Super Heroes of The Bird World

Marty the crow was a very smart crow. He had a lot to be proud of as he had been secretly doing things for humanity. He thought that seeing as how humans had been providing food for him and his brethren for all of eternity, you know, in the way of fast food and kitchen scraps and that, he and his fellow birds should begin to do something nice for the ones who walked on two legs and drove those funny metal monsters around on the concrete pathways that led on and on over the hills and across the country.

It all started when Marty got his friend Rick and Rick’s friend Don, and Don’s friend Bill to join him at the big meeting. Not many people know this, but crows are pretty smart. They have a lot going for them in the bird world and yes, they even have meetings. At this particular meeting, however, Marty put his ideas out there for discussion to see what the group could come up with. It seems that Marty wanted to start a detective agency.

They met in an abandoned warehouse a few blocks from the police department which was actually by design. Marty explained that what they would be doing was helping the police with their police business. The way they would do this was to leave notes. Crows can write you know! Oh yes. As I said, crows are a lot smarter than people know. They have a lot going for them. So, what they would do was to fly around and watch people. They would begin by recruiting a lot more crows into their organization. They would need four crews to start with and then they would grow to eight crews, then ten, then fifteen, and finally they would have twenty fully functioning “watcher crow crews.”

The Watchers, as Marty liked to call them, would be dispatched by Marty and his main body of “directors,” in the group, to various shady areas around town to try to determine when, where, and how crimes were going to be committed. Then, when a crime did happen, the watcher crow bird patrols would record the information on small writing pads that they had stashed in different parts of town, and then bring them back to the police station and tuck them under the windshield wipers of some of the key player's cop cars.

These would be the Lieutenant’s cars or the Sargent’s vehicles. You know, the ones who would read the note and think it was some kind of community ‘do-gooder,’ or just a good Samaritan. Also, they only left the notes when the cars were on duty. That way, the security cameras in the police parking lot would not record the birds with notes in their beaks and figure out that birds were leaving the cop's messages. Marty figured that wouldn’t fly, to use a bird term.

When they left the little notes, they only did it when they could hop up to the car by using the ground and not flying in. They used the other parked cars as a shield so they wouldn’t be seen. That way, even if security cameras were pointing to where the cop car was parked, they would still never see who placed the notes. As I said, crows are a lot smarter than most people realize. They have a lot going for them.

On the first night out, each crew found at least four crimes in progress, and one of them found and reported nine crimes and a wounded child who was found in a desolated forest area in the suburbs. A victim of a bicycle accident might have died out there in the elements if the cops had not read the note and driven out to the location. The child was found in time and taken straight to the local hospital.

One of the more interesting things the crows reported was a huge crime ring that was sending criminals out around the town, usually at night, who cased senior citizens' houses keying on seniors who lived alone. It was tricky because the birds knew that the cops would want the entire ring and not just one incident. They were thinking just like good cops.

They gathered together first at the meeting place and set up a series of items on the floor. Each item would represent a different house involved in a stakeout. To a human, this would have appeared just like the Generals during the big wars where they laid out all the different pieces of the war theatre.

When the birds had established a pattern, they tried to write it all down in the most concise way on the least amount of small sheets of paper so that they could still carry them around and be able to stick them under the cop’s wipers. Often, people would see the crows hopping along through a parking lot with oversized pieces of paper in their beaks but they would just laugh and look away. After all, crows in parking lots have been picking up stuff and eating all manners of things for a very long time so it was nothing new. If they only knew!

On other nights, they again began to establish a network of organized crime that was intent on stealing high-value automobiles. The crooks would stake out the cars for a few nights and then at some point during the day, they would tail the intended target and wait until they parked in just the right setting before calling in their flatbed trucks and large working crew of criminal mechanics to load them up in a hurry. Then, off they went leaving another car owner to return to their cars only to learn that they had vanished. They used the same procedure here, bringing in all the data, laying it out on the floor, and then making determinations as to the best way to approach the crime in terms of how the cops would most easily benefit.

One evening, a bird spotted what looked like it was shaping up to be rape so that bird wrote down the location and the words, ‘rape in progress,’ and simply flew right up to the first cop car he found and landed on the side window not twelve inches from the cop's ear. He spits the note into the car and then quickly flew away. From the top of a tall building, that crow watched as the cop pulled out and then flew off behind him. In this way, he was able to confirm that the suspect was stopped and apprehended and that no rape occurred.

It went on like this for months before somebody in the news business got wind of the fact that the cops had been getting virtually all of their tips from small pieces of paper left under the windshield wipers of their squad cars. That particular newsman wanted to know more, but he was never able to make any kind of determination. The crows were just too smart and they played a good clean game. Crime in the city decreased to an all-time low and suddenly, policemen all over town could be seen in coffee shops and leaning on their cars chatting with citizens about the weather and how their kids were doing in school. They had practically nothing to do. No one ever knew why!