27 Mar 07 Murder
A gaggle of geese. A pride of lions. A herd of cattle. A pack of wolves. A school of fish. A hive of bees. A flock of birds. A flock of sheep. And one of my favorites, probably because it’s so different, so unique, and so terribly appropriate – a murder of crows.
It’s fascinating how some of these grouping words can be applied to such different types of animals. A ‘flock’ being used to refer to creatures of both air and land. But I think a ‘murder’ being used to group a bunch of crows together, rather than ‘flock’, may well be one of the most intriguing mechanics to me. There’s quite a bit of uncertainty surrounding the origin of the phrase, but it seems that a murder of crows originated around AD 1450 in the form of a mursher of crows that evolved over time into its current form. Chances are good, though, that murder is actually a misinterpretation, since no one seems to know what mursher means and have never seen it appear in any of the old literature to refer to murder.
A small fable surrounding crows also seems to contribute to their grouping name. Supposedly, crows occasionally form tribunals against one of their brethren and upon reaching consensus, kill the wayward crow. Crows have also been known to kill a sick crow that either wanders into the territory of another murder or is ostracized. The first of these explanations is apparently patently false, while the second is a behavior that is not necessarily unique to crows but to many different animal groups.
Doing a bit of research on the etymology of this phrase turned up some more interesting grouping names for birds:
- a parliament of rooks
- an unkindness of ravens
- a murmuration of starlings
There’s actually a whole listed on this page for the Baltimore Bird Club. Some of them make a lot of sense when defining the behaviors of specific bird groups. Some you just have to wonder about.
Tags: a-murder-of-crows, a-murmuration-of-starlings, a-parliament-of-rooks, an-unkindness-of-ravens, birds, nature, word-etymology
