This is Bird Note.

Author Kira Jane Buxton loves crows, so much that she's written two novels about a crow named

S.T. Navigating the extinction of humanity. When she was writing those books, she tried

befriending the crows in her neighborhood and wound up bonding with a pair of humanity. When she was writing those books, she tried befriending the crows in her

neighborhood and wound up bonding with a pair of them. They are a dyad, a paired male and female.

I call them tea and dart. And they have honestly become family to me. Tea in particular,

the female, she's incredibly clumsy. She drools when she eats. She's very quirky.

She used to love to call for me out the front porch and then I would come out and she would hide and I'd have to try and find her.

And then she'd do a kind of jump scare and pop out at me. That was her favorite thing for a while.

And her partner, DART, is a very handsome crow. He's a little bit more aloof. She'll come right up to me. He will watch and keep an eye out for her. And she will eat all the food and share nothing. And he always shares his food with her. It reminds me a lot of my relationship with my husband. He's gregarious and altruistic, and she just

wants to eat all the snacks. It took a long time to garner the trust of these two birds, and now we have

this sort of reciprocity of respect.

Many details of her crow-taginist in her novels, Hollow Kingdom and feral creatures,

are drawn from tea and dart.

You can find links to those books at our website, birdnote.org.

I'm Mark Bramhill.