As I go over the hill, I see a large flock of crows on the dead white oak and on the ground under the living one. I find the ground strewn with white oak acorns, and many of these have just been broken in two.
The crow, methinks, is our only large bird that hovers and circles about in flocks in an irregular and straggling manner, filling the air over your head and sporting in it as if at home here. They often burst up above the woods where they were perching, like the black fragments of a powder-mill just exploded.
One crow lingers on a limb of the dead oak till I am within a dozen rods. There is strong and blustering northwest wind, and when it launches off to follow its comrades it is blown up and backward still nearer to me.
It is obliged to tack four or five times just like a vessel, first to the right, then to the left, before it can get off; for as often as it tries to fly directly forward against the wind, it is blown upward and backward within gunshot, and it only advances directly forward at last by stooping very low within a few feet of the ground where the trees keep off the wind.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, October 6, 1860
A large flock of crows. See September 22, 1860 ("See a large flock of crows.");September 29. September 29, 1854 (" A large flock of crows wandering about and cawing as usual at this season.") See also A Book of the Seasons: The American Crow.
A powder-mill just exploded. See January 7, 1853 ("I smelt the powder half a mile before I got there. Put the different buildings thirty rods apart, and then but one will blow up at a time.”); July 21, 1859 ("The canal is still cluttered with the wreck of the mills that have been blown up in times past.”)
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