Dusk, Part 1

A quarter of an hour before dusk, Francis was startled by a crow swooping low over her head as she walked home. It flew to a tree a few hundred meters on, and joined its brethren there. Though there were no leaves--spring not yet having come--the sky behind was totally obscured by wings and feathers, as over a thousand birds competed for space on the branches. Something that Francis could not put her finger on was deeply disturbing about the scene. As she stood and watched the crows jostling for position on the tree, she glance upward at motion in the corner of her field of vision.

The sky was full of crows. There was a word for a group of crows, she struggled to recall what it was. She walked past the first tree and saw that most were filled near to bursting with crows. All of them were so full that the crows were shoulder to shoulder. A solid mass of black, a silent mass of black: not a single bird cawed, crooned, or clicked. Francis shivered. There must have been a hundred thousand crows, and not one made a noise.

"Murder" she muttered, "a murder of crows. But how many crows is that? Surely a single mob of crows flying together would be one murder?" As Francis looked around, she could distinguish tens of groups of crows, each technically their own murder by her rubric. “Tens of murders, then. Unless the collective noun for crows is recursive. Which gives ‘a murder of murders.’” Francis felt a chill down her spine, despite feeling warm in her coat.