A "Murder", indeed

So I have decided to tell the story of my morning on here, even though it led my mother to nervously suggest I might want to find somewhere else to live. Mom, avert your eyes. Nothing to see here.

The story involves two species of the local fauna. The first is the Dar es Salaam crow. I have been vaguely disturbed by these crows since my very first day in Dar; they’re just a little too sleek, a little too aggressive, a little too Alfred Hitchcock to really let me ignore them completely. (Plus, suckers are loud – cawed debates over important matters in the crow community often wake me up in the morning.) Big groups of them line the stone walls and the streets on my walk to work, scratching their way through the trash piles. After a few days I had written them off as essentially winged raccoons, sort of icky but harmless (despite those pointy beaks).

Yesterday on my walk to the office, however, I made the mistake of bringing my breakfast toast to eat along the way. Decidedly unwise. Every crow on Kibasila Street knew that I had bread and that it was in my eminently peckable hands. Hungry circling began. A few of them were shuffling backwards on the ground about three feet in front of me, forcing me to make regular kicking motions like a crazy person. And THEN, I happened to look up to my right to see a particularly bold crow flying right next to me, hovering not two feet from my face. I minorly freaked out and ran the next half block, tucking my bread under my shirt and heading for the safety of the office. Yes, I ran from birds. My cowardice is no longer in question.

So that’s the crows. The other animals in our story are the rats that live in my guest house’s kitchen. My bedroom’s not anywhere near the kitchen (not even the same building), so this doesn’t particularly bother me. They mostly make their presence known at night, when a sort of wild rat rumpus can be heard emanating from the kitchen. Although I didn’t particularly like seeing one when I tried to throw something in the trashcan under the sink one night, I don’t really mind that they’re there. I like to think of them as the Tanzanian rats of NIMH.

This morning, I got up unusually early, before dawn, with plans to Skype with Mom. Through the windows in my room, I can always hear the matron, Mary, cleaning the house and sweeping the whole courtyard every morning, putting out breakfast and such. She's usually finished long before I get out of my bedroom, but not today. Today, I got showered, got dressed, then headed out through the courtyard to the main house to grab my toast (this time to transport in a crow-resistant opaque plastic bag). Right under to the big tree in the yard, however, I noticed an unfamiliar pile. Somehow suspicious already, I leaned in to discover it was, in fact, a pile of dead rats. Well done, Mary. She must’ve gotten at least a dozen. But why put them out in the yard, you ask?

Ah, the great circle of life. The crows were already descending on the pile. I looked away and walked quickly inside. In the time it took for me to toast three pieces of bread and return outside, every single rat body was gone. (Recycled, if you will.) I was already pretty creeped out by the abstract idea of their being carnivorous, but when a crow with an enormous dead rat in its mouth landed above the gate as I tried to walk out beneath it (true story), I allowed myself a big girly shudder. Ewwwwwwww. Grossgrossgrossgross.

Ok, out of my system. Will be on guard against evil crows from here on out.