At 8:23 a.m. on July 6, a warm, drizzly, Sunday morning, I realized that it was a red-letter day.
Not because of the Independence Day parade I had planned to visit later in the day. To be honest, I wasn’t looking forward to that. Crowds, heat, and impending rain are not a red-letter recipe for a day well spent, in my opinion.
But as I rode my bike in the morning mist, my eyes were drawn upward to a sight I haven’t seen in more than two decades in Sun City.
It was a crow, winging eastward over the rooftops, heading deeper and deeper into the Del Webb community. Close behind was a second crow. The first crow caw-ed twice to call it on.
And I pumped my fist and declared it a red-letter day, because I haven’t seen a crow in Sun City in two decades. And I’ll bet you haven’t either. Oh, we have plenty of other blackbirds — starlings, grackles, redwings, cowbirds and the like — but nary a card-carrying, caw-cawing, common crow.
But why should anybody care about the absence of crows here in our hometown?
“Good riddance,” some might say. After all, few people would list a crow among their favorite birds.
If you have anything at all to say about crows, it would probably be about how they woke you up with their raucous cries too early in the morning, and your comments might be unfit to print here. It would be rare to hear anybody say in a hushed, excited voice, “Ooh, look, over there, pecking out the eyes of that dead opossum rotting on the road. Is it…? Could it be…? It is! A crow!”
But I miss them.
In 2007 I wrote a column called “The curse of quiet summer mornings,” in which I lamented the absence of crows in this area, because crows had been decimated only a few years earlier. When West Nile virus spread among birds beginning in 2001, crows were hit particularly hard, far worse than any other bird species.
In 2002 alone, a full ninety percent of Illinois crows died. They vanished entirely from Sun City. I noticed because I am a bird watcher, and crows are among my favorite birds.
Of course, West Nile disease spread far beyond crows and other birds. It also hit humans hard that year, particularly in this region. Illinois reported the highest number of human West Nile cases in the nation — 884 that year, including 67 who died of the disease, according to the Illinois Department of Public Health.
Although West Nile disease has diminished somewhat in the years since then, it is still out there, killing an average of about 125 humans in the U.S. each year. In 2023, Illinois saw 119 human cases, with six fatalities.
The disease is carried by mosquitos, and yearly rates of infection vary, depending in large part by rainfall. As of July 1 of this year, with mosquitos just beginning their summer swarm, the virus has been detected in mosquitos in 24 Illinois counties, with only one human infection, in Southern Illinois, fortunately non-fatal.
But while most humans will survive a bout of West Nile, the story is different for crows. West Nile disease in a crow is almost guaranteed to be a death sentence.
As West Nile has declined since 2002, crows have rebounded somewhat across the nation, but Illinois crow levels still remain well below what they were in the 1990s. Especially in Sun City, where they have been altogether absent.
That is, until the morning of July 6, at 8:23 A.M, when two cawing crows flew over a cheering codger on a bike.
So why should anybody care that a couple of crows flew over? After all, they’re just crows.
Well, because crows are more susceptible to West Nile disease than any other bird, they may be considered our “canary in the coal mine” when it comes to that disease.
If you don’t recognize that analogy, it comes from the fact that early coal miners always brought a caged canary into the mines with them. As long as the canary sang, there was plenty of oxygen for everybody. But when the canary keeled over, it was time to get out because the oxygen was depleting and the miners would be next.
So when it comes to humans and the West Nile Virus, the crows might be our unlovely canaries. As long as our trees and gardens and rooftops are bare of them, then you can bet that West Nile is still out there, doing its silent damage.
That’s why I consider this rare sighting of a couple of Del Webb crows to be a red-letter day.
Because when our Sun City summer morning sleep is once again shattered by the raucous cries of crows, then maybe we can truly breathe easy once more, at least when it comes to the West Nile virus.
And the neighbors will hear cries of joy coming from my house when that happens.
It happened two days later, July 8, when I dashed outside at 6:30 a.m. to confirm that I wasn’t just dreaming the raucous cries of several crows cawing to each other.
Four of them flew over my house across the dazzling early morning sky. Two others cawed atop the oaks behind my back yard. A handful more answered from the meadow below the ridge.
Ten or a dozen crows, right here in our neighborhood, shattering the quiet dawn.
Oh, what a glorious, clamorous daybreak!
TR Kerth is the author of the book “Revenge of the Sardines.” Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com
