Each year around Thanksgiving when the season turns cold, a plague of crows descend on the city of Minneapolis from Canada and northern Minnesota. Here are some photographs I recently took of large concentrations of these wintering crows in the treetops above the University of Minnesota campus.

Such gatherings of crows are colloquially referred to as a murder. I have no fear of these birds, even if their raucous presence unavoidably evokes that famous film by Hitchcock.

Nothing about them, however, is actually cinematic. The sidewalks and my blue collection boxes are all coated in fresh splotches of their white shit. There are so many! Should I die on the route all anyone is going to find is the bones.

After work, I ride my bicycle home alone in darkness along the river because scavengers of a different sort have stolen the copper wiring from the streetlights.