By Marshall Hammond
In the winter months, they can be seen every morning making their daily commute, fanning out across the city, heading east toward the rising sun… hundreds, no thousands of them. And every evening they return, settling back into their crowded urban roosts.
They are our other neighbors: the feathered Portlanders known as Corvus brachyrhynchos, the American Crow.
“I think I’ve always loved crows, but especially during the pandemic I started noticing them more and more,” says children’s book author Leslie Barnard Booth.
The inspiration for Booth’s latest book, I Am We: How Crows Come Together To Survive, came to her during the lockdown. Schools were closed, gatherings weren’t recommended and long daily walks around her neighborhood near Mt. Tabor provided a much needed source of stimulation for Booth and her daughters.
“One day, during the afternoon in fall we looked up and we saw all these crows just streaming across the sky, these long flight lines above our heads, crow after crow after crow. And of course we wondered what it was all about. And it happened again the next day and the next day. So we started just being in the habit of going out at that time and watching for them, and it was so fun to be able to depend on them and know they would appear every day at the same time.”
Booth learned it was likely that the crows were heading to roost somewhere together, but didn’t discover where until a year later while walking through the city center on a winter night.
“I was walking along and I heard this thunderous sound and I looked up and the park blocks were just filled with crows. I had just inadvertently stumbled upon this roosting spot which was the same place all those crows had been going. And it was just a totally overwhelming and powerful and moving experience to stumble upon that and to connect those dots and see them.”
More than 20,000 crows roost together in downtown Portland during the colder months. The nightly influx rises rapidly in September and reaches its peak between November and February.
Multiple factors may drive the crows to gather together in such large numbers and close quarters. The collective warmth of thousands of huddled feathered bodies creates a sort of urban heat island, helping them stay warm on chilly nights. Crows also find safety in numbers – only a few lookouts are needed to warn the group of impending danger, the rest can sleep soundly. And as food sources decline in the cold weather, the crows, who are famously intelligent and social animals, share information about where sources of sustenance can be located.
During the warmer months, the crows disperse to roost in small, territorial family groups. By May and July, the vast majority leave the downtown area, save a few hundred who claim the city center as their territory. The rest spread out across the city and surrounding area, roosting in the trees lining Portland’s streets and parks.
“I just get this feeling of companionship from the crows,” says Booth. “I feel like they’re keeping me company, because they’re always there, regardless of what’s going on in the human world, they’re doing their thing. It’s reassuring to see.“
Booth grew up in Woodinville, WA, and developed a love of writing and poetry at a very early age. “As soon as I learned what an author does, I wanted to be one,” says Booth. She earned her bachelor’s degree at Pomona College, and received an MFA in creative writing and a MS in education from the University of Oregon.
She initially set out to write for adults, but that changed in the process of raising her two daughters. “I noticed as I was reading picture books for my kids that a lot of them really read like poems, because both forms really emphasize sound and sound design,” says Booth. “Picture books are really meant to be read aloud, they’re like live theater, they’re a script for a live performance.”
Booth, who spent years as a preschool, elementary and college teacher, looks to nature and science for the subject matter for her books. In 2023 she published A Stone is a Story, which describes hundreds of millions of years in the life of a rock. The following year she released One Day This Tree Will Fall, a tale of how a tree grows, dies, rots and helps renew and sustain life in the forest. Both books won awards from The National Science Teaching Association and the Children’s Book Council.
Booth writes about Portland’s crows with lyrical and sometimes mischievously dark prose in I Am We: How Crows Come Together To Survive. Moody, playful and hypnotic illustrations by Canadian Alexandra Finkleday complete Booth’s spell, taking the reader on a magical journey through the crows’ world. It’s a book that is meant to be read aloud to a young audience, in close enough proximity so that they can see the illustrations, preferably just after sunset on a fall or winter’s day, just after the crows have headed home for the night.
I Am We: How Crows Come Together To Survive was published in September by Chronicle Books. You can find out more about Leslie Barnard Booth, including upcoming readings, at lesliebarnardbooth.com.
Author Leslie Barnard Booth. Photo by Booth.
