind turning once again to your bizarre circumstances as your gaze sweeps across your new body and surroundings. You and the human child have switched places. You are now grounded, but fast, wiley, and possessing of clever hands and new opposable thumbs, which you now flex and turn over in front of you. You and the child, now stuck in your juvenile corvid body, are unable to communicate verbally, but have a mutual understanding, being stuck in the same situation.
You offer your arm to the crow in front of you, and they climb on, gripping their way up to perch on your shoulder. You rise once again, more carefully this time, and face the bramble surrounding you and your unlikely partner.
You hadn’t flown into this situation expecting an ally, but after an unimaginable twist of events, walk out of it with one. You didn’t gain the golden trinket you had hoped for, but you don’t regret it in the least. Who has two thumbs, a new friend, and the ability to wreak as much havoc as you please? You do. Now.
Eleanor Magaziner is a seventeen-year-old amateur artist, writer, and birder living in New York. Some of her favorite pastimes are hiking, sketching, and birding. She is also a proud participant in the American Birding Association’s Youth Mentorship Program, thanks to the support of her close friends and family.
