BIRD OF ILL OMEN

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXVI, Issue 3400, 30 July 1932, Page 2 (Supplement)

BIRD OF ILL OMEN

WEATHER VANE TO GO. In deference to ancient superstition the Council at Cromer, Norfolk, has decided to take down a weather vane with the figure of a crow as a winddirection finder, which it had erected recently. Fishermen have protested that the crow is a bird of ill omen and that since its image was set up their hauls of crabs and lobsters have fallen off. Landsmen, too, have urged the Council to remove the vane, saying that the crow is a symbol of “ death, disaster, and destruction.” The chairman of the Council has promised to give a new vane with some other device.\ This will bring much relief to many Cromer inhabitants, although the town’s coat of arms bears three crows as charges. The crow, from Roman times at least, has been an inauspicious bird. Its croaking was held to presage rain and bad weather—a piece of natural observation mentioned by Virgil in the Georgies. But in flight or in alighting, especially on the left hand, it might be a portent of almost any disaster. The comparative rarity of solitary crows—hooded or carrion—in England has probably preserved for them this sinister aspect, which the sociable rook has avoided, and local rhymes, as in the case of magpies tell of the conclusions to be drawn from their flight. Thus in Essex the following jingle occurs:— One’s unlucky. , Two’s lucky; Three is hea’th. Four is wealth. Five is sickness. And six is death. But over a great part of Europe one crow cawing on the roof of the house where a sick person lies is held to foreshadow his death. In German Switzerland the augury is pushed further, and the perching of a crow on the house in which there is a corpse is held to show that the soul of the dead is irrevocably damned.