A Congress of Crows

Last night I finished an illustration for Kristina Miller’s book Woodland Harmonies. The story was cleverly didactic and featured crows as the main characters. Although a children’s story in format, it has very much an adult theme - the crows get together after work to meet at a local bar in a tree called, naturally, The Crow Bar. Getting tipsy, they start to become, as Miller puts it, "a raucous caucus," and decide to challenge each other to a nest building contest. They then divide themselves into distinctly dysfunctional groups. One group has a dictatorial leader who tolerates no constructive input from the rest of the group. Others are overly analytical and can never seem to get the project started. Clearly they represent human dynamics at its worst as they attempt to build hopelessly ludicrous nests. Fortunately the story has a happy ending, with the one egalitarian group volunteering to help repair the nests of the other groups and show them how these things are done (had that group not had as much to drink?)

While doing some background research for the project, I came across a list of names for gatherings of different types of birds. A group of crows is called a congress of crows. Congress. Now that was a word I was trying to avoid thinking about these days. I noticed that there was no word for a gathering of booby birds. A senate of boobies anyone?