Crow in a Raindrop

Three stills from 2007 crow videos, by Anna Peach


I spend my days and nights with one idea tumbling into the next. I have moved from the sea to the rain and then back to the sea for sources that inspire me. From filming seaweed to harvesting it, from filming the raindrops to filming birds through them, my investigations are unending. I have been looking up the various species of birds and trying desperately to identify the numerous seaweeds that wash ashore. I have to laugh at the scientific documentation photos of seaweed that I find on the computer, for they all look exactly alike. These distant hazy images of lumps of seaweed on the shore, some more red, others more apple green. You have to wonder if anyone could use these images to identify anything, especially when we are talking about hundreds of species with many of them being a shade of green.

I selected to present a few images from my raindrop trilogy. I used the ice cam to film the local crows visiting my cabin. I became fascinated with them at first due to their ability to know when I was eating even though my eating time changes every day. They would perch outside the window and watch me eat. I soon realized that they also seemed to recognize me coming back from my hike, as they would call to each other and fly ahead to my cabin’s roof. They seemed to know that if I was returning to the house it had to be for food. Of course they were right every time.

I began to think about ‘birding’ and the aspect of stalking and watching birds. I too love to watch animals, birds, and fish. But if you really look at it, it is spying. Some types of spying we choose to accept, and others we find objectionable. It was this that brought me to the idea of documenting the birds that were watching me, namely the mated pair of crows and a lone raven. It became a double surveillance with the crows looking for me, while I set up the camera to monitor them. It seems relevant in this time of watching everyone else’s moves.

These three stills are taken from my crow-watching day. I found it to be an all consuming act where I had to open the windows so to hear their call and have time to trigger the camera whose cord slinked around the cabin and in through a window. If I dared to wash the dishes or turn my back to cook lunch, they would approach in their mating season loopy loops all with the camera on standby. This was done in the middle of a North Atlantic swell that was doing its best to push a few icebergs in my direction. The rain was coming horizontally and it took turns with the fog to make this a challenging act.

It ended up being both the fog and rain that also made the work successful and beautiful to watch. When I took up a cup of tea and reviewed the footage, I found that the fog made a hazy glow, and the rain had pooled on the lens creating a wonderful double image. At that realization, of course the rain stopped. I took loads of footage to find two separate three-second clips of this beautiful bird taking flight. In my video world, a few seconds is all you need.

PS this was written twelve days ago, but not posted. Needless to say the "crow day" is still going on...and on...